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Two Narratives to Explain Unrest in One Bahraini Village

Video posted online by opposition activists in Bahrain, said to show that a village near the capital is under siege by the security forces.

A village southeast of Bahrain's capital surrounded by checkpoints has become a focus of the ongoing struggle between the government and opposition activists. In the village of Eker, activists say students are being kept from school, closing shops and roads are blocked.

The government calls the security measures necessary following an attack last week in which, the authorities say, a police officer was killed and another injured. According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, security forces are imposing a curfew on the village and the cordon is making it difficult to get ambulances, medical supplies and food through.

Both sides have turned to social media to document what they say is the reality of a situation being grossly distorted by their opponents.

On Monday, when more than 200 protesters tried to break through the security cordon, the security forces fired tear gas, according to an Associated Press photographer and Said Yousif al-Muhafdah of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.

Opposition activists shared photographs and video online, showing what they said were heavy-handed tactics employed by the security forces against a group of women who had attempted to bring food and medicine into the village.

Video posted online Monday by opposition activists in Bahrain, showing women being chased by the security forces near a village outside the capital.

What exactly took place last week in Eker remains a subject of contention between supporters of the government and opposition activists, with each side wary of accepting the version of events put forward by their political opponents in the divided kingdom.

According to a government statement, on Friday at 1 a.m., a 19-year-old police officer, Imran Ahmed, was killed in an attack during a routine patrol in Eker. A second police officer was critically wounded. Seven people were arrested in connection with the attack, which was described as a bombing in the government statement.

The state information ministry released video with its statement, showing what it described as Eker in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

A video report from Bahrain's state news agency showed the aftermath of what was described as an attack on police officers early on Friday.

On Saturday, the government said the police put up checkpoints to search for suspects. “There has been no attempt to stop people from going about their business, attending work or school, shopping for supplies or seeking medical treatment, as exaggerated reports on social media suggest,” a government spokesman said.

Activists have described the security measures as a siege and suggested that the government's shifting accounts of the nature of the attack cast doubt on the official version of events.

Bahrain's information ministry, which has frequently cast the crackdown on demonstrations as necessary to maintain an orderly flow of traffic in the kingdom, also posted video online showing cars and trucks passing through the checkpoints on Sunday.

Video posted online by Bahrain's information ministry to document traffic flow through checkpoints around Eker.

Three activists were briefly detained on Sunday when they tried to enter the village. The participants in the small protest march taken into custody included Mr. Muhafdah, the rights activist, and Zainab al-Khawaja, whose father Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was jailed last year for his role in the protest movement.

After their release, opposition activists countered government accounts of the standoff by pointing to photographs and video they posted online of the three protesters walking beside the road, out of the way of traffic, before their arrest.

As The Lede has reported previously, Ms. Khawaj a, who charts the protest movement in Bahrain on her popular @AngryArabiya Twitter feed, has been detained on several occasions since the uprising began, for protesting her father's detention and the continued rule of the country's monarchy. Last December, when she was dragged from a traffic circle in the capital, Manama, video of her arrest seemed to show her being punched by a police officer.

Last week, Ms. Khawaja called in video posted online for protesters to tear up pictures of Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

Video of protesters in Bahrain tearing up pictures of the country's king.

Although opposition activists are getting their messages out of Bahrain through the Web, the standoff is a reminder, on the eve of a presidential debate in the United States, of uncomfortable questions about American support for Bahrain's monarchy in a region where entrenched autocracies are under threat from popular uprisings.

As our colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an analysis of the Arab uprisings and the U.S. election, “Neither candidate has fully squared the potential conflicts of American values and interests, a problem most acute in the case of Bahrain. Its Sunni Muslim monarch used brutal force to crush a democracy movement among the Shiite majority, but the island kingdom is also home to the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet and a crucial bulwark against Iranian influence.”

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



The Internet Attack That Wasn\'t

For an hour this afternoon, the entire Internet came under attack. Or so it seemed.

