After months of toeing the "red line" set by US president Obama regarding the use of chemical weapons against his own civilian population, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime has seemingly been caught killing more than 300 Syrian civilians and sickening over 1000 more in a suspected sarin nerve gas attack. The US has already considered
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Pulitzer Prize winning photographs
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Even with Twitter adding two-factor authentication
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The Syrian Electronic Army isn’t happy with VoIP app developers as of late — following an attack against Tango last week, the politically motivated hacking group has compromised Viber’s support page. The SEA claims to have downloaded database backups from Viber that include phone numbers, device IDs and push notification tokens. However, the company believes that the attack was largely harmless for regular customers; SEA’s team got access to top-level support systems, but not the all-important user databases. They’re kept in a system that can’t be reached by attacks like these, according to Viber. While that news is reassuring, we’d advise playing it safe by watching for any suspicious account activity.
Filed under: Internet
Via: TechCrunch
Source: AppleSpot (translated)
The situation in Syria is getting worse by the hour. France and the UK have both confirmed Assad’s use of Sarin gas against rebel-held towns, Hezbollah fighters have jumped in to the regime’s defense, and drones are falling out of the sky at an alarming pace. Including this one.
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It seems unlikely that it’s the last time the country will be cut off from the internet given its past history, but Syria does now appear to be back online following a nationwide blackout that began yesterday afternoon. As the BBC reports, state-run media in the country had attributed the problem to a “fault in optical fibre cables,” but most have cast doubt on those claims, suggesting instead that it’s much more likely the blackout was the result of a deliberate shutdown by the government.
Filed under: Internet
Via: @ckanal (Twitter)
Source: BBC
Yesterday, we reported on Syria’s Internet experiencing some serious outages according to Google data as well as other global Internet companies. It looks as though things may be getting back to some kind of normalcy in regards to the country’s Internet as Renesys is reporting access is being re-established.
Rensys’ claim was backed up by several other companies such as Akamai, and BGPmon as well as Google. The reason for the over 19-hour outage is still unclear, although state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) gave a possible explanation through a message posted on their website that reads “Internet services back to normal across Syria after repairing optic cable malfunction. Whether or not that is the actual reason for the outage is yet to be seen, although we’re sure we’ll hear something in the coming days as to the real reason for the outage.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Fiber Expanding To Grandview, MO, Anonymous Threatens To Wipe U.S “Off The Cybermap”, 
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Syria is not exactly the shining example of being a stable country at this point in time, not to mention the fact that the Syrian electronic army recently hacked 11 Twitter accounts belonging to the Guardian. Having said that, it seems that Syria’s Internet connection to the rest of the world has been interrupted, at least this is what can be gathered according to Google data as well as other global Internet companies. Google’s Transparency Report pages pointed out that traffic to Google services pages from the country which has been knee deep in a civil war which has dragged on for more than a couple of years already, stopped abruptly before 3pm EDT (19h00 GMT), and there were no additional activity for approximately four hours after the initial drop-off happened.
Christine Chen, Google’s senior manager for free expression, said, “We’ve seen this twice before. This happened in Syria last November and in Egypt during the Arab Spring.” It is more or less an impossible task to know the reason behind such a disruption, unless someone or a party claims responsibility, but hopefully, Syrians will be able to get back on track – at least their online lives, sooner rather than later.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Microsoft Has Plans For Office Web Apps Suite, Google Maps To Get New Interface, 
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Entire countries can go offline. Syria’s done it before, and now it appears that the troubled nation has dropped its web connection again, according to Google’s Transparency Report and other online sources. The outage appears to have begun just before 3PM ET, according to Google’s report, and has yet to be resolved nearly three hours later. It’s not entirely clear what’s caused the outage, but based on educated speculation surrounding previous incidents, it wouldn’t be out of the question to conclude that the government was behind this latest interruption. For now, the country remains in the dark — we’ll update this post just as soon as that’s resolved.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Google+
Source: Google Transparency Report
Columbia University yesterday announced the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes—and those for Breaking News and Feature Photography were all awarded for heartrending images capturing the civil war in Syria. More »
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