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The buildings located on the Red Square: Kremlin wall (at left) and Saint Basil's Cathedral (at right), Moscow, Russia.(Stock Photo, Getty Images)

Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.

The Russian government escalated its war against social media companies on Wednesday by slowing down access to Twitter in the country in order to protect Russian citizens.

But just like its done in the past, Roskomnadzor, the states communications regulator, appears to have botched its plan to censor a social media platform while at the same time taking down its own website offline, as well as those of the Kremlin and the Russian government, according to several experts and journalists.

Last week, the regulator warned Twitter that it could face heavy fines if it was found guilty of repeatedly failing to remove some 3,000 posts containing information about suicide, child pornography, and drugs dating back to 2017. The regulator added that if Twitter continued to ignore the takedown requests, it would block the platform completely.

But on Wednesday Roskomnadzor took matters into its own hands and took action against the social media company.

Starting March 10, 2021, centralized response measures have been taken against Twitter to protect Russian citizens and force the internet service to comply with Russian legislation, Roskomnadzor said in a statement on Wednesday morning, according to a translation by the Moscow Times.

The agency said it would be slowing down access to Twitter on cell phones and desktops, but according to multiple Twitter users in Russia who posted messages on Wednesday morning, the action so far has had little minimal impact. However, the Russian version of the outages tracking website Down Detector is reporting a spike in issues with Twitter in the country.

The Twitter slow down is part of an escalating stand-off between Moscow and U.S. social media platforms. The action comes just 24 hours after news emerged that Moscow is planning to sue Twitter along with Google, Facebook, Telegram, and TikTok for allegedly failing to delete posts it said illegally urged children to take part in anti-Kremlin protests.

However, it appears that while trying to slow down access to Twitter, Roskomnadzor may have inadvertently knocked its own website offline together with a swathe of other Russian government sites and services, including the official Russian government website and Kremlin.ru though the latter subsequently came back online with a warning that its not secure.

At one point the Russian authorities appeared to blame the outage on a U.S. cyberattack, with Senator Andrey Klimov referring to reports this week that Washington is preparing a digital attack against Russia in response to recent moves against U.S. targets.

But then Russias Ministry of Digital Development laid the blame for the websites going offline on malfunctioning equipment operated by Rostelecom, a Russian telecoms provider, claiming the outage had nothing to do with the efforts to throttle Twitter.

But Russian experts believe that the effort to slow down Twitter and the sudden removal of several government websites are related.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian governments efforts to control cyberspace, said on Twitter Wednesday that the throttling of the social network is what caused the website outages in Russia.

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Alexey Kovalev pointed out that an almost identical incident befell Roskomnadzor in 2018 when it attempted to block Telegram. This was because Russias security services decided that Telegram was a tool for terrorists due to the messaging services strong encryption preventing them from seeing what people were saying to each other.

And Financial Times Moscow correspondent Max Seddon wrote that it looks like Russia managed to take all the government websites offline in its attempts to slow down Twitter...Another crushing success.

Twitter, which didnt immediately respond to VICE News request for comment, is only used by around 3 percent of the Russian population. But it has become a space for hyper-politicized speech in the country, according to experts, particularly around the poisoning, and subsequent arrest and jailing of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

Roskomnadzor has no power to actually block any website or service itself. In 2018, it provided a list of IP addresses of Telegram users to the internet service providers, who then implement the block.

Trying to avoid being shut down, Telegram switched its IP addresses to Google and Amazons cloud infrastructure. But because thousands of Russian businesses and much of Russias critical IT infrastructure depend on the same services when Roskomnadzor decided to block those addresses too, Telegram remained online while the websites of online businesses and services were blocked.

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Russia May Have Censored the Kremlin Website While Trying to Censor Twitter - VICE

You watched the Queen's Gambit, right? These courses will teach you how to play just like your favorite characters.

Greta Good

March 10, 2021Updated: March 10, 2021 4:03p.m.

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During quarantine, did you try and learn to play chess after watching The Queen's Gambitto no avail? Chess is an incredible lifelong skill that you can whip out anytime, but it can definitely be daunting to learn if you don't have much experience or a playing partner. Once you learn, you will discover that chess is a beautiful way to connect with people of all cultures and wind down, while still using your brain power.

