Washington Post

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.

A team of former congressional investigators is calling for a new inquiry into the Central Intelligence Agency -- not unlike one they performed nearly four decades ago.

The officials -- who helped lead a months-long study in 1975 to assess allegations that the CIA had improperly spied on US citizens -- say Congress should convene a special panel to determine whether America's intelligence agencies have overstepped their bounds.

In a letter sent to the White House and top lawmakers, the officials drew parallels between recent allegations of overreach and their work on the Church committee, the investigative body chaired by the late Sen. Frank Church (D-IH) that resulted in a two-feet-thick report on the intelligence community's secret activities.

"There is a crisis of public confidence," they wrote. "Misleading statements by agency officials to Congress, the courts, and the public have undermined public trust in the intelligence community and in the capacity for the branches of government to provide meaningful oversight." Among those who signed the letter are the Church committee's chief counsel, Frederick AO Schwartz; top committee staffer and University of Georgia professor Loch Johnson; and more than a dozen others.

Federal regulators may have approved AT&T's bid to merge with Leap Wireless, aka Cricket -- a deal that will add 5 million customers to AT&T's rolls.

But fans of Cricket's service may have a reason to be wary of their new corporate overlords. That's because prepaid customers on AT&T are routinely being billed extra for minutes they don't appear to be using. If true, that means their available credit is being drained at unexpected rates -- often without their knowledge -- requiring that they buy more credit, more often.

Critics allege the practice amounts to a subtle program of consumer fraud that, in the aggregate, delivers big bucks to wireless carriers. According to a formal complaint lodged with federal regulators, wireless companies are reporting longer call times than what a customer's device will show. In the case of one AT&T subscriber, the network added as many as 33 seconds to his call after he hung up, allowing AT&T to bill him for an additional minute of usage.