Syria Releases Video of Fox News Interview With Assad

President Bashar al-Assad’s office, which promoted his “television dialogue” with the Fox News contributor Dennis Kucinich online before the channel even acknowledged that it had taken place, posted video of the complete interview on its YouTube channel as soon as the broadcast began Wednesday night.

Video of Bashar al-Assad speaking with Dennis Kucinich and Greg Palkot of Fox News in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday, posted on the YouTube channel of the Syrian presidency.

At one point, Mr. Assad defended the use of force to put down the uprising against his rule, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths, by comparing it to the use of soldiers and Marines to quell rioting in Los Angeles in 1992. “What did you do in Los Angeles in the ’90s, when you had rebels?” he said. “Didn’t you send your army? You did.”

Grand Theft Auto V Muscles Its Way to Sales Record

Grand Theft Auto V, one of the most anticipated video games of the year, has beaten sales figures posted by previous installments in the violent and controversial adventure game series. The new game generated more than $800 million in sales on its first day on store shelves.

Take-Two Interactive Software, the publisher of the game, said those first-day sales were the biggest ever for the company and the Grand Theft Auto series, which seems to have lost little appeal even though the first edition of the series was released 16 years ago.

The last major version of the game, Grand Theft Auto IV, had $310 million in opening day sales when it came out in 2008. It sold more than $500 million in its first week.

The video game industry is undergoing major shifts that pose big challenges to traditional publishers, as the opportunities proliferate for playing games on mobile devices, many of them available free or at low costs. But the success of the industry’s biggest blockbuster franchises appears to be secure for now.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the most recent version of the popular combat game series from Activision, earned $1 billion in sales late last year after 15 days on the market. The previous installment of the game did the same after 16 days.

New versions of Grand Theft Auto come out less frequently than others, partly because of the meticulousness of Rockstar Games, the development studio responsible for it. Rockstar has a cultlike following among gamers and others in the industry for the painstaking research and technical wizardry that go into making its games.

Grand Theft Auto, which takes place in a vast virtual world populated by thugs, has also become a magnet for wider criticism of the games business by politicians and others incensed by its brutality.

The new version of the game has received glowing reviews, including from The New York Times, which called it the “best plotted, most playable, character-driven, fictionally coherent entry” in the history of the series.

Grand Theft Auto V Muscles Its Way to Sales Record

Grand Theft Auto V, one of the most anticipated video games of the year, has beaten sales figures posted by previous installments in the violent and controversial adventure game series. The new game generated more than $800 million in sales on its first day on store shelves.

Take-Two Interactive Software, the publisher of the game, said those first-day sales were the biggest ever for the company and the Grand Theft Auto series, which seems to have lost little appeal even though the first edition of the series was released 16 years ago.

The last major version of the game, Grand Theft Auto IV, had $310 million in opening day sales when it came out in 2008. It sold more than $500 million in its first week.

The video game industry is undergoing major shifts that pose big challenges to traditional publishers, as the opportunities proliferate for playing games on mobile devices, many of them available free or at low costs. But the success of the industry’s biggest blockbuster franchises appears to be secure for now.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the most recent version of the popular combat game series from Activision, earned $1 billion in sales late last year after 15 days on the market. The previous installment of the game did the same after 16 days.

New versions of Grand Theft Auto come out less frequently than others, partly because of the meticulousness of Rockstar Games, the development studio responsible for it. Rockstar has a cultlike following among gamers and others in the industry for the painstaking research and technical wizardry that go into making its games.

Grand Theft Auto, which takes place in a vast virtual world populated by thugs, has also become a magnet for wider criticism of the games business by politicians and others incensed by its brutality.

The new version of the game has received glowing reviews, including from The New York Times, which called it the “best plotted, most playable, character-driven, fictionally coherent entry” in the history of the series.

Today’s Scuttlebot: The Release of iOS 7, and the Constitutional Protection of the ‘Like’

Every day, The New York Times’s staff scours the Web for interesting and peculiar items.

Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS7, was released to the world today. It is the most significant software change the company has made to its mobile platform since it first released the iPhone in 2007, and The Times’s personal technology columnist, David Pogue, called the updates radical.

“The look of iOS 7 is sparse, white â€" almost plain in spots. No more fake leather, fake wood grain, fake green felt, fake yellow note paper. It’s all blue Helvetica Neue against white,” he wrote.