Brian Krebs, a closely followed computer security blogger, reported on Twitter that he had received a tip that the servers that power the entire Internet were under attack. The well-regarded Mr. Krebs linked to an Internet Traffic Report that said nine out of 13 Doman Name System servers had been disabled in the largest denial of service ever reported - topping a 1997 incident in which a technical glitch disabled seven DNS root servers.

“At 1:45pm for about one hour an extremely large distributed denial-of-server (DDoS) attack took place. The target of the attack were the 13 DNS root servers, which are responsible for helping to resolving domain names to their respective IP's. Even though 9 of the 13 servers were disabled in the attack, the remaining were able to support the additional load without any widespead problems. Prior to this attack, the largest outage for the root registry was 7 machines in July of 1997, due to a technical problem.”

An attack on the Domain Name System would be devastating. The system converts people-friendly domain names like yahoo.com into the numeric addresses that computers use to route traffic. By attacking the root servers that power the system, attackers would crash the Internet's switchboard, making it impossible for people to reach Web sites.

Anonymous, the loose hacking collective, threatened to take down the DNS root servers in March - an effort that was unsuccessful but that prompted a multimillion-dollar global effort to beef up the DNS system, given the potential for devastation.

But this afternoon's report was a false alarm. And the unusual traffic directed at the DNS root servers was actually the Internet's version of a fire drill. The Internet Traffic Report Mr. Krebs linked to was actually from 2002.

According to people who work closely with the DNS system, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak, those who defend the Domain Name System underwent an exercise this week to simulate a denial of service attack on its root servers. The simulation was part of a regular exercise conducted every six months, to make sure the system can withstand large amounts of traffic in the event of attack.

The exercise was timed a little more than one week after Leon E. Panetta, the defense secretary, warned that the United States was vulnerable to “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” with foreign hackers determined to attack the nation's critical infrastructure, like its water supply and power plants.

As for Mr. Krebs, he later Tweeted that people should disregard his earlier message. “Some days I just want to unplug and play Halo,” Mr. Krebs wrote. “This is one of those days.”



Amazon Cloud Service Goes Down and Takes Some Popular Web Sites With It

Amazon's data centers in Northern Virginia crashed Monday afternoon, taking with it a number of popular Web sites, from Someecards, the quirky e-card company, to mobile applications like Flipboard and Foursquare.

Amazon reported having problems with the data centers in Northern Virginia. Those problems appear to have had a ripple effect across the Internet with several sites hosted on Amazon's popular EC2 cloud hosting service also reporting problems.

Several frustrated customers took to Twitter Monday to complain that they could not get access to Web sites including Foursquare, turntable.fm and Flipboard. It appears that some of the affected services then affected services that, in turn, ran on them. Because they are all hosted on Amazon's cloud service, there is a ripple effect. They all go down when the original hosting servers go down.

Last June, an electrical storm caused problems at the same Northern Virginia data centers and took down sites includ ing Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram for a weekend.

The companies that were affected by the latest shutdown were scrambling to respond.

“Like many other services, we've been taken down by the outage,” said Erin Gleason, a spokeswoman for Foursquare, the mobile check-in service. “Both the site and the app are inaccessible right now.”

Ms. Gleason said the company was still awaiting guidance and updates from Amazon about when its service might be restored.

“Hoping to get things back up and running ASAP,” she said.

Amazon has not yet responded to requests for comment. A status message on Amazon's Web site that pertains to the company's cluster of cloud computing services in Virginia, also known as Elastic Cloud Computing, or EC2, stated that they were “currently experiencing degraded performance.”



TimesCast Media + Tech: Twitter\'s Content Ban

Twitter blocks content in Europe. Getting to know Windows 8. Deb Roy and the future of social TV analytics.

French Music Service Takes On the World, Skipping America

French Music Streaming Service Is Taking On the World, but Omitting America

PARIS - Most of the biggest Internet companies got their start in the United States or expanded there quickly. One of the most successful European start-ups, on the other hand, hopes to turn itself into a global powerhouse by ignoring America.