Luckily, there's a simple way to become a chess pro, and it doesn't costs loads of money or the mental turmoil you saw inThe Queen's Gambit.Meet The Ultimate Beginner to Grandmaster Chess Course Bundle. This giant training features 137 hours of training spread out over 3 bundles, each designed to work your way to chess mastery. Did we mention that it's on sale for a limited time?

You'll get started with the Chess for Beginners: The Ultimate Course Bundle. This beginner-friendly bundle of chess strategies will help you learn the ins and outs of the game so you can breathe some fire into your chess openings, middlegame, and endgames while scorching your opponents. This bundle focuses heavily on the London System, which is well-loved for good reason.

From there, you'll move onto the Advanced Chess Strategy Mega Bundle, which is taught by some of the best chess players and presenters in the world: GM Niclas Huschenbeth, GM Simon Williams, GM Judit Polgar, and IM Nazi Paikidze.

This set of lessons will take your thought process to an advanced level with sacrifices, forcing moves, and prophylaxis. The Road to Chess Mastery: Quick Chess Improvement Mega Bundle polishes off your mastery so you discover the secrets of positional chess and nail that endgame.

The Ultimate Beginner to Grandmaster Chess Course Bundle normally costs $747, but for a limited time, you can get it for only $89.99, which is over 85% off.

Price subject to change.

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Learn to play chess with three comprehensive course bundles for only $90 - mySanAntonio.com

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Chess is making a comeback onto the national stage. The Netflix series,Queen's Gambit,has elevated curiosityregarding the game, jolting interest and boosting the sales of chess sets and informational books.

Whether you are one of the many inspired by that widely watched production, or simply want to reacclimatize yourself with a board that has been collecting dust in your closet, chess is a great at-home investment during these days ofsocial distancing.

Become a master of this most tactical competition with a collection of discounted lessons from highly acclaimed international grandmasters. Whether you're looking to take your game to the next level or simply learn the basics,The Ultimate Beginner to Grandmaster Chess Course Bundlehas you covered for only $89.99 (reg. $747) with an 87% price discount.

Lifetime access to 23 comprehensive courses allows you to make steady progress at a pace that is perfect for you. This massive 137-hour experience trains you from elemental chess theories through advanced defenses that have made a major impact on the game's greatest stages.

Soon, you'll be ready to wow friends and chess rivals with high-level strategy and execution.

Familiarize yourself with Kasparovs Greatest Hits, and gain foundational insight on opening moves, must-know middlegame strategies, aggressive decisions that can swing momentum, and ultimately, the all-important endgame.

Once you get the basics down, there are plenty of ways to accelerate your growth on the board. Discover game-improvement secrets, modernized techniques, and memorization shortcuts that have helped produce champions.

Enjoy your ascension in the chess world, or give the gift of knowledge to a new generation of players, with a boost from The Ultimate Beginner to Grandmaster Chess Course Bundlefor only $89.99(reg. $747).

Prices subject to change.

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Dominate the chess board with these low-cost comprehensive grandmaster courses | TheHill - The Hill

Beth Harmon is making her next move.

A production company led by a Disney heir is planning to adapt The Queens Gambit into a stage musical. The fictional story is about an orphan girl thats Harmon who becomes a pill-popping prodigy in the overwhelmingly male world of chess.

Level Forward, a company whose founders include Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, said on Monday that it has won the rights to adapt Walter Teviss 1983 novel, which has become newly noteworthy thanks to the enormous success of last years streaming series adaptation on Netflix.

Level Forward is not yet announcing a creative team or any other details of the project.

The company has a decidedly progressive bent (it describes itself as an ecosystem of storytellers, business people and social change organizers), and is a relatively recent but active player in the theater industry, co-producing four Broadway shows in 2019: What the Constitution Means to Me, Slave Play, Jagged Little Pill and a revival of Oklahoma!