Here’s what else we noticed today:

How to Use iOS 7
Wired |  When you update to iOS7, many of the familiar commands and gestures will change. Here’s a guide to your new phone. - Jenna Wortham

Court: Facebook ‘Like’ Is Protected by the First Amendment
The Wall Street Journal |  Court “likes” the argument that Americans have a constitutional right to like things on Facebook. (Subscription required.) - Vindu Goel

High Schooler’s Facebook Post Can Constitute the Crime of Menacing
Technology & Marketing Law Blog |  Are online threats the new version of yelling fire into a crowded theater? A look at one Facebook post found to induce panic. - Amy O’Leary

Swisscom Data Stolen
The Wall Street Journal |  Oops. Tapes that may contain customer data were stolen from Swisscom. (Subscription required.) - Victoria Shannon

Linkedin Challenges U.S. Government on Data Requests
BBC |  Most of the data requests to LinkedIn come from the U.S. government â€" not even including national security requests. - Victoria Shannon

Video of Heavily Armed Starbucks Customer Thanking Staff Before Policy Change

Video of Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, explaining the company’s new policy on guns.

As my colleague Stephanie Strom reports, Starbucks announced a change in policy regarding guns, in a blog post and a video statement from Howard Schultz, the chief executive, in which he made “a respectful request that customers no longer bring firearms into our stores or outdoor seating areas.”

While most Starbucks stores are in states that allow people to openly carry guns, and the company has tried to remain neutral in the debate over gun control, the coffee shops have recently gained a lot of unwanted attention from armed proponents of “open carry” policies who visited the stores to thank employees for not turning them away. In one such demonstration, a Texas pastor named Terry Holcomb visited a Starbucks in Huntsville last month carrying a loaded AR-15 Bushmaster rifle while his son recorded video on his phone.

Video of an armed man visiting a Starbucks in Huntsville, Tx. last month carrying a loaded rifle.

Facebook Removes Dating Ads Featuring Photo of Dead Girl

Facebook has apologized for dating ads that recently appeared on its service that featured a photo of a Canadian teenager, Rehtaeh Parsons, who hanged herself in April.

Ms. Parsons’s case has received much publicity in Canada because she had been the target of cyberbullying because of online circulation of photos taken of her after an alleged gang rape in 2011. Critics said the initial crime was poorly investigated by the police, who recently reopened the case.

The “Find Love in Canada” ads with photos of Ms. Parsons were placed on Facebook by one of the many dating sites that barrage users of the social network. The site, ionechat.com, apparently pulled news photos of Ms. Parsons off the Web after reports of her suicide and used them without authorization in the ad. The owner of the site, which has been shut down, told The Toronto Sun that he had used the photo by mistake and wasn’t aware of the the girl’s background. Facebook said it had blocked the company from submitting future ads.

“This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the Internet and using it in their ad campaign,” Facebook said in a statement. “This is a gross violation of our ad policies and we have removed the ad and permanently deleted the advertiser’s account. We apologize for any harm this has caused.”

The incident comes as the Federal Trade Commission is conducting an inquiry into Facebook’s proposed changes to its privacy policies. Privacy advocates say the changes would give Facebook wider latitude to use the names and photos of teenagers in ads and also would allow the company to use photos of its users in facial recognition software that would help their friends tag them in other photos.

The publication of the ads featuring Ms. Parsons’s face highlights a weakness in the advertising systems of Facebook and many other Web sites. The sites run so many ads that the process of submitting and screening them is automated, allowing some objectionable ads to get through.

While Facebook’s computers scan for obvious violations of its advertising policy, such as ads that feature nudity or automatic weapons, they cannot easily detect more subtle issues. In this case, Facebook said, its computers would not have known why a photo of the girl was problematic.

Facebook said it relied on users to report objectionable content, which is then reviewed by a team of people at the company.

The exact process of reporting an objectionable ad varies by the type of ad, but generally, a user can click on the little X or arrow or Hide Story button that is at the top right corner of the ad. That should pull up a list of options for why the user wants to block or report or hide the content.

In the case of Ms. Parsons, Andrew Ennals, a Canadian ad copywriter, caught the attention of Facebook on Tuesday after he posted screenshots of the objectionable ads on Twitter.

Assad’s Office Promotes Fox News Interview With Kucinich

Syrians who take their cues from President Bashar al-Assad’s office were advised to stay up late Wednesday, so they can tune into the Fox News Channel at 1 a.m. local time (6 p.m. Eastern) to watch “a television dialogue” between their leader and Dennis Kucinich, the former Democratic representative from Ohio who is now a Fox News contributor.

Although Fox News has not yet announced the interview, and did not respond to a request for comment, the Syrian presidency’s Twitter promo featured a photograph of Mr. Kucinich and Greg Palkot, a Fox correspondent who has been reporting from Damascus this week. They were apparently seated in exactly the same spot occupied by Charlie Rose during the taping of his recent interview with Mr. Assad for CBS.

