If you believe the Uzbek authorities, nothing can possibly be worse for society than fergana.ru, the independent online news agency that first reported the brutal repression in Andijan last month - not even pornography. That, at least, is the gist of a warning posted on the door of an internet cafe in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. "Logging onto pornographic websites is prohibited and punished by a fine of 5,000 soms" (4.4 dollars, 3.6 euros), the warning reads.
And, further down: "Logging onto political websites, such as ferghana.ru, is strictly prohibited and punished by a fine of 10,000 soms."
The loathing that Uzbek President Islam Karimov's hard-line regime has for the Moscow-based website, which mostly covers Uzbekistan, is understandable.
In spite of the authorities' tight grip on the local media, fergana.ru was the first news outlet to report that an armed insurrection had broken out on May 13 in Andijan, eastern Uzbekistan's main city in the volatile Fergana valley.
The rebels stormed Andijan's prison and freed 23 local businessmen who were being tried for allegedly spreading radical Islamist propaganda.
Fergana.ru was also the first medium to report that soldiers had opened fire on a peaceful crowd which had gathered on Andijan's main square.
Some of the people the soldiers shot at were chanting slogans against the regime. Others were protesting overwhelming poverty. Others still were just taking a stroll on the square.
And it was fergana.ru that first established that Andijan had been the scene of a full-scale massacre, quoting witnesses and reporting that hundreds of corpses had been carried out of the city in military trucks.
For three days, Russian television and radio stations aired countless reports from fergana.ru's correspondent in Andijan, Alexei Volosevich. Their own reporters had been barred from entering the city, which was cordoned off by the Uzbek police and military.
Such was the Uzbek authorities' fury against fergana.ru that the Pravda Vostoka official daily lambasted its "so-called journalists," prepared to "betray the motherland" in exchange for a little foreign money.
Ironically, the cause of all this bile is a distinctly unpretentious affair, operated by fewer than ten people, including four correspondents in Uzbekistan and one in Tajikistan. The others work out of Moscow and put out a website in three languages: Russian, English, and Uzbek.
Fergana.ru was founded by a Russian hailing from the Uzbek town of Fergana who moved to the Russian capital in 1989, 40-year-old Danyl Kislov.
Initially, it was not intended as a news outlet at all, let alone an opposition medium, said Kislov, who works as a documentalist and runs the website during his spare time.
"My original goal was not to create a news agency, or a political or opposition website," Kislov told AFP.
Fergana.ru began life as an online home page for Kislov, who still feels nostalgic about his homeland, where he says he left his heart.
Then, after Uzbek radical Islamists carried out attacks in Kyrgyzstan and abducted four Japanese geologists in 1999, Kislov started posting Russian newspaper articles on his website.
"I quickly realised the site commanded a growing interest and I decided to seek information myself," he said. The Russian information ministry granted fergana.ru its official license in 2001.
Apart from a 2,200 dollar grant from the Soros Foundation in 1999, which he used to buy a computer, Kislov said fergana.ru receives no foreign money and is entirely self-funded, running on a monthly budget of around 1,000 dollars.
From a modest 1,000 daily hits at its beginning, the website has grown to 10,000 hits a day, with a peak at 60,000 during the repression in Andijan, a period during which Kislov spent three days on end in front of his computer, allowing himself no sleep and hardly any time to eat.
While he is pleased with his success, Kislov is now worried that fergana.ru's new notoriety could put its Uzbekistan correspondents in harm's way.
"The journalists really are in the authorities's line of fire," he said.