Image by Flickr user guccio (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: As Chinese-Kazakh relations increase, China’s evidence on Kazakh society is becoming more and more visible on the Kazakh blogosphere, reports neweurasia’s Kazakh bridge-blogger Askhat in this round-up of selections from the Kaznet.  Is this China’s “weaponless invasion” into Central Asia?  Translated by Sagym (KAZ).

You probably  have noticed that posts about Chinese topics are quite frequent in the Kazakh language blogs. This time I have decided to review some of them.  Let’s start with this one:  some time ago, Akzere published a post titled “China – place of grooms” [KAZ]. The post tells the interesting story of Chinese men eager to have a family. A girl who is a university student posted an advertisement hoping to meet a young man.  However, she didn’t expect to see almost 2000 men in front of her dormitory!  One of her readers, Meirzhan, remarks,

“The quantitative inequality between men and women in modern China has turned into one of the most important problems of our time that nobody dares to discuss.” Read the full story »

The WordPress blog platform, which services most of the Kaznet, is inaccessible in several Almaty offices.   This blockade has been the result of internal rules and electronic filters.  Since it began, several Kazakh language bloggers have migrated to .kz domains.  Meanwhile, I have unsuccessfully sought more information from internet service providers.

This blockade has been inconsistent.  Several Kazakh language bloggers have still been able to access WordPress.  Indeed, some enthusiastic Kaznetizens even translated the platform into Kazakh.  But as of two weeks ago the situation seems to be changing with more and more unable to access the site.

Read the full story »

Translation of Adam’s post

Popular social networks Facebook, Livejournal and Twitter were down from 7 p.m on August, 06. The first one recovered quite soon, Twitter hardly started working unstably by the midnight, while Livejournal remained inaccessible till late night.

First, I dared to think that the Kazakh Agency for Informatization and Communications is so zealous in implementing of the Law on Internet Regulation that it has decided to block even ninjacloak.com proxy, Tor servers and even humble Twitter – as a bonus to forcing all Kazakh ISPs to block access to Livejournal. But then, after having checked status.livejournal.com, it became clear that it was not “our” fault.

The most detailed update could be found on The Washington Times by the TechCrunch reporter, who ironically commented that all around the world the increase of working efficiency was noted at that time. As it was found out in a couple of hours after the outage of the sites, the reason of failure was Denial-of-Service Attacks. As it turned out, Yahoo also was down for 15 minutes the day before the blackout of the social networks, but the reason of the failure was not disclosed. Bloggers, who commented my post on Kazakh blog-platform Yvision, made various funny suppositions on the causes of blackout, e.g.:

DeaTh: The DDoS attack was orchestrated by the employers’ union.

Darx: Maybe the reason is that the Chinese Internet users got access to external networks?

Bad luck often brings good luck, and Livejournal became temporarily accessible from Kazakhstan due to the move of servers and change of IP-addresses.

Translation of the publicist’s post.

How would Kaznet develop after the notorious amendments to the Law on internet are adopted? Yesterday there was the attempt to answer this question taken in MediaNet, the International center of Journalism, where the research on the economic after-effects of the mentioned amendments was carried out by polling over 60 professional web-market players.

According to the majority of the respondents, the prime cost of the internet business in Kazakhstan will increase by over 10%, which would negatively affect its competitiveness. At that, the group of high risk web-projects that can either loose their positions or disappear at all includes Web 2.0 resources, interactive projects with user-generated content (such as: forum, blogs and social networks).

It also became clear that 95% of the internet providers and 98% of website owners, which took part in the poll, had not been asked for the opinion when the amendments to the law were prepared. According to MediaNet the draft of the law meets neither the demands of the local market, nor the international legal standards, and, moreover, it even contradicts the state concept of uniform information space.

