Ms. Wong (Photo: Wikipedia)

The White House has tapped Twitter’s former legal director Nicole Wong for chief privacy officer, a newly created position. Before joining Twitter six months ago, she was at Google where her nickname was "The Decider." [ReadWrite]

Yahoo reportedly really really wants out of its search deal with Microsoft because it's killing the company's revenue. [WSJ]

Betaworks' first game, Dots, has racked up 1 million downloads in its first week of release. [TechCrunch]

Syria's government said it's working to repair the country's connection to the Internet. Who is faster with customer service: Syria or Time Warner? [CNN]

In an effort to get more people back into its brick-and-mortar stores, Target is rolling out deals on people’s Facebook News Feeds that you can take to the store and redeem. [AdAge]

Anonymous's Seal

On Thursday the Syrian government shut down nearly all Internet traffic into and out of the country, a sign that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has grown wary of external scrutiny. Many activists fear it is also a sign that Syria plans a vicious crackdown on rebels who seek an end to Assad's regime.

Anonymous issued a press release Thursday night reiterating the hacktivists' allegiance with the people of Syria and outlining measures Anonymous has put in place to assist Syrians with maintaining communication with the outside world. The infamous and de-centralized collective also detailed what they plan for Syrian web properties that are still active online:

Anonymous will NOT allow this massive violation of the human rights of the free Syrian people go un-punished. We feel this is a desperate move by a dying regime, one that has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Beginning at 9:00 PM ET USA Anonymous will begin removing from the Internet all web assets belonging to the Assad regime that are NOT hosted in Syria. We will begin with the websites and servers belonging to ALL Syrian Embassies abroad, which we will begin systematically removing from the Internet tonight. Our first target will be the website of the Syrian Embassy of in China: syria.org.cn - we encourage the media to follow the Twitter account @OpSyriaIRC for announcements on take-downs, defacements, data dumps, E-Mail bombs and black fax attacks. By turning off the Internet in Syria, the butcher Assad has shown that the time has come for Anonymous to remove the last vestiges of his evil government from the Internet. Soon, his people will remove him from this world. Let the final battle for a free Syria begin....

All Syrian Internet traffic and cell phone access was still off late Thursday.

The Associated Press cited reports from Syrian activists and internet company Akamai Technologies confirming the outage.

AllThingsD, which reported on the #SyrianBlackout earlier this morning, surmised that the government may have closed the country to in- and outbound internet traffic in an attempt to control the flow of information in anticipation of coming horrors:

It’s also a pretty sure sign that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is either getting nervous about how it is being perceived in the world, or that it is planning something unspeakably harsh in the coming days and wants as little information emerging from that country as possible.

On Tuesday, Syrian activists posted a web video in which rebels appeared to shoot down a government helicopter with a surface-to-air missile.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported today that fighting between rebels and government loyalists outside of Damascus had shut down the capital city's airport.

Update:  Akamai sent the below image of traffic the company send to Syria:

Akamai.

Let slip the dogs of cyber war. (flickr.com/anhonorablegerman)

Remember last summer, when all anyone could talk about was hacktivists? For a while there, we were living in a William Gibson novel, with hackers wreaking havoc and corporate types running scared. Well, so far, this June is shaping up a little differently, with a wave of state-sponsored attacks straight out of a spy novel.

Much as we love lone teenaged lone wolves typing away in their moms' basements, it's clear they're just the loudest and proudest of hackers. Just because the spies don't have official Twitter accounts and release YouTube videos doesn't mean they're not there, though. The latest two instances come courtesy of Fast Company, which points out that dissidents are increasingly a target of state-sponsored hacks.

For example: Tibetan activists recently received a phishing email, disguised as an official communique regarding a recent European resolution, which takes root in their computers and calls up a server in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, members of the Syrian opposition are being targeted with malware, distributed via Skype, that installs spying software.

Google has even started warning Gmail users when they've been targets of an attempted state-sponsored cyber attack.

This is different from just a couple of months ago, when Stuxnet and Flame looked conveniently aligned with the strategic goals of the U.S. and Israel, but mum was the word as to where the infections came from. Now, thanks to exposes in the New York Times and the Washington Post respectively, we've good as got confirmation they were programs developed by the two nations working in concert to slow Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Nor is the cyber tussle between the U.S. and Iran is over. Just today, an Iranian news agency (described by the AP as "semiofficial") claimed to have fought off another "massive" cyber attack. The expression "can of worms" comes to mind.

LulzSec, we have to say, was a lot more entertaining.