Syria
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Google made an info hub to help the migrant and refugee crisis
A number of tech companies, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, have joined the global efforts to aid Europe's ongoing refugee crisis. With that in mind, Google today introduced a new initiative designed to assist the migrant relief overseas, adding to the matched donations it announced last month. The search giant has now built a mobile site for people in need, called Crisis Info Hub, which offers quick and simple access to vital information about lodging, medical facilities and transportation. Google's also looking for volunteers to help improve Translate, a service that's useful to the migrants and refugees who are in a new country. If you speak German or Arabic and you'd like to lend a hand, head over to Google's Translate Community page to get started.
Indiegogo rebrands charity as Generosity(.com)
Indiegogo will rebrand Indiegogo Life, its service to raise money for good causes, as Generosity.com. Launching later today, the platform will charge no fees, set no deadline and use Indiegogo's backend to run each campaign, much as it has done for the past year. The site will (re)launch with four new high-profile initiatives that require your cash, including helping Syrian refugees start new lives and funding STEM education for girls. It's another high-profile break with rival crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which had to break its own rules to launch a campaign to help Syrian refugees. It's also interesting that Indiegogo has opted to take its name off the service, perhaps showing a degree of self-awareness that its online reputation isn't the best. Update: The site hasn't gone live yet, but we've been told that the site will be branded as "Generosity by Indiegogo," so ignore that line about it being aware of its own terrible reputation.
ABC News introduces VR initiative with 360-degree tour of Syria
ABC News is experimenting with immersive journalism. On last night's episode of their news program, Nightline, viewers had the option to watch an accompanying 360-degree video piece on their mobile phones or computers. The in-depth story, by reporter Alexander Marquardt, took viewers on a virtual journey through Damascus, Syria, where curators are struggling to protect the country's antiquities from destruction. The network collaborated with Jaunt VR, a California-based studio that creates live-action virtual reality experiences, to produce the video that was shot on a special 16-camera device.
ICYMI: Tour a warzone in VR, champ rock-paper bot and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-115849{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-115849, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-115849{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-115849").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: A Syrian news agency is giving viewers a chance to nearly walk the ground of a bombed out city center with a virtual reality tour. Rock, paper, scissors champs would cry themselves to sleep after taking on a Japanese robot that wins the game every time, thanks to high-speed tracking tech. And OpenROV's underwater drone is being heavily funded on Kickstarter, bringing maps of the sea floor to everyone with some spare cash and a penchant for the ocean.
360-degree video puts you in a bombed-out Syrian war zone
A new 360-degree, 4K video lets you see the destruction of Syria's civil war firsthand on any virtual reality (VR) headset. It was shot by Syria's Smart News Agency between May and July in the city of Jisr al-Choughour, at the nation's northeastern frontier near Turkey, according to Le Parisien. The city of 40,000 is in near-complete ruins and most of the residents have fled after it was taken by rebels affiliated with al-Qaeda. The video (below) was captured by a six-camera rig mounted on the photographer's head, then stitched together at Okio Studios in Paris.
Virginia teen gets 11 years for ISIS support on Twitter
17-year-old Ali Shukri Amin from Virginia will spend the next 11 years and 4 months in a federal penitentiary for his role in running the powerful pro-ISIS Twitter account, @Amreekiwitness. This account collected and disseminated ISIS propaganda to more than 4,000 followers and shared instructions for using Bitcoin to secretly fund the terrorist organization. Amin also admitted to helping one of the account's followers to travel to Syria and join the group. That follower has since been arrested and is facing federal prosecution as well on a conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism charge.
