geekosystem

At approximately 2:45 PM EDT yesterday May 7th, Syria lost its connection to the global Internet. After 19.5 hours offline, Syria came back online this morning at 10:13 AM EDT. Details are still lacking, but the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency has reported that the outage was caused by an "optic cable malfunction."

The war-torn nation of Syria functionally disappeared from the Internet yesterday afternoon, just before 3 pm EDT. This morning, a few more details on the situation have surfaced, but not many. What we do know isn't heartening for the scenario in Syria. In addition to Internet access, landlines between provinces within Syria have been cut off, further hampering communication between Syrian citizens.

There aren't a lot of details at the moment, but it appears that as of about 2:45 PM EDT today, Syria has gone offline. The chart above is from Google's Transparency Report and it shows the sudden drop off in Syria. Umbrella Security Labs data backs it up as well, although they can't say what the cause is at this time.

One of the things that's understood but rarely said about the Internet is that most of it, by volume, is made of naked people, many of them engaged in a whole galaxy of exotic sex acts. There's porn for everything and everyone, no matter what weird stuff you're interested in. And while porn is a big business on its own, the way it dominates Internet search traffic means that web sites that have nothing to do with porn may still benefit from the erotic quality of the Internet at large.

Well, Google didn't exactly give Austin a whole lot of time to bask in the afterglow of being the next city with Google Fiber. Yesterday afternoon, Google announced on its official blog that Provo, Utah will be the third U.S. city to benefit from the company's new high-speed Internet service.

Austin is a pretty great town, with loads of great grub, good music, and awesome people doing cool, artsy, nerdy stuff. If you need another reason to live there, though, Google just gave you one: A ridiculously fast Internet connection. The company has confirmed rumors that the capital of Texas will be the next U.S. city to experience the awesomeness that is Google Fiber. Whether or not this move will help or hinder in the city's continuing quest to remain weird remains to be seen.

It's still a bit premature to start complaining about the next-gen Xbox being "always-on" for one reason or another, seeing as there's nothing official out just yet, but it hasn't stopped folks from expressing their opinion as to what they'd think of a console that constantly required a connection to the Internet. In short: They don't like it. On April 4th, Adam Orth, Microsoft Studios creative director, went off about these complaints on his Twitter. Microsoft has since officially apologized for his tirade, though their statement doesn't even come close to addressing anything about the "always-on" rumors that instigated it.

The British Library is an institution -- no, an edificial powerhouse -- of information chronicled in books, vaults, and presumably ancient scrolls, and it's second only in physical size to the Library of Congress. It's not satisfied with just what it houses currently, though. Now the British Library wants to expand by archiving the Internet. Well, at least the United Kingdom's slice of it. For now.

Florida Man has quickly become one of my very favorite Twitter feeds, representing a peculiar blend of stupidity, crassness, and mind-boggling lack of common sense that is a genre unto itself. If you aren't following Florida Man, I don't know what you're doing with your time on Twitter, but I am prepared to say that you're spending it poorly. Don't take our word for it, though. Check out our fifteen favorite examples of behavior peculiar to Florida Man.

As of today, three of the major Internet service providers in the United States -- Verizon, Time Warner, and AT&T -- are teaming up with the MPAA and RIAA to let you know that they're watching when you use torrents  to download music, movies or TV shows, and that they don't approve. That disapproval will initially be registered by warnings that remind you that Big Brother your ISP is watching -- the digital equivalent of a disapproving glare -- but that's not the only measure they have at their disposal. Repeat offenders could find themselves blocked from certain sites or even have their connection cut entirely, if temporarily. Keep reading to learn what we know about the new policy, what we don't, and how it could impact the way you use the Internet -- especially if you use it to download media, and come on, who doesn't?

Plagiarism is something that's become a mainstay on the Internet. Why do your own work when you can just lift it from somewhere else? Nobody's going to find out. That is, until they do. Gamewise, called "the IMDb of video games" by Huffington Post, has been getting slammed over at the Giant Bomb forums. Why? Turns out that a rather suspicious number of Gamewise articles, images, and other tidbits appear to have been lifted straight from Giant Bomb. Oops.

This is terrific news for Dungeons & Dragons geeks, but I'm also wondering if it's going to last. Copyright can be a dastardly thing, after all. To be filed under Too Good To Be True, the Internet Archive has posted up FREE scans of a massive number of Dragon magazine print issues and then some.

The Internet is an awfully big place where you can find just about anything -- a fact that can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on what you find yourself looking at. As big and intimidating as the Internet can be, though, it's also built to be easy to get around. It's so easy to get around, in fact, that the trip from any one of the Web's 14.3 billion sites to any other one is no more than 19 mouse clicks long, according to the calculations of one network theory researcher.

It's common knowledge that the Internet is primarily a method of delivering pornography to consumers at unheard of speeds, but that may not be the case much longer in Iceland. Lawmakers there are the latest working to put in place a firewall that would block citizens from viewing pornography online. Iceland isn't the first Western nation to take a swing at 86ing Internet porn -- the United Kingdom has flirted with the idea in the past -- but a growing call among lawmakers suggests it might be the first nation that has an actual shot at passing legislation to make the Internet measurably less naughty.

If you're going to buy a thing -- any kind of thing, really -- Amazon tends to be the first thought if you're someone that uses the Internet. The old guard when it comes to retailers, like Best Buy or Target, are last on the list to be checked. Showrooming, however, is more popular than ever. Checking stuff out in a physical store and then buying online is all the rage. In an effort to fight back against the beast that is online retail, Best Buy has revealed that they're making their Internet price-matching policy permanent for a select few retailers.