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Thursday, February 14, 2013

Teenager Killed as Bahrain Marks Protest Anniversary

Video posted on YouTube by activists in Bahrain showed a man confronting riot police officers after a young protester was shot and killed in the village of Al Daih on Thursday.

A Bahraini teenager was shot and killed during clashes with the kingdom’s security forces on Thursday, as protesters marked the second anniversary of the start of their movement calling for reforms on the Arab island.

Both rights activists and the interior ministry reported the young man’s death in the village of Al Daih, outside Manama, the capital. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights posted an image of a death certificate online that said Hussein Ali Ahmed, 16, was killed at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday by gunshot.

Death certificate of Hussain Ali (16) shot dead with police gunshot this morning from a very close range http://t.co/n9sha1JV #bahrain

â€" Bahrain Human Rights (@BahrainRights) 14 Feb 13

The rights group also added the young man’s name to a list of 88 fatalities since the protest movement began two year ago. According to the center, whose founder and current president have both been jailed for their part in the protest movement, 88 people have died since Feb. 14, 2011, including three police officers.

After the young man was shot, local activists uploaded graphic video and distressing photographs of the frantic attempts to save his life, despite a gaping wound in his chest.

One image posted online later was said to show the dead boy’s blood on a man’s shirt.

In another, a woman pushed a shopping cart filled with spent tear gas canisters fired at protesters during the clashes in the village.

Maj. Gen. Tariq Hassan Al Hassan, Bahrain’s chief of public securit! y, acknow! ledged the death of a “rioter” in a statement that blamed protesters for “several incidents of violent attacks on police officers, attacks on citizens, destruction of property and blocking of roads.”

The police chief’s statement also defended the actions of his officers as necessary since the presence of protesters on the roads of the kingdom impeded the flow of traffic.

Police responded to restore order and clear roads. Traffic flowed freely in the vast majority of areas throughout the day.

When necessary, the police employed proportionate force to disperse violent crowds. Most incidents involved small groups of rioters who were quickly dispersed before they could amass into larger groups. During some of these dispersals, several police officers were injured. Some were injured severely and required hospital care.

The most violent group amassed at around 8 a.m. in the village of Daih, where 300 rioters assembled to attack police, who were deployed in the area, with rocks, steel rods and Molotov cocktails. Warning shots were fired but failed to disperse the advancing crowd who continued their attack. Officers! discharg! ed birdshot to defend themselves. At least one rioter was injured in the process. A short time later, a young man was pronounced dead at Salmaniya Medical Center.

The statement said that the death would be investigated and conveyed the police chief’s condolences to the family, while adding that he had “advised young men to avoid taking part in violent street activities and riots,” the day before.

International human rights groups have criticized Bahrain’s use of force in its crackdown on dissent.

Ahmed Al-haddad, who handles international relations for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, posted an image on Twitter of what he said was an Italian-made shotgun used by the security forces to fire at demonstrators.

Thirteen of the country’s most prominent dissidents remain in jail after being convicted by a military tribunal of trying to overthrow the government. As our colleague Kareem Fahim reported last month, a court upheld their sentences of between five years and life in prison for their leadership roles in the protest movement.

The protests and clashes before and after the fatal shooting in Al Daih were extensively documented in photographs and video posted online by activist bloggers. In several photographs, protesters could be seen holding u! p camerap! hones as they marched.

Mazen Mahdi, a Bahraini photojournalist, wrote on Twitter that he and other photographers were briefly detained while covering the protests.

Video posted online by activists later on Thursday showed the street fighting between rock-throwing protesters and officers who fired tear gas, shotgun pellets and stun grenades. Another raw clip shwed a tense confrontation after the fatal shooting between an emotional man and riot police officers.

Activists posted more video online late Thursday that appeared to show the protesters regrouped on the streets after dark and chanted, “The People Want to Topple the Regime!”

Video posted online! by activ! ists in Bahrain appeared to show protesters on the streets of Al Daih on Thursday night.

Clashes south of the capital, in Sitra and Nuwaidrat, were also documented on video by activists calling themselves the Media Center for the Revolution in Bahrain (who add titles to their clips and what seems to be introductory music copied from videos posted online by The Associated Press).

In the video from Sitra, a police vehicle appeared to catch fire after protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at it.