Translation of Mursya’s post

roose, the blogger from YVision.kz blog platform in Kazakhstan, has posted [ru] a letter from the government to the principals of schools and colleges of the country containing recommendations to use KazTube.Kz video portal, which was created in February, 2009 at the expense of the state budget. In particular, the principals are urged to post videos about “significant events taking place in their institutions on a regular basis.”

akost has associated [ru] this “marketing approach” with the one that had been applied back in the Soviet times, when “people were forced to work on subbotniks (area clean-ups), and nowadays people are forced to upload videos to inferior video portals”. bakha has suggested [ru] that the reason for that is that “the authorities have dumped a lot of money into that project and now they are looking for the ways to justify it by administrative increase of traffic”. At the same time, Kimberly jokingly notes [ru] that “fun” is the most popular tag on KazTube. Read the full story »

Originally published at Internews Kazakhstan

Initiated by the “For free Internet” movement on June 16 Almaty will host the first Kazakhstani forum “For free Interne”. IT specialists, Internet publications representatives, public and political figures of Kazakhstan including Culture and Information Minister, M. Kul-Mukhamet, ex-Minister and an adviser for the President in Politics, E. Ertysbayev, Parliament and Senate deputies, Kazakhstan Culture and Information Ministry representatives, International Organizations representatives are invited to participate.

Participants are to discuss the main topic: Are the introduced changes necessary and useful for the development of Internet resources in Kazakhstan and how censorship may influence the alternative thinking of Internet users in the republic.

Participants will have an option to step-up with reports, suggest improvements for the law and start the discussion. Forum organizers think that only public and multidimensional discussions on this very important for the country’s democratic development legislation may help all participants give an adequate evaluation on statistics in order to gain access to free information via Internet.

Forum organizers hope to hear important and concrete proposals such as an alternative document to substitute the draft legislation on Mass Media passed two readings in the Parliament of Kazakhstan.

Everybody interested to participate in the discussion and propose changes and improvements on the given subject is asked to send an application before June 10, 2009, to e-mail: kaznet-freedom@mail.ru, kaznetfreedom@gmail.com

Or dial +7 727 2923614, +7 727 3851043 (ext. 108) or mobile +7 701 111 33 18

The Kazakh Internet regulation amendments which were sent to the Parliament last week have woken up the Kazakh language bloggers’ activism. A lot of posts in Kazakh language tried to analyze the influence of the draft law on the future of Kazakhstani segment of the Internet. Some are full of harsh criticism, while the other are not to surprised with the developments.

Janarbek Matay, one of the founders of the popular Kazakh website “Massagan.com” agrees that the Government should regulate the Kaznet, but believes this draft law is a rush project [kaz]:

“This is not the law that I was expecting. It will put barriers to blogs or sites even if they misspell a word. I doubt that it will be able to ban really dangerous sites. We need a law, which will filter porn and pirates”.

“They are going to kill blogs with one bullet”, say Urimtal and Symbat [kaz]: Read the full story »

Yesterday the Kazakh Parliament’s lower chamber has approved the first reading of the draft law on online regulation, which is meant to equate all websites (including blogs, social networks, chatrooms, forums and even online shops) with mass media. On the other hand of this law, the authorities will be granted the right to block any local or foreign website for “violation of the national legislation”. The decision to block it would be issued by the general prosecutor, and approved by the city court of Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan. Many bloggers believe that the government wants a legal tool for filtering of the web. LiveJournal, a leading platform in the Russian-language blogosphere, is blocked in Kazakhstan since early October last year, and no official reasoning has been provided for that. Read the full story »

Translation of the Zara’s post

Low performance of Kazakhstan in the ICT competitiveness ratings has been an incentive for the authorities to boost development of KazNet (Kazakhstani sector of the world wide web). Recently, the prime-minister has become the forst official to launch a blog – and he has directly ordered his ministers to follow his example.

“These blogs look more like books of complaints”,

says political observer Eduard Poletaev in his comments to the research, held by the Business Resource company, published in the “Biznes & Vlast” [Business and Power] newspaper.

The analysts asked 15 questions – 3 in each of 5 ministerial blogs (industry and trade, transport and communications, economy and budget planning, finance and agriculture). Three questions were not published at all, while the answers came for 11 questions, so one request was ignored.