Axel Dauchez, the chief executive of Deezer, near a decorative sign reading “Paint it black” at the company's Paris headquarters.

The company, Deezer, is one of the biggest players in digital music streaming, trailing only the market leader, Spotify, in the number of paying customers it has attracted globally. Like Spotify, which is based in London, Deezer, with headquarters in Paris, offers subscribers unlimited access to millions of songs on demand, via PCs, mobile phones and other devices.

Deezer just got a big endorsement for its approach. Access Industries, the owner of Warner Music Group, pumped 100 million euros, or about $130 million, into Deezer this month, in what analysts described as one of the biggest investments ever in a French start-up.

“This shows that they think the music market is beginning to turn around,” Axel Dauchez, chief executive of Deezer, said in an interview.

Deezer, which started in 2007, has just moved into a slick new headquarters, where employees conduct business meetings on lawn chairs and on sofas disguised as musical keyboards. “Paint it black,” reads a neon sign on the somber-toned wall behind Mr. Dauchez. Like the Rolling Stones, Deezer is on a mission to blot out the color red - in this case, from the ailing music industry's ledgers.

After a battle with piracy that has cut its sales in half in just over a decade, the music industry has high hopes for streaming, which is growing faster than digital purchases, as many listeners decide that ownership makes less sense than in the days of plastic and vinyl.

While Deezer and Spotify are still losing money, their sales are growing rapidly. Deezer generated about 50 million euros in revenue last year, and Mr. Dauchez has set a goal of 1 billion euros in sales in 2016.

With more than two million paying customers, Deezer trails Spotify, which has more than four million. Spotify introduced an American version last year, and it has been growing quickly. But Deezer has turned its back on the United States and plans to use its new money to finance an expansion into more than 160 other countries.

“Like a canny general who decides to march around a heavily fortified stronghold and thus effectively leave it stranded behind enemy lines, so Deezer expects the streaming war to be waged on different shores,” Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst, wrote on his Web site. “They are both right and wrong.”

Analysts say Deezer is right to worry about competition in the United States, where Spotify competes with services like Rhapsody, Pandora and Rdio, even though their business models all vary slightly.

Mr. Mulligan says there is room for growth in the United States, because premium streaming services remain too expensive for most consumers. But the field is less crowded outside the United States, where Spotify is the clear leader in streaming in many of the markets it has entered - except France, where Deezer reigns.

Spotify, too, is planning for the battles ahead. Several people briefed on the company's plans said it had begun a new round of fund-raising, seeking to secure several hundred million dollars in new investment.

New financing is essential for Deezer and Spotify because they are burning through significant amounts of cash. To attract new listeners, both companies offer free versions of their services, subject to certain restrictions. Yet both companies must pay a royalty to a recording company every time someone listens to one of their tracks.

While streaming services sell advertising to cover some of the costs of free listening, Mr. Dauchez said raising revenue in this way had proved to be more challenging than expected. So Deezer now sees its free service primarily as a way to entice listeners into paying for its premium offerings, which include things like unlimited streaming and special content and recommendations, along with no ads.

This makes expanding into new markets expensive. While Deezer says it was profitable last year, it expects to lose money until 2014 as it enters new markets. The company set up sites in several other European countries in 2011 and accelerated its global expansion this month.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 22, 2012, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: French Music Streaming Service Is Taking On the World, but Omitting America.

Disney Struggles to Find Its Digital Footing

Disney, Struggling to Find Its Digital Footing, Overhauls Disney.com

LOS ANGELES - Trying to finally master the Internet the way it has theme parks or animated films, the Walt Disney Company has redesigned its Web site, Disney.com, for the third time in five years.

The Web series “Talking Friends,” based on mobile apps.

The new site, introduced this month and promoted as “cleaner, simpler, more elegant,” is one way Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, hopes to turn around the company's gaming, mobile and Internet division after 15 consecutive quarters of losses - some $977 million in total.