The group’s footage of a clash in Nuwaidrat showed small numbers of protesters and the security forces facing off across flaming barricades

The monarchy’s police force continued its aggressive use of social media to combat perceptions that its use of violence in response to protests is disproportionate. The official interior ministry Twitter feed on Thursday featured two video clip uploaded to a police YouTube account on Thursday of “thugs” hurling Molotov cocktails at officers. One of the clips was recorded last week, the police said, the second was undated.

Video of thugs hurling Molotov cocktails in Bani Jamra (recorded by thugs) http://t.co/CoXLOxuX …

â€" Ministry of Interior (@moi_bahrain) 14 Feb 13

The police did not explain why these previously recorded video clips were not posted on YouTube until the day of the protest movement’s anniversary and did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Lede.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Teenager Killed as Bahrain Marks Protest Anniversary

Video posted on YouTube by activists in Bahrain showed a man confronting riot police officers after a young protester was shot and killed in the village of Al Daih on Thursday.

A Bahraini teenager was shot and killed during clashes with the kingdom’s security forces on Thursday, as protesters marked the second anniversary of the start of their movement calling for reforms on the Arab island.

Both rights activists and the interior ministry reported the young man’s death in the village of Al Daih, outside Manama, the capital. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights posted an image of a death certificate online that said Hussein Ali Ahmed, 16, was killed at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday by gunshot.

Death certificate of Hussain Ali (16) shot dead with police gunshot this morning from a very close range http://t.co/n9sha1JV #bahrain

â€" Bahrain Human Rights (@BahrainRights) 14 Feb 13

The rights group also added the young man’s name to a list of 88 fatalities since the protest movement began two year ago. According to the center, whose founder and current president have both been jailed for their part in the protest movement, 88 people have died since Feb. 14, 2011, including three police officers.

After the young man was shot, local activists uploaded graphic video and distressing photographs of the frantic attempts to save his life, despite a gaping wound in his chest.

One image posted online later was said to show the dead boy’s blood on a man’s shirt.

In another, a woman pushed a shopping cart filled with spent tear gas canisters fired at protesters during the clashes in the village.

Maj. Gen. Tariq Hassan Al Hassan, Bahrain’s chief of public securit! y, acknow! ledged the death of a “rioter” in a statement that blamed protesters for “several incidents of violent attacks on police officers, attacks on citizens, destruction of property and blocking of roads.”

The police chief’s statement also defended the actions of his officers as necessary since the presence of protesters on the roads of the kingdom impeded the flow of traffic.

Police responded to restore order and clear roads. Traffic flowed freely in the vast majority of areas throughout the day.

When necessary, the police employed proportionate force to disperse violent crowds. Most incidents involved small groups of rioters who were quickly dispersed before they could amass into larger groups. During some of these dispersals, several police officers were injured. Some were injured severely and required hospital care.

The most violent group amassed at around 8 a.m. in the village of Daih, where 300 rioters assembled to attack police, who were deployed in the area, with rocks, steel rods and Molotov cocktails. Warning shots were fired but failed to disperse the advancing crowd who continued their attack. Officers! discharg! ed birdshot to defend themselves. At least one rioter was injured in the process. A short time later, a young man was pronounced dead at Salmaniya Medical Center.

The statement said that the death would be investigated and conveyed the police chief’s condolences to the family, while adding that he had “advised young men to avoid taking part in violent street activities and riots,” the day before.

International human rights groups have criticized Bahrain’s use of force in its crackdown on dissent.

Ahmed Al-haddad, who handles international relations for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, posted an image on Twitter of what he said was an Italian-made shotgun used by the security forces to fire at demonstrators.

Thirteen of the country’s most prominent dissidents remain in jail after being convicted by a military tribunal of trying to overthrow the government. As our colleague Kareem Fahim reported last month, a court upheld their sentences of between five years and life in prison for their leadership roles in the protest movement.

The protests and clashes before and after the fatal shooting in Al Daih were extensively documented in photographs and video posted online by activist bloggers. In several photographs, protesters could be seen holding u! p camerap! hones as they marched.

Mazen Mahdi, a Bahraini photojournalist, wrote on Twitter that he and other photographers were briefly detained while covering the protests.

Video posted online by activists later on Thursday showed the street fighting between rock-throwing protesters and officers who fired tear gas, shotgun pellets and stun grenades. Another raw clip shwed a tense confrontation after the fatal shooting between an emotional man and riot police officers.

