Cyber attacks and cyber espionage have supplanted terrorism as the top threats to the United States in an annual “worldwide threat” assessment released on Tuesday by the U.S. intelligence community.
However, in testimony prepared for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, played down the likelihood of catastrophic attacks on the United States by either cyber attackers or foreign or domestic militants in the immediate future.
In what has become an annual ritual, Clapper presented to the Senate panel a 34-page paper that ran through a wide variety of threats covered by U.S. intelligence agencies.
China unveiled tighter Internet controls on Friday, legalizing the deletion of posts or pages which are deemed to contain “illegal” information and requiring service providers to hand over such information to the authorities for punishment.
The rules signal that the new leadership headed by Communist Party chief Xi Jinping will continue muzzling the often scathing, raucous online chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for debate.
The new regulations, announced by the official Xinhua news agency, also require Internet users to register with their real names when signing up with network providers, though, in reality, this already happens.
Chinese authorities and Internet companies such as Sina Corp have long since closely monitored and censored what people say online, but the government has now put measures such as deleting posts into law.”
Service providers are required to instantly stop the transmission of illegal information once it is spotted and take relevant measures, including removing the information and saving records, before reporting to supervisory authorities,” the rules state.
The restrictions follow a series of corruption scandals amongst lower-level officials exposed by Internet users, something the government has said it is trying to encourage.
READ ON: China tightens Internet controls, legalizes post deletion
Syrian rebels battled forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad just outside Damascus on Thursday, forcing the closure of the main airport road, and the Dubai-based Emirates airline suspended flights to the Syrian capital.
Residents also reported Internet connections in the capital were down and mobile and land telephone lines working only sporadically in what appeared to be the worst disruption to communications in Syria since an uprising began 20 months ago.
The past two weeks have seen rebels overrunning army bases across Syria, exposing Assad’s loss of control in northern and eastern regions despite the devastating air power that he has used to bombard opposition strongholds.
Rep. Darrell Issa introduces bill on Reddit that would prevent new internet laws for 2 years
The Internet Moratorium Act is submitted first to the internet
Ecuador is ready to negotiate over the fate of Julian Assange if Britain withdraws a threat to raid its embassy in London where the WikiLeaks founder has sought refuge, President Rafael Correa said on Tuesday.
Ecuador was incensed by a veiled British threat to enter the embassy to arrest the 41-year-old former computer hacker, who is trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault.
Correa has offered Assange asylum and told Britain to let him leave the embassy and fly to the South American country. The leftist leader said Assange, who has been in the building for nine weeks, was welcome to stay there “indefinitely,” but also said he was open to discussions.
“Despite that rude, impertinent and unacceptable remark we’re still open to dialogue,” Correa told reporters in the coastal city of Guayaquil.
“We don’t expect an apology, but of course we expect Britain to retract the extremely serious mistake they made when they issued the threat that they could violate our diplomatic mission to arrest Mr. Julian Assange.”
Micro-blogging service Twitter suffered an outage Thursday that affected users on multiple continents.
“Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” the San Francisco-based company wrote in a blog post shortly after 8:30 a.m. Pacific time (2100 IST).
The service went dark for several hours in June. That episode revived fears that stability issues may once again be plaguing Twitter, which suffered frequent outages in its early years, but has claimed to have improved its infrastructure.
READ ON: Twitter suffers widespread outage
Website operators may soon be forced under planned new British laws to reveal the identity of those who post defamatory comments on their forums, a move that aims to protect victims by speeding up what is often a lengthy and expensive legal process.
Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke said the proposed approach would give greater protection to operators who complied with the procedure, ahead of Tuesday’s second reading in Parliament of the Defamation Bill.
“As the law stands, individuals can be the subject of scurrilous rumour and allegation on the web with little meaningful remedy against the person responsible,” said Clarke in a statement.
“The government wants a libel regime for the Internet that makes it possible for people to protect their reputations effectively but also ensures that information online can’t be easily censored by casual threats of litigation against website operators.”
READ MORE: Internet trolls face tough new rules in UK
What would happen if HBO no longer had the pay-TV industry’s marketing team propping it up all the time? The results would be disastrous, and there’s no way that HBO could make up in online volume the number of subscribers it would lose from cable. Which is why, even though some users would actually pay more for access to HBO GO without all the other cable channels, you won’t see it show up as a standalone service anytime soon.
Islamist website offers $100,000 for Iranian rapper's death
An Iranian rapper living in Germany has a $100,000 bounty on his head after an Islamist website offered a reward for anyone who kills him over a song that satirizes the Islamic Republic and irreverently addresses a historic religious figure.
The Iranian news and religion website Shia-Online.ir said hip-hop star Shahin Najafi deserved to die for a song which it said “grossly insulted” Ali al-Hadi al-Naqi, one of the 12 imams, the religious figures highly revered by Shi’ite Muslims.
Najafi denied his song focused on the revered Shi’ite imam or was meant to criticize Islam.
Scoops & scandals: How the net is changing the news in China
Chinese political dramas have grabbed global headlines, roiled the leadership ranks, and could spark a public crisis. But how do you report in such a closed media landscape? Chris Buckley explains.
