The pirate station equipment is not so expensive, and in fact, petty phreakers use it pretty frequently to do basic SMS frauds in heavily populated areas. Maidan protesters have found themselves on a receiving end of false-station SMS frauds since November, so we know for a _fact_ that criminals do operate them.
The government could as well, of course, but I'm going by an Occam razor here.
This specific instance might or might not have been. I'm just telling you that the pirate base stations have been operating in the Maidan area and have been used for nefarious purposes since November at least. Knowing some of the petty phreaking criminals that do stuff like this, I assumed that it's much more likely to be a prank.
It's amazing people don't understand this is an elaborate mass prank. Pirate base stations have been present in the area since the disturbances began, already being used for nefarious purposes before (SMS/money transfer fraud and so on). Whoever operates these is a petty criminal, not a nefarious government – if I'd have an opportunity to send thousands of protesters anything I want, I'm sure I'd pull a prank like this as well.
At this point, I would be actually happy for Disney IP to be in copyright forever, as long as they leave the copyright law alone and works start entering public domain again.
I've seen somewhere a test for how many color words are there in the language - only color-words which do not correspond to a specific material or plant which color is emulated are accepted. So “red” or “blue” is fine, as is “piros” or “vörös” - but “sky blue” (color of sky), “ruby” (color of the gemstone) or “scarlet” (color of the Scarlet cloth) are not.
Given that VC-backed startups are obviously receiving far more press than bootstrapped ones, is there any statistics on how widespread are former and latter, and how successful they are, in consumer Web?
The government could as well, of course, but I'm going by an Occam razor here.