#President al-Assad gives an #interview to American Fox News channel, to be broadcasted on 01:00 am - Damascus. http://t.co/gVHjyIpPMA

â€" Syrian Presidency (@Presidency_Sy) 18 Sep 13

Mr. Kucinich was spotted in Damascus on Tuesday, posing for photographs with his crew on his way to the interview, according to Bill Neely, a correspondent for Britain’s ITV in the Syrian capital.

Before he left for Syria, Mr. Kucinich said in an appearance on Fox that President Obama risked impeachment if he launched a military strike on the Assad government without Congressional approval. He also argued against a strike on Syria in a blog post that prominently cited speculation on the Canadian Web site GlobalResearch that Syrian rebels might have staged the chemical attack to provoke Western intervention. The founder of GlobalResearch, Michel Chossudovsky, has also claimed that the 9/11 attacks were “a pretext” for invading Afghanistan and asserted that there was “not a scrap of evidence” that Al Qaeda was responsible.

Six weeks after the protest movement in Syria began in 2011, Mr. Chossudovsky uncritically repeated the Assad government’s claim that “many of the demonstrators were not demonstrators but terrorists involved in premeditated acts of killing and arson,” in a post accusing the United States of “fabricating a pretext” for military intervention.

That same month, Mr. Kucinich refused to blame the Syrian government for the deaths of protesters. He told The Plain Dealer in Cleveland that “there’s very serious questions raised about the conduct of the Syrian police, but we also know the Syrian police were fired upon and that many police were murdered.” He added, “President Assad has made certain commitments, and I would imagine that when things finally settle down, that President Assad will move in a direction of democratic reforms.”

Mr. Kucinich then met Mr. Assad in person during an unannounced visit to Damascus in 2011. The former congressman’s Web site, which has not been updated since Mr. Obama deferred action, still displays a banner encouraging readers to “TELL CONGRESS: STAND FOR AMERICA - VOTE NO TO ANY ATTACK ON SYRIA.”

A New BlackBerry Phone, but Maybe Too Late

OTTAWA â€" With its future as a business in doubt, BlackBerry introduced on Wednesday a new flagship model for the line of phones that were supposed to revive the company.

The new phone, the BlackBerry Z30, was released with few technical specifications. But the company did say that the device has a 5-inch touchscreen, which is slightly larger than its predecessor, the Z10, and has a bigger battery and a faster processor. The Z10 was introduced early this year, and was the first phone that used the BlackBerry 10 operating system. A new version of that operating system was also announced on Wednesday. Among other things, the new operating system allows BlackBerry Messenger instant message notifications to pop up in any app.

BlackBerry has yet to announce prices for the new phones, which will go on sale in Britain and the Middle East next week. However, cost may be a secondary factor for would-be buyers. Questions about the company’s survival may be at the top of buyers’ minds.

After a steep decline of BlackBerry’s market share, the company said last month that it was considering “strategic options,” a code phrase for a sale. Since then, no obvious buyers have emerged, at least publicly. Several analysts anticipate that the company will be broken up into several pieces. In calculating the value of BlackBerry’s assets, the most pessimistic of those analysts have declared its phone handset business to be worthless, suggesting that it may disappear from the market. After once controlling more than half of North America’s smartphone market, Gartner now estimates BlackBerry’s share at 3.4 percent.

It is not apparent that a new top of the line model will be sufficient to turn around BlackBerry 10, which has met largely with indifference from consumers in important markets like the United States. While there has been some criticism of the companies latest phones, they have generally received favorable reviews. But BlackBerry’s relatively late delivery of the new operating system means that many popular software apps, including Google Maps and Instagram, are not easily available on the devices.

Technically minded users can download apps created for Google’s popular Android operating system on the new BlackBerrys, but the process is arcane and difficult compared with using Google’s or Apple’s app stores.

The new phone, which also features stereo speakers and the ability to analyze users’ patterns and prioritize messages, appears to be more incremental than revolutionary. It is expected to go on sale in the North American market by the end of the year, timing which will put it in competition with other new handsets from several companies including two new iPhones from Apple.

Google and Former Genentech Chief Announce New Biotech Company

Silicon Valley luminaries are joining to start a new biotechnology company, Calico, that will focus on aging and the health of elderly people.

Arthur D. Levinson, 63, a former chief executive of Genentech and the chairman of Apple, is the chief executive and a founding investor. Google is also a major investor, and Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, announced the formation of the company Wednesday.

