Washington Post

[Commentary] You'd think world leaders would know better. Shut down the Internet (or some services that it hosts), and the users will come after you.

But, faced with allegations of corruption, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went ahead and banned Twitter anyway. Now Turks are pushing back. Twitter is facilitating the uproar by offering advice on how to evade the ban with text messaging. Other users have turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the blockage.

How do these leaders keep making the same mistakes? Don't they learn?

It shouldn't surprise us that these leaders have more in common than just an affinity for dropping the hammer on the Web. Many are also isolated, says Steven Cook, a Middle East scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who met with Erdogan.

If the Internet creates filter bubbles that keep us from having to grapple with dissonant views, the filter that afflicts censor-happy regimes like Turkey's is arguably even worse. If Erdogan is convinced that he's the victim, and sees enemies everywhere, shutting down their ability to associate might seem like a perfectly rational move -- at least in the moment. It's an age-old move out of the dictators' playbook: Control the flow of information, and you control the people.

The portrayal of women in video games and the gender dynamics of the gaming community have received ample attention in recent years.

While now nearly half of gamers are female, examining the way girls and women are treated in the culture or commenting on the lack of their presence in professional gaming and e-sports can still ruffle feathers. But The Washington Post was already investigating the relationship between gender and the gaming industry back when Donkey Kong Country was still a new release. ("No hype: The graphics really are unlike anything else in the world of cartridge games.") Here's how then-staff writer Don Oldenburg tackled the topic in a story originally published on November 29, 1994 in his article, “The Electronic Gender Gap.”

“There is nothing at all virtual about the overriding priority given to boys in the video and computer game industries,” he wrote. “It's just plain reality. Unapologetically so.” He quoted one video game company executive as saying that the industry’s most popular products are biased toward boys because: "The bottom line is the dollar sign.”

Multiple Internet monitoring companies are reporting that Syria has been hit with a near country-wide outage. According to Renesys, the outage started at 12:26 UTC, and the only online link remaining is one via TurkTelecom that connects the city of Aleppo.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city, has been the site of some of the most intense fighting in the country's three-year civil war.

A group calling itself the "European Cyber Army" is claiming responsibility for the outage on Twitter and in a posting to text sharing site PasteBin. In the note on PasteBin, the group calls the outage retaliation for attacks on western systems by the Syrian Electronic Army -- an unofficial group of pro-Assad regime hackers that have gone after prominent western figures and media outlets, including The Washington Post.

The Federal Communications Commission is requiring phone companies with more than 100,000 domestic subscribers to submit aggregated reports on calls that customers make to rural areas. It's part of an effort to crack down on a problem known as "rural call completion," in which calls to remote parts of the country get dropped or never make it through. By requiring phone companies to submit those reports on rural call completion, the FCC thinks it has a shot at curbing what Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has called an "unacceptable problem." Yet to a casual observer, the FCC's request could be easily mistaken for another, more insidious form of privacy intrusion. At its most basic level, the components are all there: A worthy goal everyone can get behind; corporate retention of user data; quiet, confidential reports to the government. But there are subtle differences between the NSA's systematic surveillance program and what the FCC is trying to accomplish. For one thing, the retention period is a lot shorter: Phone companies are obligated to retain the individual call records for six months before discarding them. What's more, the FCC doesn't have access to the individual call records, while the NSA has a giant database that it could query virtually anytime. Here's what the FCC sees in the reports it gets quarterly from phone companies: The number of attempted calls to rural phone providers per month; the number of those calls that were answered; and the number of calls that failed to complete.

Hybris Software has its eye on the future of commerce. Here’s the process:

1. See a QR code on a magazine ad for a product you’re interested in. Scan the QR code on your smartphone.
2. Request customer service in an app for the next time you’re in a store.
3. You walk in the store, and an employee receives an alert via Google Glass that you’re in the store and want help buying that product.
4. The salesperson identifies and greets you, thanks to a photo from your Facebook profile.
5. The salesperson guides you to the product you’re interested in.
6. As you check out, the salesperson is alerted to another product you’re interested in, and he or she offers you a promotion.
7. You buy that other product, motivated by the deal.

According the Pew Research Center, Internet usage and support for net freedom share a close relationship -- no matter where you live. The more of a country's population that's connected to the Web, the more likely it is that they'll support ending government controls.

This is truest in Latin American countries like Chile and Argentina, where a majority of people are online. Unsurprisingly, places that are still lacking in connectivity don't seem to care as much.

Support for Internet openness says nothing about the actual conditions in-country, which is arguably the more important metric. And the reality is somewhat depressing. Internet usage may be a factor in determining support for a free and open Internet. But its connection to actual Internet freedom is not so clear.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine -- one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance. On Jan 17, President Barack Obama called for significant changes to the way NSA collects and uses telephone records of US citizens.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere. In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology say they've come up with a new kind of laser that's capable of quadrupling the bandwidth on today's fastest fiber optic networks.

These networks make up what's known as the Internet "backbone," the behind-the-scenes network that delivers content to ISPs like Verizon -- who in turn make that content available to you. Today's best backbone technology is capable of staggering bandwidth -- in some cases up to 400 Gbps. For perspective, that's more than 40,000 times the speed of the average American's home connection. (Take that comparison with a grain of salt: Most Americans will never need the capacity of a backbone connection. Even the fastest consumer plans top out at 1 Gbps these days.) But the new laser technology, developed in part by National Medal of Science-winner Amnon Yariv, promises to quadruple bandwidth in the existing Internet backbone, if not more.

For global messaging sensation WhatsApp, the privacy brouhaha that followed its sale to Facebook came as a rude surprise. Soon after the $19 billion deal was announced, consumer privacy groups asked federal regulators to investigate the merger for potential consumer harms and possibly block the deal.

Some users are threatening to leave the service. WhatsApp founders tried to deflate concerns that user data may be used for advertising. But it will be hard for the messaging service to convince users who thought they had signed up to service that would never use data for targeted advertising, privacy advocates say. Any deal with Facebook comes with the baggage of the social networking giant's troubled history on privacy.

"They took Facebook's money, and now one of them has a seat on their board," said Jeff Chester, head of Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy group that along with the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint against the merger to the Federal Trade Commission. Jan Koum, who co-founded WhatsApp with Brian Acton, will join Facebook's board once the deal closes.

Facebook has repeatedly changed privacy policies on users, having the effect of a slow boil that constantly pushes the comforts of users who are at this point too reliant on the network to leave, some consumer groups say. The merger of Facebook and WhatsApp brings together two companies with diametrically opposing business models and philosophies on consumer data. Facebook's success is tied directly to how much data it collects about its users and sells for advertising.

For half a century, television ads have been the staple of political campaigns, the preferred, if costly, vehicle for communicating a candidate’s message to the voters. What happens when people stop watching live television?

That day hasn’t arrived yet and probably never will. But the outlines of the new world of television watching habits -- and their implications for political campaigns -- were highlighted in a survey released at a conference hosted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the Internet Association.

The survey, presented by Robert Blizzard of the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies and Julie Hootkin of the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group, concluded that the country has reached “a tipping point” in the competition for viewers between traditional live television and other forms of viewing content. “That means, for political campaigns, reaching younger, more diverse, swing voters through live TV advertising alone is problematic,” the authors wrote in their analysis.