The Anti-virus Times

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Today it's hard to imagine life without the Internet (and, really, who would even want to?). We use the Internet for work, study and entertainment; we spend a lot of time on social networking sites, and communicate via email and instant messaging services. Every day we interact with people whom we would never have gotten to know in the pre-Internet era. However, much of what is taken for granted today was not that accessible too long ago. For example, a simple subject network search was a chargeable service, and nobody had ever even heard of Wi-Fi!

But enough with the scary stories. Today is a big day for all Russian-speaking Internet users: exactly 22 years ago, the domain .ru was registered for Russia, marking the day our country officially became part of the Internet.

April 7, 1994 is the birth date of RuNet.

No generally accepted definition exists for RuNet. In different contexts this word means the Internet in the .ru domain; servers in the domains рф, su, ru, am, az, by, ge, kg, kz, md, ua, укр, uz; the Russian Internet in general (i.e., Russian websites) or the Russian part of the Internet.

In addition to the .ru domain, since 2009 there exists in Russia the top-level domain name .рф—the first Cyrillic domain on the Internet. It includes second-level domains in Cyrillic. At first, only government agencies and trademark owners could register such a domain. Now registration is open to everyone.