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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.

Searching the web for the right image can be tricky. We at Geekosystem know this well. You can't just grab what you want willy-nilly without a little bit of fact checking. But if you're a TV news station, you should probably be extra careful. Danish channel TV2 made the mistake of displaying a screenshot from Assassin's Creed under the assumption they were a showing a current view of war-torn Syria.

If there's one thing about warfare, it's that it offers absolutely no luxuries. Sometimes, when one's life is on the line, you have to buck up and make do with what you have when it comes to your survival. The Syrian rebels are no stranger to this concept and have relied on their ingenuity and basic programming skills to cobble together their own DIY tank. Built upon an old car chassis, the tank, dubbed the "Sham II" in honor of ancient Syria, boasts a camera system, internal LCD display and -- perhaps the most important feature -- a pivoting gun turret controlled by a video game controller. It may not get any points in the looks department, but let's face it -- if you have to make a decision between "crappy tank" and "no tank," you're going with "crappy tank" like, every time. Video after the jump.

Yesterday we reported that due to an ongoing civil war in Syria, the country's Internet access -- in addition to downed phone lines and suspended air travel -- had been cut off, leaving the public with virtually no access to the outside world. Theories are still being posited regarding this particular blackout and how it happened, but, in the interim, Google and Twitter are working together to offer Syrians a means of communication via the Speak2Tweet service. Thanks to the aforementioned downed phone services in the country, this gesture may prove difficult.

The conflict in Syria between rebels and government troops is nothing new. The country's been engaged in a bloody civil war for over a year now, and there are no signs of it getting better at any point soon. In fact, it's just gotten worse. As of 12:26PM Damascus time, Syria's essentially been cut off from the Internet. Like any good modern conflict, there's no clear cause and both sides are blaming each other.

President Obama will be issuing an executive order allowing for sanctions to be imposed on foreign nationals who use technology to violate human rights, the Washington Post reports. The order, which will be given in a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is intended to bring the U.S. up to speed, in a way, and acknowledge that technology can be both a very useful tool and a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. Since the Internet has become a major part of modern protests, like we saw in Egypt, it's also fallen under fire by many authoritarian governments who would rather see the Internet shut off entirely. With the issuance of this order, the U.S. will be officially opposed to that sort of behavior, specifically in cases where it enables widespread violence and mass murder.

Not content with simply cutting off Internet access to the entire country, the Syrian government has allegedly banned iPhone. The move comes after months of anti-government protests and a brutal response from the Syrian authority which have reportedly left thousands dead and put the country on the brink of civil war. The ban has been enacted presumably to prevent photos and video of government abuses from leaking out of the country, which has already banned foreign journalists.

In retaliation for Anonymous' hack of the Syrian defense ministry webpage, a Syrian hacking force alleged to be called the "Syrian Electronic Army" struck back at Anonymous. How, you ask? They defaced Anonymous' pet project, the social network AnonPlus, by replacing the homepage with the message above, including gruesome pictures of burned and mutilated bodies. Anonymous' original hack was said to be in support of protesters in Syria and left a message encouraging the Syrian military to revolt against President Bashar al-Assad instead of supporting his suppression of the protests. The counter-hack attributed the current Syrian violence, depicted in the gruesome photos, to Syrian demonstrators instead.

The origin of the hackers was not mentioned on the defaced website. The attribution of this hack to the Syrian Electronic Army comes from a tweet by Citizen Lab, and the SEA are a recognized, public hacking organization, strikingly similar to Anonymous in their press and methods. They even have a bit of that Anonymous flavor to their message, stating that.

In response to your hacking to the website of the Syrian Ministry of Defence, the Syrian people have decided to purify the internet of [y]our pathetic website

The graph to the left, as The Next Web has pointed out was generated by Google's Transparency Report tool, shows that Syrian Internet traffic has flatlined over the past few hours, and Al Jazeera's liveblog has confirmed that the Syrian government has completely cut off the Internet due to protests -- a common move recently in the Middle East. The Internet has been disconnected -- 3G, dial-up and DSL -- due to anti-government uprisings that have been happening as early as January of this year.

Reports are issuing from Syrian bloggers that the government-run Syrian Telecom Ministry is compromising the security of citizens' Facebook accounts. In what appears to be a man-in-the-middle attack against the HTTPS version of Facebook, logging in triggers a browser warning like the one above, saying that the certificate is invalid not to be trusted. The certificate on the left, issued to "Facebook, Inc." is not real; the DigiCert one is. The EFF says that it's a sign of the relative unsophistication of the alleged government attack that it raises a warning at all: However, there are plenty of people who don't pay attention to browser warnings, especially if they're attempting to log into a trusted site like Facebook. Logging in anyway would give the attackers behind the phony certificate "access to and control of their Facebook account," so this is serious business. (EFF via Boing Boing)