Activists posted more video online late Thursday that appeared to show the protesters regrouped on the streets after dark and chanted, “The People Want to Topple the Regime!”

Video posted online! by activ! ists in Bahrain appeared to show protesters on the streets of Al Daih on Thursday night.

Clashes south of the capital, in Sitra and Nuwaidrat, were also documented on video by activists calling themselves the Media Center for the Revolution in Bahrain (who add titles to their clips and what seems to be introductory music copied from videos posted online by The Associated Press).

In the video from Sitra, a police vehicle appeared to catch fire after protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at it.

The group’s footage of a clash in Nuwaidrat showed small numbers of protesters and the security forces facing off across flaming barricades

The monarchy’s police force continued its aggressive use of social media to combat perceptions that its use of violence in response to protests is disproportionate. The official interior ministry Twitter feed on Thursday featured two video clip uploaded to a police YouTube account on Thursday of “thugs” hurling Molotov cocktails at officers. One of the clips was recorded last week, the police said, the second was undated.

Video of thugs hurling Molotov cocktails in Bani Jamra (recorded by thugs) http://t.co/CoXLOxuX …

â€" Ministry of Interior (@moi_bahrain) 14 Feb 13

The police did not explain why these previously recorded video clips were not posted on YouTube until the day of the protest movement’s anniversary and did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Lede.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Updates on the Disabled Carnival Cruise Ship

Land â€" and with it, the prospect of warm showers, hot food and working toilets â€" is within sight but still, agonizingly, so far away for the more than 4,000 people who are stranded aboard the Carnival Cruise Line ship Triumph off the Alabama coast.

When a problem with a winch on a tugboat connected to the cruise ship further delayed the journey on Thursday afternoon, Alexa Benedetti, 32, a passenger on board the ship, said it was like a punch in the gut.

“Literally, people are crying,” she said.

Coast guard officials say a new tugboat has been secured, and the Carnival Triumph is again making its way into Mobile, Ala. It is expected to arrive late Thursday night.

As the ship inches closer to land, passengers have been posting photos, sending text messages and sending some video of the scene.

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How Lightning Tightens Apple\'s Control Over Accessories

When the iPhone 5 was released in September with the new Lightning connection port, all those docks and accessories that longtime Apple customers had been collecting for years were suddenly obsolete. But Lightning-compatible accessories have been trickling in more slowly than the typical flood of Apple accessories that comes after a new iPhone release. Why

One challenge, according to a person briefed on Apple’s plans who was not approved to discuss them publicly, is that the iPhone 5 is more fundamentally different from previous versions of the device than new models usually are  â€" introducing a different overall size and shape as well as an engineering change. At the same time, with Lightning, Apple has made it harder for companies to avoid working with its own licensing program. Both of these factors have slowed the production of accessories.

Mophie, an accessory maker, hared some insight into Lightning and the overall process of making an Apple accessory. (This week it introduced the Helium, its first iPhone 5 case with a backup battery.) When a hardware maker signs up with Apple’s MFi Program, for companies that make accessories for Apple products, it orders a Lightning connector component from Apple to use in designing the accessory. The connectors have serial numbers for each accessory maker, and they contain authentication chips that communicate with the phones. When the company submits its accessory to Apple for testing, Apple can recognize the serial number.

“If you took this apart and put it in another product and Apple got a hold of it, they’d be able to see it’s from Mophie’s batch of ! Lightning connectors,” said Ross Howe, vice president of marketing for Mophie.

The chip inside the Lightning connector can be reverse engineered â€" copied by another company â€" but it probably would not work as well as one that came from Apple, Mr. Howe said. Apple could also theoretically issue software updates that would disable Lightning products that did not use its chips, he said.

What’s the benefit for Apple The proprietary chip makes it more difficult for accessory makers to produce cheap knockoff products that are compatible with Lightning, which could potentially tarnish the iPhone brand. Also, it pushes accessory makers to pay Apple the licensing fees to be part of the MFi program.

“That’s one thing Apple is good at: controlling the user experience from end to end,” Mr. Howe said. “If you’re buying something in an Apple store, it’s gone through all this rigorous testing.”



The President Revives an Old Debate About Privacy

Few expect Internet privacy legislation in Congress this year. But many were heartened that the “p” word came up at all in the State of Union address Tuesday night.