Mr. Iger is optimistic about new products, which include an ambitious and unannounced gaming initiative code-named Toy Box. He has promised that Disney Interactive will turn a profit sometime next year. “It's about time,” he told analysts in May, sounding a bit fed up himself.

But questions abound. Disney has now taken several stabs at creating a thriving Web site, and has vacillated on game strategy. Has the entertainment giant finally solved the riddle of new media? Or is it playing a no-win game on the whiplash-fast Web?

Furthermore, why has the deep-pocketed Disney taken this much time to figure it out?

“We've been waiting for years and years and years,” said Jessica Reif Cohen, a senior analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “For traditional media companies, this really does seem like a totally different skill set.”

Figuring out the Internet is critical for all media companies, but Disney's future in particular depends on a winning strategy. The children it hopes to turn into lifelong consumers of its products are increasingly living online. Disney Channel used to be the company's most important welcome mat. Now executives refer to Disney.com as the “front door.”

The interactive division's losses are small for a company that last year recorded $4.8 billion in profit on $40.9 billion in revenue. Ms. Cohen noted that new media is “not a primary driver” of Disney shares, which have climbed 57 percent over the last year, to about $51.90. But at some point those losses threaten to besmirch an otherwise stellar record for Mr. Iger, who has said he will step down as chief executive in 2015.

“I don't think he's going to want any black marks,” Ms. Cohen said.

Almost every major media company has had a difficult tangle with the Web or gaming. Time Warner and AOL. News Corporation and MySpace. Viacom and the Rock Band game maker, Harmonix.

Disney is no different. In 2001, under Mr. Iger's predecessor, the company took $878 million in charges to close its Go.com portal.

But recently, Disney has had more technology brainpower than most. Steve Jobs sat on its board from 2006 until his death last year. Current board members include John S. Chen, chief executive of the software developer Sybase, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. Mr. Iger himself is a strong technology advocate, pushing for the company's ABC network to become the first channel to offer its shows on iTunes, for instance.

That Disney has nonetheless struggled underscores how difficult it is for traditional media companies to compete in this arena. Challenges include the pool of available talent. If you are a prominent technology executive, or a creative young designer, you are more likely to join Google or found a start-up, not toil deep inside a media conglomerate.

Disney and its cohorts also resemble aircraft carriers trying to compete with speedboats. Smaller gaming companies can quickly change course as technology preferences change (although upstarts like Zynga have not succeeded at that lately). But the lumbering likes of Disney move slower.

Consider Epic Mickey, a 2010 video game that depicted a rough-and-tumble version of Mickey Mouse. Disney spent six years developing the idea, which required approval from a number of executives because it involved tweaking a sacred character. Disney managers then limited its release to the Nintendo Wii console, whose popularity had slumped by the time the game reached stores. Disney also missed that year's Thanksgiving retail season.

Disney also bet heavily on console-based games - operating six development studios - but consumers abruptly moved to mobile gaming. Disney was not positioned to swiftly follow and had to buy its way in, spending what analysts considered a large sum, $563 million, for the social gaming company Playdom in 2010.

As for Disney.com, it must serve an array of products: 13 theme parks, games, children's books, TV, movies, music, Broadway and online worlds like Club Penguin. (ESPN and ABC's digital businesses, both considered innovative and successful, are handled by separate divisions.) Disney.com must cater to a broad audience, including toddlers interested in Winnie the Pooh and mothers booking theme park vacations.

Leading Disney Interactive's latest quest for profitability are James Pitaro, a former Yahoo executive, and John Pleasants, Playdom's former chief executive. Named co-presidents in 2010, they quickly cut costs through a series of layoffs and have shut down three of Disney's console game studios. Going forward, their profitability strategy turns on multiple fronts.

Disney Online, which also includes subsidiaries like the parenting site Babble.com, attracts about 33 million monthly unique visitors, according to comScore. Mr. Pitaro's vision for those sites centers on entertainment. “We can't expect to grow Disney.com in reach and engagement if we're just focused on marketing,” Mr. Pitaro said.