Mr. Levinson, who used to be on the board of Google, said that Mr. Page and Bill Maris, the managing partner of Google Ventures, approached him about starting a new company to investigate the links between aging and disease.

Immortality has long been an obsession of many in Silicon Valley, including Google’s founders, who are involved in Singularity University, part of the belief system that humans and machines will at some point merge, making old age and death meaningless.

Calico stands for California Life Company. “But if you’re thinking about cats, we like the old saying that they have nine lives,” Mr. Levinson wrote in a post on the social network Google Plus, which he appears to have joined for the sake of announcing the company.

“Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness,” Mr. Page wrote in his own Google Plus post. “These issues affect us all â€" from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families.”

Mr. Page placed Calico in the context of Google projects like driverless cars and Internet-connected glasses â€" ideas that Google refers to as “moonshots” that stray from its core business of search and advertising. Though Google assures wary shareholders that these projects are small compared with the core business, the company often says it will continue to invest in long-term, long-shot ideas.

“So you’re probably thinking wow! That’s a lot different from what Google does today,” he wrote in the post. He added, “Don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses.”

Google has invested in a variety of life sciences companies, and Google’s founders have invested in other health-related initiatives. Sergey Brin, who founded Google with Mr. Page, financed research on Parkinson’s disease after discovering that he had a genetic mutation that raised his risk for the disease. And Mr. Page financed research on vocal cord problems, which have affected his voice.

Outsource Your Memory, With an App

Like GPS units, alarm clocks and watches, scrapbooks are largely things of the past, relics of an era before the smartphone. Mementos we once might have pasted in a scrapbook are now largely stored on our phones and scattered between apps like Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter.

Beginning Wednesday, a new start-up called Memoir wants to take the place of that scrapbook on your iPhone.

“More of our lives is being automatically recorded,” said Lee Hoffman, one of the company’s founders. “But it goes into a box and you never look at it.”

The box Mr. Hoffman is referring to is a smartphone, which often has hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs of friends, events, parties, particularly memorable meals or outings, plus data about where the photos were taken. That box also has a calendar and data from services like Foursquare and contacts, meaning it also has the potential to start assembling a smart scrapbook of a person’s life.

Mr. Hoffman said that Memoir was a “major step towards augmenting memory,” and providing a better way to store and organize the photographs, notes and events stored on a smartphone to be remembered. The application will also automatically remind people of past events by showing them photos and remind them what they did a year ago.

There are already a number of companies working in the same area, including Timehop. But Mr. Hoffman said Memoir would try to distinguish itself by offering users a search function that lets people find all the photos â€" or memories â€" from a particular year, city or with a particular friend. The app connects the dots between photos saved on your camera roll from a big party and the event on your calendar, so that when you search for “Katie’s Wedding,” it should be able to find the correlating photographs, even though you didn’t store them or tag them that way.

Memoir can also let you wirelessly share photos with your friends who are also using the application, so you can round out your memories of shared experiences.

The company has raised $1.2 million to work on Memoir, from venture capitalists including Betaworks, Thrive and SV Angel. (The New York Times Company is an investor in Betaworks.) The application is free for now, but Mr. Hoffman says the company eventually plans to introduce premium features like high-definition videos to make money.

Eventually, Mr. Hoffman said, the hope is that Memoir will work with hardware like Google Glass and be able to use that data and video footage to help people relive their favorite memories, their first dates and a best friend’s wedding or a cross-country trip â€" not unlike gathering in the living room to watch a slide show of a trip to the Grand Canyon.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Modern Warfare, and What Facebook Ads Say About You

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With Help, Teradata Speeds Up

Teradata, the venerable data analytics company, is about to offer capabilities in data analysis that seem to be fast, powerful, versatile and accessible. It is a somewhat cobbled-together approach, involving other companies, but it is a start.

It could be a big deal, because this is not a combination seen previously from the analysis offerings of the biggest companies. There is a lot of expectation and hype around the analytic and predictive potentials of Big Data, but in general it remains hard to work with. When an idea does seems promising, either from smaller start-ups or new initiatives formed by big companies, products have not come out. When they do, it is not clear how quickly they will be accepted by customers.

Teradata is among the largest businesses in data analytics, with a big customer base. This new product, part of its latest release, has a fast kind of so-called in-memory processing, and uses a library of over 1,000 types of different analytic tools. It is used in conjunction with an open source analytic language, R, that is popular with many researchers, academics and analysts.

“There are no size limitations here,” said Chris Twogood, the company’s vice president of products and services marketing. “We have e-commerce customers generating 50 billion items a day who are using this. A manufacturer of silicon wafers is looking at 100,000 different versions of design.” For lots of data, he said, the product also can use disk memory, which is somewhat slower.