Syrian government supporters hack the US Army's website
The Syrian government's digital supporters aren't letting up on their attacks against the US. Officials have confirmed that hackers linking themselves to the Syrian Electronic Army both defaced the US Army's website and steered visitors to a page championing the regime. The military rejects the intruders' claims that they compromised internal databases, noting that there's no classified or personal data at risk. Still, the Army isn't taking any chances -- it temporarily took down its website to make sure things didn't get any worse. However light the damage might be, it's safe to say that the feds' cyberdefense efforts just took another bad blow. [Image credit: Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty Images]
3D printers find a home fighting disease in Syrian refugee camps
Sure, 3D printers can make guns, but it can also be used for good: for instance, its capability to create whatever you want gives it a bright future in humanitarian efforts around the globe. Oxfam (an organization that seeks to eradicate poverty) agrees, that's why it has partnered with online 3D printables platform MyMiniFactory for a mission in Lebanon. Their first collaboration? To find a printable water-efficient hand wash system for Syrian refugees who fled to the country in order to lower instances of diarrhea and other diseases. Here's how the partnership works: MyMiniFactory will accept design submissions from anyone, and then select a few to email the Oxfam team. The org will then print and test these designs onsite, and then email MyMiniFactory on how to tweak them and make them better. Sadly, not every org out there comes with a 3D printer in tow, but a lot of humanitarians recognize the technology's benefits and hope to take advantage of it soon. With the advent of more affordable 3D printers, that's looking more and more possible. So, we wouldn't be surprised if organizations start lugging around printers instead of actual equipment to produce everything from housing to medical supplies in the future.
Viber support page hacked by Syrian Electronic Army, most user info remains safe
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.
Syria back online after a nearly day-long internet blackout
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.
The entire nation of Syria goes offline yet again
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.
Syrian internet access mostly restored, for now
History has a way of repeating itself, and the turmoil in Syria is proving no exception -- though potentially for the better. Following a communications blackout that began Thursday, reports have surfaced from Renesys, the AP, the BBC and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that internet and phone access has resumed across major swaths of the country as of Saturday. President al-Assad's office and rebels accuse each other of severing the links, although the US State Department doesn't see there being much debate: it believes the near-simultaneous cut was an attempt by Assad to disrupt opposition that has been using the internet as one of its coordinating tools. It's difficult to know if links will remain intact when battles inside the country are as fierce as ever. While there's some comfort to be had in knowing that technologies like satellite internet access are available if the lines go dark once again, we just hope that peace comes to the country instead. [Image credit: Aziz1005, Wikimedia Commons]
Syrian internet goes down, gets cut off from the world
The civil war-torn nation of Syria has seemingly disappeared from the internet. In a sign that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is trying to limit the flow of information and possibly increase its violent crackdown on opposition forces, all 84 blocks of IP addresses used by the nation have gone offline. The blackout was first reported by Renesys this morning at around 5:26am ET and the #SyriaBlackout hashtag has started picking up steam on Twitter as others have noticed. While it's unclear exactly what has happened and investigations are on going, and a nationwide outage is highly suspicious. The Associated Press is reporting that rebels are laying blame for the blackout at the feet of the government and that cellphone service has also been severed. We'll update as more information rolls in, but we wouldn't expect good news. Update: Akamai has provided more confirmation of the outage. As you can see in the image above, at some point this morning the amount of data coming out of Syria simply dropped to zero.
Flame malware snoops on PCs across the Middle East, makes Stuxnet look small-time
Much ado was made when security experts found Stuxnet wreaking havoc, but it's looking as though the malware was just a prelude to a much more elaborate attack that's plaguing the Middle East. Flame, a backdoor Windows trojan, doesn't just sniff and steal nearby network traffic info -- it uses your computer's hardware against you. The rogue code nabs phone data over Bluetooth, spreads over USB drives and records conversations from the PC's microphone. If that isn't enough to set even the slightly paranoid on edge, it's also so complex that it has to infect a PC in stages; Flame may have been attacking computers since 2010 without being spotted, and researchers at Kaspersky think it may be a decade before they know just how much damage the code can wreak. No culprit has been pinpointed yet, but a link to the same printer spool vulnerability used by Stuxnet has led researchers to suspect that it may be another instance of a targeted cyberwar attack given that Iran, Syria and a handful of other countries in the region are almost exclusively marked as targets. Even if you live in a 'safe' region, we'd keep an eye out for any suspicious activity knowing that even a fully updated Windows 7 PC can be compromised.