The Obama administration’s latest salvo resurrects a difficult, urgent debate over keeping Americans safe online and respecting their privacy.

The White House order reopens rather than settles an argument that computer scientists, lawyers and civil liberties groups have been having for years over whether increased surveillance of our digital lives will make us safer. It has been fought over body scanners at the airport and surveillance cameras on the street. But expect a new political brawl on this. Both sides have powerful advocates in Washington.

On one side are proponents of greater “information sharing” between the government and the private sector. A bill proposed Wednesday, by Representatives Mike Rogers, aRepublican from Michigan, and C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Democrat from Maryland, would permit the flow of intelligence from private companies to government agencies.

An earlier version of the bill passed the House of Representatives last year, but failed in the Senate amid the threat of a White House veto.

Mr. Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, took pains to say that the new legislation would protect civil liberties.

But that did not reassure many civil libertarians.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group in Washington, warned Wednesday that the bill, the Cyberintelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as Cispa, could allow private communications to be shared with the National Security Agency, part of the Defense Departme! nt. “Once that private information is in the hands of the military, it can be used for purposes completely unrelated to cybersecurity,” argued Leslie Harris, the group’s president. “In seeking to promote cybersecurity information sharing, Cispa creates a sweeping exception to all privacy laws.”

Another advocacy group, called Fight for the Future, which agitated successfully against antipiracy legislation last year, set up an online petition in an effort to defeat Cispa.

The American Civil Liberties Union, likewise, criticized the House bill, and gave its blessings to the White House executive order instead. “Two cheers for cybersecurity programs that can do something besides spy on Americans,” the group said in a blog post.

The presidential order has been criticized by others for lacking enforcement teeth.It does not give the government the power to set minimum standards for how private operators of power plants and other critical infrastructure should protect their computer systems to deter attack; that would require Congress to change current law.

Meanwhile, the debate over privacy and security continues to be stuck in what Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, calls a false trade-off. In his 2011 book “Nothing to Hide: The False Trade-Off Between Privacy and Security,” Mr. Solove argues that Americans in the post-Sept. 11 era have been increasingly persuaded to trade “privacy” for “security,” with technology including video surveillance cameras, wiretapping and all kinds of digital data mining. “Privacy often loses out to security when it shouldn’t,” he writes.

The issue should not be seen, he adds, as a zero-sum game. “Privacy often can be protected without undue cost to security,” he continues. “In instances when adequate compromis! es can’! t be achieved, the trade-off can be made in a manner that is fair to both sides. We can reach a better balance between privacy and security. We must. There is too much at stake to fail.”



Former BlackBerry C.E.O. Sold All Company Shares

Jim Balsillie, the former co-chief executive and co-chairman of BlackBerry, has sold all of his shares in the struggling company, a regulatory filing indicated on Thursday.

Mr. Balsillie’s arrival at what was then called Research in Motion in 1992 and his personal investment of $125,000 saved the company in its early days. But Mr. Balsillie’s latest investment move means that he will not gain if the new line of BlackBerry 10 phones revive the company’s fortunes.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated Thursday, showed that Mr. Balsillie held no shares in the company as of the end of December. Mr. Balsillie owned up to 33 percent of the company, now called BlackBerry, before it became publicly traded and he reported holding 5.1 percent of its shares in a previous filing.

When asked about Mr. Basillie’s pullout, Kris Thompson, a longtime BlackBerry analyst at National Bank Financial, replied: “Who cares” BlackBerry’s shares initially slipped 7.5 percent to $12.94 in Nasdaq trading Thursday, but had recovered later in the morning.

Following a protracted and severe decline in BlackBerry’s stock price and American market share, Mr. Balsillie stepped down as both co-chief executive and co-chairman along with Mike Lazaridis in January 2012. While Mr. Lazaridis remains on the BlackBerry board as the company’s vice chairman, Mr. Balsillie resigned as a director in March.

A separate securities filing issued on Thursday indicated that Mr. Lazaridis, who co-founded the company, still holds 5.7 percent of BlackBerry’s stock.

Mr. Balsillie could not immediately be reached for comment. Adam Emery, a spokesman for BlackBerry, said the company does not “comment on holdings of ind! ividual shareholders.”

Earlier this week Mr. Thompson, the analyst, issued a report that praised many of the features on the new BlackBerry 10 phones but concluded that they will not significantly rebuild the company’s market share. He cited an impending wave of new products from larger competitors and the general lack of desirable and high quality apps for BlackBerry 10.