The redesigned Web site still provides advertising support for Disney products, but the sell is much softer and relies heavily on exclusive videos - backstage at Disney's Broadway musical “Newsies,” for instance, or Re-Micks, a video series where classic Disney cartoons are remixed to current dance music. The site's overhaul is only in its first stages. Plans call for adding a movie streaming service.

Mr. Pitaro has also reversed Disney's go-it-alone Web strategy. He has sharply bolstered its presence on YouTube, spending up to $15 million to make original Web series. One of them, based on Outfit7's Talking Friends apps, has generated over 102 million views in only a few months. Disney now operates more than 60 YouTube channels.

“We have to take our content to our guests wherever they are,” Mr. Pitaro said.

 Mr. Pitaro and Mr. Pleasants are working to build character franchises that can spread across Disney's empire, a priority for Mr. Iger. There is promise in Swampy, an alligator who stars in Disney's mobile game “Where's My Water?” The hit game - 100 million downloads and counting - has spawned a modest toy line and been added to Typhoon Lagoon, a Walt Disney World water park. Disney Channel will run a Swampy short series next month.

Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two arrives on Nov. 18 - before Thanksgiving and playable on every available game platform - while Club Penguin, a virtual world where children groom virtual arctic fowl, is set to fully expand onto mobile devices after a long delay. “It's an important ingredient to profitability,” Mr. Pleasants said of Club Penguin.

Mr. Pleasants is also pouring money into a project Disney refers to as Toy Box, a console game with extensive mobile and online applications in which various Pixar and Disney characters will interact with one another for the first time. “I'm excited about what we've already done and where we're going,” he said, adding that Disney has had three No. 1 apps in the last six months.

But every time Disney appears on the verge of making true strides in digital media, it seems to stumble. Last week, a major executive resigned: Lane Merrifield, the founder of Club Penguin, will join an education-focused start-up after clashing with Mr. Pleasants in operating philosophy and personality.

Mr. Pleasants said he is proud of the intensity he has brought to his division. When his contract expires in 2014, he said “it would be an honor to be asked to stay.”

“We have a long way to go,” he said, “but we have a plan and just need to execute it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 21, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated Lane Merrifield's role at Disney. Mr. Merrifield, the founder of Club Penguin, was not one of the executives leading the Toy Box initiative at Disney.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 22, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Disney's Digital Struggle.

Daily Report: Windows Makeover May Cause Head-Scratching

Microsoft Windows, which has more than a billion users around the world, is getting a radical makeover, a rare move for a product with such vast reach, Nick Wingfield reports in The New York Times. The new design is likely to cause some head-scratching for those who buy the latest machines when Windows 8 goes on sale this Friday.

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

To Microsoft and early fans of Windows 8, the software is a fresh, bold reinvention of the operating system for an era of touch-screen devices like the iPad, which are reshaping computing. Microsoft needs the software to succeed so it can restore some of its fading relevance after years of watching the likes of Apple and Google outflank it in the mobile market.

To its detractors, though, Windows 8 is a renovation gone wrong, one that will needlessly force people t o relearn how to use a device every bit as common as a microwave oven.

“I don't think any user was asking for that,” said John Ludwig, a former Microsoft executive who worked on Windows and is now a venture capitalist in the Seattle area. “They just want the current user interface, but better.”

Little about the new Windows will look familiar to those who have used older versions. The Start screen, a kind of main menu, is dominated by a colorful grid of rectangles and squares that users can tap with a finger or click with a mouse to start applications. Many of these so-called live tiles constantly flicker with new information piped in from the Internet, like news headlines and Facebook photos. What is harder to find are many of the conventions that have been a part of PCs since most people began using them, like the strip of icons at the bottom of the screen for jumping between applications.

The Times asked five people to come in and try Windows 8 fo r the first time. Watch the video to see what they thought.



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