Syria gets previously blocked Google software, at least for now
Mountain View's just dished out some good news for Syrians, Picasa, Chrome, and Google Earth were officially made available for download in the complex nation as of yesterday. US export controls and sanctions had hitherto blocked that possibility, and there's sill no guarantee that smartphones won't be prohibited. That's of course assuming the whole internet won't just be turned off if the Syrian government doesn't like what's going down, but as of right now the software is live. Google put the same trio on tap this February in Iran after more than a year and a half of similar restrictions in that country. And we thought our internet-related issues were annoying.
Obama cracks down on Iran and Syria's surveillance of dissidents
President Obama may be quite cozy with tech -- what with his predilection for the iPad and those town hall meetings on Facebook -- but he's well aware of its dark side, too. Today he announced that the US will freeze assets and cancel the American visas of Iranian and Syrian agencies tracking dissidents and pro-democracy groups via satellite, computer and phone networks. Among the entities getting the blacklist treatment are the Syrian cellphone company Syriatel, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian internet provider Datak Telecom. Amid election-year pressure to confront Iran, Obama addressed the ongoing threat of the country acquiring nukes, but also paid lip service to social media's role in democracy. "These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them," he told an audience of 250 people, according to Reuters. Still, given the limited impact of previous sanctions against Iran, it remains to be seen just how much of an effect Washington's actions have on the human rights situation in either country.
Syria bans iPhone in attempt to curb protests and silence citizen journalists
Times are tough in Syria right now, but that isn't stopping the Assad government from making things a whole lot worse. The nation's customs department, a branch of the Syrian Finance Ministry, has officially banned the iPhone in an attempt to curb citizens from sharing news and videos of the massive protests and violent crackdowns throughout the nation. For those not keeping score, foreign press have been largely barred from the nation since March, which necessitated the use of citizen journalism as a means to report news from the streets. As Syrians come to grips with new economic sanctions against the country, the banning of the iPhone is, sadly, certain to escalate the unrest.
Report: iPhone banned in Syria
According to a report by the German Press Association (via Haaretz), Syrian authorities have banned the use or importation of the iPhone into Syria in an attempt to crack down on protesters in that country. International media has been banned from Syria for months, so virtually all we know about the protests currently happening there comes from footage uploaded to the Internet, usually via protesters' cell phone footage of events. The BBC reports that other smartphones have yet to fall under the blanket ban, which seems curious at first; however, it's not so curious when it turns out there's actually an iPhone app dedicated to the protest movement. The iPhone's UI also makes it incredibly easy to upload video footage to YouTube, which the current Syrian regime also wants to suppress as it opposes -- often violently -- the protests against the government in Syria. The UN reports that more than 4000 people have been killed in Syria since protests began in mid-March. Like many other flashpoints in the Arab Spring movement of 2011, protesters have been heavily using iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other smartphones to communicate and co-ordinate their activities. Additionally, with camera quality in many smartphones approaching the level of low- to mid-range point-and-shoot cameras, and with many smartphones supplying simple methods of uploading those videos online, documenting government responses to protests has been easier than ever before. The Syrian government's ban on the iPhone is unlikely to measurably impact protesters' activities, as they will either start using iPhones more clandestinely or simply switch to an unbanned smartphone platform. Additionally, protest movements like the one currently taking place in Syria got along just fine before the iPhone came along, so if Syrian authorities are hoping that banning the iPhone will stop the protests, they are sure to be mistaken.
Daily Update for December 2, 2011
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Syrian internet knocked out as protests fill the streets (video)
The Washington Post is reporting a massive internet outage across Syria today, a fact confirmed by government-backed outlet Syria-News.com. Internet traffic monitoring group Renesys began noting the outage at 7:00AM eastern time, with two-thirds of networks in the country affected -- half an hour later, 49 out of 50 networks in Syria were hit. The outage struck the nation as some 50,000 protesters took to the streets as part of a "Children's Friday" protest, drawing attention to the death of dozens of children in prior protests and calling for the resignation of the country's president, Bashar al-Assad. The timing has led many to speculate that the government itself is behind the shutdown, seemingly echoing recent outages in Egypt and Libya -- and Syria's long history of monitoring internet activity on sites like Facebook and YouTube certainly seems to lend credence to that claim. Video coverage of protests after the break.