The game of chess, although seemingly unlikely fodder for song-and-dance, has inspired at least one other musical: In the 1980s, the lyricist Tim Rice collaborated with Benny Andersson and Bjrn Ulvaeus of Abba to write Chess, a fictional account of a tournament between an American and a Soviet grandmaster. The show had a well-received score that remains an object of affection and fascination for some, but, despite repeated efforts at revisions, it has not found success onstage; it ran for two months on Broadway in 1988.

The Queen's Gambit project is just at the start of its developmental life, and its not yet clear when or where there might be a production.

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Making Chess Sing: Queens Gambit to Be Adapted for the Stage - The New York Times

Right now, a stalemate is considered a draw. But before the 1800s, it was considered a win for the losing player. These rules were heavily dependent on the region the game took place in, and as noted in Harold J. R. Murrays A History of Chess, a stalemate win was commonly considered to be an inferior win, and any player who won a competitive chess match in this way would only receive half of their winnings. Since then, chess experts have gone back and forth with regards to the rule. As recently as 2009, grand master Larry Kaufman argued in the 35th issue of Chess Life that a stalemate shouldnt be a draw, because its a situation where any move would get your king taken.

Stalemate remains a draw because of chesss propensity to create draws. Implementing a rule change on that scale would make hundreds of years of endgame theory irrelevant.

The White Side Advantage

While reviewing competitive chess matches from the years 1852 to 1932, chess theorist William Franklyn Streeter found that across more than 5,000 games played, the white side was slightly more likely to win. As reported in Chess Review in May 1946, this trend has maintained into the present day despite changes to the rule set.

Since tournament matches were recorded, white has been calculated to have around a 5 percent higher chance of winning than the opposition, because it gets the first movesomething statistics and theorists have agreed on throughout history. If the white side can construct an opening that maintains its innate advantage, it can carry that boost into the rest of the game. Its up to the black side to construct a defense that will swing the initiative back into its favor and fight for a draw if thats not possible.

The attacking and defending sides are decided the moment the game begins. Over time, playersincluding grand master Larry Kaufman in his 2004 book The Chess Advantage in Black and White: Opening Moves of the Grandmastershave argued that, if played perfectly, the white side should always win. You can't take a piece by purely playing defensively, while you can when always being the aggressor. It's hard to imagine a change to the game that would adjust this without giving one side an option the other doesn't have.

But does such a change need to be made? While the numbers suggest that the game is tilted towards the attacking side, it's still a theory that doesn't always work out when humans are involved. If given infinite amounts of time, a high-level chess player could divine the best movebut most competitive chess formats restrict the players' time. Nowadays, most rule changes, or patch notes, are toward the clock's usage and how the players and referees (or arbiters) conduct themselves in the game. For instance, you can't have any electronic device capable of communication while playing in a competitive match.

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A Humans Touch

The human aspect is what sculpts competitive chess. If everyone made the correct move instantly, the game would play out the same waybut very few can play perfectly under a timer, and even fewer are able to come up with the best move at all. Chess's modern rule sets are different because of what goes on around the game, rather than in itsomething that is rarely seen in esports, where the players are bound by the game's code.

Blitz chess is a subcategory that includes any format where players have less than 10 minutes to make their moves. Bullet chess, with one minute per side, is the fastest among them. Stricter time limits push players to make mistakes. With such limits in place, new strategies ariseyou can complicate the game board to give your opponent something to think about, or start simplifying it so that a standard win becomes more feasible.

But does that make chess balanced? The white pieces still move ahead of the black ones. The attacker could start with an opening, and the defender still needs to respond. The time limit may mitigate things, but if all things are equal, the proactive player would still win most of the time if they make the mathematically best move. There are a finite number of board states in chess, but that number is so vast that its impossible to navigate them all within a reasonable amount of time. Someone might be able to pilot a strong opening into the rest of the game, but if the defending player understands how to complicate it, they can still wrestle control back to their side. Chess has always been that way; the changes made over the centuries have made the pieces more interactable. If both players open by moving opposing pawns, they come in contact within two moves as opposed to four moves in older versions of the game.

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The Game of Chess Had Patch Notes, Too - WIRED