While Mr. Lazaridis handled the technology side of the company, Mr. Balsillie, an accountant, is widely credited with putting BlackBerry on the stable financial footing that ultimately allowed it to develop the BlackBerry device. He also played a pivotal role in convincing skeptical wireless carriers to carry the company’s first wireless e-mail devices on their networks.

Both men, however, were widely criticized for not responding more effectively and swiftly to the arrival of Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system. Those smartphones now overwhelmingly dominate a market that Blackerry created and was once leading.

At various times, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have sold substantial stakes in BlackBerry to fund educational institutions in Waterloo, Ontario, the company’s hometown.



Daily Report: In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On

Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But Martin Fackler reports that the country also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology â€" the fax machine â€" that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.

Last year alone, Japanese households bought 1.7 million of the old-style fax machines, which print documents on slick, glossy paper spooled in the back. In the United States, the device has become such an artifact that the Smithsonian is adding two machines to its collection, technology historians said.

“The fax was such a success here that it has proven hard to replace,” said Kenichi Shibata, a manager at NTT Communications, which led development of the technology in the 1970s. “It has grown unusually deep oots into Japanese society.”

The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011.

Japan’s reluctance to give up its fax machines offers a revealing glimpse into an aging nation that can often seem quietly determined to stick to its tried-and-true ways, even if the rest of the world seems to be passing it rapidly by. The fax addiction helps explain why Japan, which once revolutionized consumer electronics with its hand-held calculators, Walkmans and, yes, fax machines, has become a latecomer in the digital age, and has allowed itself to fall behind nimbler competitors like South Korea and China.

“Japan has this Galápagos effect of holding on to some things they’re comfortable with,” said Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian who is writing a book on the machine’s rise and fall. “Elsewhere, the fax has gone the way of the dodo.”



Cisco Profits Rise 44%, Exceeding Expectations

Cisco Profits Rise 44%, Exceeding Expectations

SAN FRANCISCO â€" Cisco Systems is trying to pull off one of the toughest tricks in high technology, adapting a big legacy business to a vastly different future.

Cisco emerged from a pack of computer networking companies in the 1990s during the rise of the Internet and briefly became the most valuable company in the world. It still dominates the market for computer networking hardware, controlling 85 percent or more of some businesses.

Increasingly, however, customers want their technology suppliers to offer them sophisticated services, not just equipment, as they seek to better manage an Internet that connects not just computers, but also things like sensors and mobile devices.

Like other tech giants, including Microsoft and Dell, Cisco is struggling to adapt to this new world.

On Wednesday, the company reported fiscal second-quarter earnings that grew 44 percent. Although that was more than Wall Street expected, John Chambers, the chief executive, warned of “a challenging economic environment.”

Erik Suppiger, an analyst with JMP Securities in San Francisco, said Cisco “did a good job managing costs, and keeping their margins up, but there’s a lot of concern about what they can do to build revenue.”

“Building a cloud and wireless business eats into your traditional product lines,” he said. “If you have a wireless laptop, you don’t need a desktop computer connected to your office network.”

Mr. Chambers, who has led Cisco for 18 years, is well aware of that problem, and he has spent much of the last decade devising ways to adapt Cisco. In his latest reinvention, he has cut much of its consumer business, and has refocused on selling large, complex products and services for telecommunications firms, big business and governments.

Cisco’s latest ad campaign extols “the Internet of Everything,” in which even trees are connected to scientists, to solve global warming, and cars talk to traffic lights.

“We’ve broken away from the traditional players,” Mr. Chambers said in an interview after the results were announced. “The pipeline is starting to fill.”

There are indeed signs of progress, though it is unclear whether Cisco will prevail before Mr. Chambers retires in what he says will be two to four years. What may be his greatest task â€" building a software and services business distinct from its existing hardware business â€" is still in its early phase.

Cisco does appear to be garnering the sales and cash for such a move, however. As of Jan. 26, Cisco had a cash pile of over $46 billion, and some of the highest gross profit margins in high tech.

In the second quarter, Cisco, which is based in San Jose, Calif., had net income of $3.14 billion, or 59 cents a share compared with $2.18 billion, or 40 cents. Revenue rose 5 percent, to $12.18 billion. Excluding certain items, Cisco earned 51 cents. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected Cisco to make 48 cents a share, on revenue of $12.06 billion.