Experts came to the conclusion that most blogs of the officials are characterized by the lack of responsiveness, completeness of the queries and clarity of answers. According to the research results, the least effective blog belongs to the minister of industry and trade, while the most active ones are owned by the minister of finance and the minister of agriculture.

A huge minus to the blogs of ministers is the style of these web-pages – most responses to the visitors’ questions are a dull bureacratic writing of their press-services, representing a mere formality and redirection of the questions to other authorities. According to Dosym Satpaev, political expert, blogs are presented as a substitute to the e-government – but they don’t solve the problem of corruption and don’t improve quality of state services.

As observers Poletaev and Nurmukhamedov note, another reason for limpness of the governmental blogosphere are prematurity of the idea and formal top-down obligation to run blogs. As a result there are few updates in ministerial blogs and users have little interest in them. The tool that was meant to become a channel for dialogue between the authorities and people, is unfunctional to date.

On December 11, 2008, Kazakhstani blogger Nurlan wrote in his blog, dedicated to IT development issues, about a possibility that so-called KazNet (a Kazakhstani segment of the world wide web) soon may have its own search engine and quotes an advertisement placed on the official website of the Governmental Agency on Informatization and Communications (AIC) [ru]:

Dear users,
The department of information technologies at the Governmental Agency on Informatization and Communications is pleased to inform you that we plan to create a National Search System within the framework of KazNet development. The search system will be society-oriented. In this regard, we ask the Internet community to help us in choosing a name for the search engine.

In the below-the-post discussion threads bloggers have been debating not only possible names for the search engine, but rather the overall necessity of the whole innovation.

Thus, Zhomart thinks [ru], that this is “just another way of money laundering”. Valentin doubts the AIC’s technical ability to make it good [ru]:

“It’s fishy. The best they can do is to create a websites catalog. Actually, what is the reason of making something that already exists? They will not have enough capacity to create something better than the existing search engines. It’s going to be some fake at the expense of taxpayers’ money”.

Assasin believes that the agency should solve internal problems first [ru]:

“What are you talking about, a search engine? They cannot even do a dns server properly. Look – aic.gov.kz doesn’t return the page, only http://www.aic.gov.kz works. There was an online conference with Kuanyshbek Esekeev, the AIC chairman on “e-government”. He was not able to respond to concrete questions! A search engine… It would probably take 50 years for them to make one”.

There is a lot of skepticism, and that’s quite understandable. What is the need to invent a bicycle? What is the need to create a new search engine (irrespectively of who is helping to do it – Yandex, Google or Microsoft), if the already existing search engines provide correct indexing and perfectly find all Kazakhstani websites. They do not require any additional time or financial investments, especially in harsh times of economic crisis.

Besides, the new resource is being publicly positioned in a quite strange way. In particular, it remains unclear what stands behind the “society-oriented” nature of a search engine. Besides, if the Internet is meant to unite countries and to remove borders, why Kazakhstan needs a localized search engine, however functional it may be? What is it: a self-affirmation complex, a reason to spend the agency’s budget or a real technical necessity?

While bloggers are passionately discussing the issue, organizer of the Annual Kazakhstani Internet Award and one of the first and most respected bloggers in KazNet, Alexandr Lyakhov a href=”http://lyakhov.kz/editorial/08/e0802.shtml#080217″>quotes some figures [ru]:

According to the paragraph 8.1.1 of “the Program of fighting Internet inequality in Kazakhstan for 2007-09″ (it is being implemented by AIC), KZT 28,8 million (nearly $242,000) was to be spent in 2007 and 2008 from the budget for the development of an “intellectual search system”.

Blogger Valentin bitterly jokes that it could be cheaper to hire people that would receive requests, google for them and send back results to the users.

But the matter has already gone beyond jokes: several days ago blogger Zhomart published in his blog a draft open letter to Mr. Esekeev, the AIC chairman, describing the problem and demanding to stop the project. He also asks bloggers to sign it and send the letter to Astana.

This post was also published on Global Voices Online.