In this move to serve what Mr. Twogood called “mere mortals” in the business world, however, Teradata did need some help. The R analytics it is using come from another company, Revolution Analytics. Customers of Teradata that want to use the service will have to subscribe to Revolution separately. In addition, 600 of the 1,000 tools in Teradata’s analysis library come from a third company, Fuzzy Logix.

In-memory computing is already done by SAP and Oracle, among others, but Mr. Twogood said the Teradata system would prove more efficient by allocating data by how frequently it is used for problem solving.

The analysis tool, a part of Teradata’s 14.1 product release, also shows a change in what customers want from Teradata’s products, he said.

“The world is going to more predictive analysis,” he said. “It has been about report generation, now predictive is more pervasive. It is a change from known quantities to unknowns - what question is the data showing we should ask.”

Daily Report: Rentbro, Sender of 42 Million Texts, Settles in Spam Case

The Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday that it had settled charges against a Florida company and its two top executives for sending more than 42 million unwanted and deceptive text messages to consumers, Edward Wyatt reports.

Messages sent by the company had promised free gift cards worth up to $1,000, the commission said, but when consumers tried to visit a Web site to collect the prize, they were instead connected to a site that asked for personal information, like Social Security numbers and credit card numbers. It also required them to pay for additional services to receive a gift card.

The company, Rentbro, and its principals, Daniel Pessin and Jacob Engel, both of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., were required to turn over remaining assets and to repay up to $377,321, the amount the business had collected.

The settlement came as part of a sweeping crackdown on text message fraud that the commission announced in March. The agency filed eight cases in February and March against 29 companies and individuals around the country, accusing them of sending text messages with fake offers.

Those companies sent more than 180 million spam text messages, which typically offered gift cards to national chain stores like Best Buy and Walmart.

C. Steven Baker, director of the commission’s Midwest region, said that since the agency had filed the cases, it had received many fewer complaints about such offers.

Review Roundup: The iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C

A small number of technology journalists have had their hands on Apple’s new iPhones for about a week. And this time they had two phones to evaluate instead of one.

The consensus among reviewers was generally very positive. They agreed that even though the fancier phone, the iPhone 5S, looks almost exactly the same as its predecessor, it’s the insides that count: a smarter computing chip and a new button with a fingerprint scanner. They also liked the iPhone 5C, even though it is essentially an older iPhone repackaged in colorful plastic.

Following is a quick roundup of what some prominent technology writers had to say.

Walt Mossberg of AllThingsD called the iPhone 5S the best smartphone on the market. But he said it was a better upgrade for those who have an older iPhone, like the iPhone 4S, not last year’s iPhone 5:

I like it and can recommend it for anyone looking for a premium, advanced smartphone. If you are an iPhone fan with any model older than the iPhone 5, the new 5s will be a big step up. If you own an iPhone 5, there’s less of a case for upgrading, unless you want the fingerprint reader and improved camera. You can get the new OS free of charge.

Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech was impressed with the upgrades inside the iPhone 5S: the faster processor, improved camera and the fingerprint sensor for security:

As with all other S-upgrades, the biggest changes to the iPhone 5s are beneath the aluminum and glass exterior. The 5s’ flagship feature? Apple’s new A7 SoC. The A7 is the world’s first 64-bit smartphone SoC, and the first 64-bit mobile SoC shipping in a product (Intel’s Bay Trail is 64-bit but it won’t ship as such, and has yet to ship regardless).

Rich Jaroslovsky of Bloomberg News was jaded. He said that most of the improvements in the iPhone 5S were minor, and that the iPhone 5C was nothing to be excited about:

There’s nothing wrong with either phone. But there’s not much that’s pulse-quickening about them either.

Lauren Goode of AllThingsD said the cheaper iPhone 5C was a solid phone that is better than the older iPhone 5:

While the 5C looks and feels very familiar, it’s still a good phone and an improvement over the 5. But its improvements are evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Alex Kidman of ABC questioned who would buy an iPhone 5C when the iPhone 5S is so much better:

So who’s going to buy it? I’m honestly not sure outside of the heavy fashion crowd who, for one reason or another might just want color and not actual features.

David Pogue of The New York Times said both the iPhone 5S and 5C were great phones. And he said that even though the iPhone 5C is not all that innovative, it will probably still be a big seller:

It’s a terrific phone. The price is right. It will sell like hot cakes; the new iPhones go on sale Friday. But just sheathing last year’s phone in shiny plastic isn’t a stunning advance.