Lurkomorye online encyclopedia removed from list of banned Web sites

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(Interfax – November 13, 2012) The net culture online encyclopedia Lurkomorye has been removed from the communications, IT and mass media oversight service Roskomnadzor’s list of banned Web sites.

“We have conducted a thorough check and removed the [Lurkomorye] links and IP-addresses from the list,” Roskomnadzor spokesman Vladimir Panin told Interfax on Tuesday.

The ban was lifted after Lurkomorye’s owners removed the banned content.

Roskomnadzor hopes, he said, that a well-oiled procedure for removing objectionable content from the Russian portion of the Internet will have been worked out.

“Practice shows that even though Lurkomorye switches to other IP addresses, it is finally complying. We are dealing with sensible and law-abiding Internet players. We are aware that information posted by third parties cannot always be checked. But we hope that jointly we will work out a convenient procedure for removing the banned content,” Panin said.

“The nasty things filling the Internet must be dealt with in some way. I don’t think representatives of the Internet community will protest,” he said, adding that law must be respected, and volitions amended quickly and reported to Roskomnadzor.

It emerged on Monday that the IP address of the Russian-language online humorous encyclopedia Lurkomorye had been entered on the Federal Drug Control Service’s list of Web sites carrying banned information. Roskomnadzor did not cite the reason for banning the site, only mentioning the Federal Drug Control Service’s decision.

Federal Drug Control Service spokesman Nikolai Kartashov said that “some pages of the Web site carried content popularizing drugs.”

Lurkomorye is similar to Wikipedia, and its users write and edit articles about Web sites, subcultures and Internet memes, and about celebrities and organizations popular with Internet users.

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