Reposting this video; it's from Ekaterinburg, not St Petersburg.
.@tvrain have a camera at an apartment overlooking Pushkin square. Police are now trying to break into this apartment to cut off broadcast, currently trying to break in via neighbor's balcony.
View from above.
Source: ProtestRussia via Baza.
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Two mobile networks in Russia "experiencing connectivity problems", Russian media report, as far Eastern cities see turnout not seen since 2008.
Arrests began on Pushkin square more than an hour before the start of the protests in Moscow, riot police appears to be targeting random people. Reminds of Belarus a few months ago.
In fact all mobile networks in Russia have a spike of disruptions this morning. Given that crowd congestion in the main cities has not yet happened, it appears these are artificially introduced.
After @navalny was taken away by police, his wife, lawyer and aid remained waiting behind passport control...this means there's a chance he might be released tonight... possibly with a writ of simmons. Let's hope for that.
A press release by the prison authority announced just now that he has been detained until a court decision on their request to convert his suspended sentence to a real one.
Got a few questions about how we did the (partial) face comparison in our latest investigation. This is a valid question given that the standing man in the Omsk hospital wears a mask. As this issue is bound to pop-up in the foreseeable future in our Covid times, I will explain.
Obviously, the publicly available professional-grade face-verification services like Azure are not geared up to compare partial faces to other faces. In fact, they don't recognize a mask-covered face as a face at all.
So we need to cheat the system and use a proxy for the missing half-face of our unknown suspect. The idea is to force the software to give us a face match based on the upper face section (eyes, skull shape, ears = signal), while ignoring the lower part (nose, mouth, chin = noise)