The thread appeared on the forum at 12:55. Ishchenko, the founder of DOU, posted a quote from Mas's entry and added links to three blogs describing the search. One led to Mas's own post, the other two belonged to eyewitnesses. For Ukraine's IT community in 2008, this was not abstract news. It concerned a project many had known since the early years of the Runet.
Mas's name was well known long before Infostore. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmytrakowych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN). The network was written in Perl in three weeks, and expenses came to about $100. From March 7, 2000, Mas headed the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), one of the first major Ukrainian internet resources. He made Infostore famous in a different role. In December 2004, during the Orange Revolution, it was a site for citizen news. By April 2006, Infostore was already operating as a file-sharing service accessible through the UA-IX traffic exchange point.
Dump or Part of Freedom
The quote from LiveJournal set the tone of the discussion. “Today the Interior Ministry spent 12 hours in our office (from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.) trying to remove all our equipment,” Mas wrote. According to his account, the search went on from midday until late at night, and officers tried to take the equipment in its entirety.
“Today the Interior Ministry spent 12 hours in our office (from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m.) trying to remove all our equipment”
In total, the thread gathered 137 comments. Opinions diverged sharply. Some participants called Infostore a “смітник,” that is, a dump where pirated content was stored. Others defended the service as part of a free internet. It was the second group that saw the seizure not as a case against one company but as pressure on the entire industry. Most of the debate occurred before December 13, though isolated replies continued to appear until 2010.
Official events proceeded in parallel with the forum debates. According to sources, on December 4 and 5 the Interior Ministry seized 18 servers, two storage systems and a switch. The search lasted 12 hours. For the prosecution, the head of the Interior Ministry's department for combating human trafficking, Mykhailo Andriyenko, spoke. The service's defense was handled by representatives of the Ukrainian Internet Association (InAU). InAU board member Ivan Petukhov commented on the case, and Oleksandr Olshansky, head of Internet Invest Group and an investor in Infostore, was on the association's board. On December 10, InAU held a press conference. On December 23, an interview under the headline “Infostore Is Non-Commercial” discussed the project's non-commercial nature.
What Happened Next
The debate on DOU was not an isolated episode in Mas's biography. He continued to work in the industry and organized events for the internet community. On April 1, 2009, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum, the future iForum, took place. It was held to mark the tenth anniversary of UBN and was attended by 1,280 people. Mas put together the forum program and continued to organize it in subsequent years. In 2010, he still spoke about content as “the creator of Infostore,” that is, he maintained his connection to the project at the center of the controversy.
In 2008, Mas was also the architect of Mail.ua. In August of that year, the mail service underwent closed testing, and Internet Invest Group invested more than $1 million in the project. In 2012, Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group; Mail.Ru Group vice president Anna Artamonova confirmed the deal. Mas died in Kyiv on October 6, 2021, at the age of 47 after an illness. His death was reported on October 8 by his brother Viktor Mas.
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