NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

ours later, a blindingly profane reference to Mr.
Navalny was reposted from President Dmitri A. Medv
edev’s Twitter account, prompting his press office
to release a statement explaining that the messag
e had been sent out by a member of the technical s
upport staff “during a routine password change.”
On Thursday, United Russia published an attack on
Mr. Navalny, describing his activism as “typical d
irty self-promotion,” and Secretary of State Hilla
ry Rodham Clinton issued a statement about his cas
e. The consulting firm Medialogia documented a sud
den leap in the number of mentions of Mr. Navalny
in the Russian news media, from several hundred a
day to around 3,000. On Friday, people started cir
culating a Web site promoting him as a candidate i
n the March presidential election. Mr. Navalny, ev
en skeptics admit, managed to knit together a crow
d that had not previously existed.
“They had never gathered anywhere together before,
” wrote Grigory Tumanov, a reporter for Gazeta.ru.
“They just read Twitter, and to them it was clear
that in this situation you have to go somewhere,
do something, unite around someone, because it was
intolerable. Let this be Navalny, with all his pl
uses and minuses.”
BY his appeals hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Navalny l
ooked tired and disgusted. His supporters had foun
d amateur video showing that he had not resisted a
rrest, and that the officers who testified against
him were not the ones who had arrested him, but t
he judge refused to review it. A photograph taken
from outside the detention center showed him gripp
ing the bars on his window and staring out with a
fierce, fixed gaze.
“There are people standing here who were not recru
ited by anyone,” said Viktor Masyagin, 28, outside
a courtroom earlier in the week. “No one drove us
here in buses, no one paid us anything, but here