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Syrian activists' Facebook pages said to be shuttered

Just as Syria recovers from last week's countrywide Internet outage, a number of government opposition groups are reportedly saying that their Facebook pages have been shuttered, according to Al Arabiya.

One of the pages that is no longer available is the profile page of the former brigadier general of the Syrian Republican Guard, Manaf Tlass, who defected from the government last year. According to Al Arabiya, his page was visited by tens of thousands of Syrians to discuss the country's civil war.

Tlass told Al Arabiya that he reached out to Facebook to get his page back online … Read more

EA 'retires' SimCity Social, Sims Social, and more from Facebook

The Sims Social was once heralded as Electronic Arts' "most successful Facebook game," but now it's being laid to rest along with SimCity Social and Pet Society. These three social games will be extinct from Facebook as of June 14.

The game maker made the announcement today, saying that it was a hard decision but had to be done in order to "reallocate servers and resources to more popular titles," according to the FAQ section of its Web site.

"Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society," EA wrote in a blog post today. "After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off."… Read more

BlackBerry to shutter its BBM music sharing service on June 2

BlackBerry's BBM music sharing service will be no more.

As of June 2 the service will be shuttered, according to Mobilesyrup. BlackBerry sent out a mass e-mail to all of its BBM Music subscribers today informing them of the news.

Here's a portion of BlackBerry's e-mail, according to Mobilesyrup:

BBMT Music service will be discontinued as of June 2, 2013*. For paying customers, April is the last month that you will be billed. In May, as your BBM contacts stop using the service, songs in your playlists will begin to turn grey and will no longer be … Read more

Make a workaround to avoid time-outs at shutdown in OS X

When you shut down OS X, the system will first attempt to quit all open applications smoothly and then proceed with the shutdown; however, if a program takes too long to quit, then it may halt the shutdown process and issue a warning that the program has prevented the system from shutting down. While this usually just requires you to quit the program manually and save your data, at times it can be frustrating to deal with, especially if some programs simply take a while to quit.

MacFixIt reader Frida recently wrote in with such a problem:

Several applications, particularly … Read more

Sync your Exchange account with TouchDown for Android

Many business-oriented people use Android. TouchDown for Android serves a very specific and valuable purpose for these users. It connects the Android device with the Microsoft Exchange service and enables the device to access secure business files and contacts. It also separates those secure business files from the personal files on the device. With this app, users are able to utilize one device for both business and personal use.

TouchDown for Android comes as a free 30-day trial. Download and setup of the app are fairly straightforward, but some users may find it a bit tedious to initially sync their … Read more

The 404 1,220: Where it's always greener on the other side (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Lucasfilm forces Flyers goalie to change the "Star Wars" graphic on his mask.

- NIN's "Head Like a Hole" mashed with "Call Me Maybe" is terrible and perfect.

- Teddy Faley made a mashup album using Mobb Deep lyrics over 8-bit Mario samples.

- Never lose at pool again (by cheating).

- Silicon Valley is full of stoners.… Read more

Movie studios target mobile apps for copyright infringement

After targeting Web sites for copyright infringement for years, Hollywood is now setting its sights on mobile apps, according to Reuters.

Time Warner, Walt Disney, Sony, Viacom, and Twentieth Century Fox have all recently sent app "take down" notices to Google. Citing copyright infringement, these studios are demanding that the Web giant remove apps that use the likeness of characters in their movies or TV shows.

One of the offending apps is "Hobbit 3D Wallpaper HD," which has images from the popular movie, according to Reuters. Other apps are from movies like "Clash of the … Read more

Making sense of the PS4 game lineup

NEW YORK--So the world didn't exactly get what it wanted out of Sony's PlayStation 4 debut tonight. There was no sight of the actual console itself and details about its specific release date and price were also nowhere to be seen.

Sony's team-up with Gaikai is sure to net some interesting ideas and implementations with cloud streaming, the sharing of game screens, remote play, and other concoctions, but the games themselves were what made the biggest impact.

Those pondering the PS4's gaming prowess were served an interesting dish. Ten or so major developers were represented in … Read more

Amazon suffers some homepage glitches

It looks like Amazon is having some spotty service on its homepage right now, but shoppers can still access the site through its other pages.

When visiting www.amazon.com through the Web or on mobile, some users are getting the error message "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." Twitter users started complaining about the apparent outage around noon Pacific time. Accessing the site through the mobile app or one of the other internal links doesn't seem to be a problem. For example, www.amazon.com/kindle and www.amazon.com/music are working just find.

We've … Read more