Despite the better-than-expected performance, Cisco shares retreated slightly in after-hours trading.

While sales in Europe were down 6 percent, Cisco’s sales grew in both Asia and the Americas. Newer businesses like video and cloud computing systems did well. Revenue from services, Mr. Chambers said, was now almost evenly divided between money from planning and installing traditional networks, and higher-value consulting contracts.

Mr. Chambers called video “the most intriguing area, not just because it will be 90 to 98 percent of the load” of data packets on the Internet. “It changes business, health care, government, everything.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2013, on page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Adapting to a New Tech Landscape Challenges Cisco.

Fresh from the Internet\'s Attic

Fresh From the Internet’s Attic

An animated GIF on Mashable.com shows Taylor Swift at the 2013 Grammy Awards.

The Internet, it seems, has found its version of vinyl chic.

An animated GIF on Mashable.com shows Taylor Swift at the 2013 Grammy Awards.

Just as the LP has enjoyed a second spin among retro-minded music fans, animated GIFs â€" the choppy, crude snippets of video loops that hearken back to dial-up modems â€" are enjoying an unlikely vogue as the digital accessory of the moment.

Hypnotically repeating GIFs are popping up in art galleries in Berlin, Miami and New York. In fashion advertising, they are suddenly as hot as ironic brogues, popping up in online marketing campaigns for brands like Burberry, Diesel and Jack Spade. Online, there are GIF contests both highbrow and low, and “Best of” GIF roundups.

And social media sites like Tumblr have entire pages devoted to viral GIFs plucked from the biggest news events of five minutes ago (political speeches, awkward awards-show moments and other pop-cultural flotsam), which instantly circulate as must-see memes.

“For people in their 20s, GIFs are a relic of their childhood, so it makes sense they would come back as a fashion statement â€" just like ’70s fashion came back in the ’90s, and the ’90s are coming back around now,” said Jason Tanz, the executive editor of Wired.

It’s an unlikely renaissance for a geeky computer format that dates to 1987, the Internet’s Paleozoic era. That was when CompuServe, the Internet service provider, developed the “graphics interchange format,” as a way to bring a little color and movement to the Web.

Thanks to the animated GIF, first-generation Internet memes like the dancing baby (later appropriated by “Ally McBeal”) were spread.

The format has since grown up. Artists and photographers have used GIF technology to push far beyond the lo-fi novelty of Web 1.0. Consider the Wigglegram, a craze on Tumblr, which creates a jaunty 3-D effect by looping multiple images shot from slightly different perspectives, like an old-fashioned stereopticon.

In addition to looking more fluid and professional, GIFs are becoming easier to create, thanks to Web-based apps like GIFSoup and Gifninja, which allow people to create them in an instant, said Brad Kim, the editor of Know Your Meme, a site that tracks Web fads of the moment.

And in a world where so much daily communication takes place by text, GIFs are being used by Web geeks as a visual way to drive home a written point. To celebrate good news, they might insert a dorky celebratory dance from “The Office.” If they are feeling flirty, Amanda Seyfried’s coy wave from “Mean Girls” will help make the point. In this sense, GIFs function as glorified emoticons to punctuate a point when, say, typing out a blog comment.

These pop-cultural GIFs have gained cultural currency as a way to distill big televised moments into short visual bites, often with a humorous bent. Such GIFs are often live-edited by editors at social news sites like BuzzFeed, and disseminated instantly, one step ahead of tomorrow’s water-cooler topics, said Mike Hayes, the social media editor of BuzzFeed.

Recent examples include Taylor Swift’s singalong to a Bob Marley tune during last weekend’s Grammy presentations, Beyoncé avoiding a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl and Michelle Obama’s apparent eye-roll at John Boehner at last month’s post-inauguration luncheon.

“A lot of viral GIFs we see these days are real-time snippets of what’s trending in the viral video circuit, news and pop culture,” Mr. Kim said. “In a way, GIF is taking over TV shows like ‘The Soup’ or ‘Best Week Ever’ as the more accurate pop culture barometer of our time.”

The cultural currency of GIFs has not gone unnoticed. The august Oxford American Dictionaries voted “GIF” as the word of the year for 2012, beating out “Eurogeddon” (the potential financial collapse of the euro zone) and “superstorm.”

“The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace,” Katherine Martin, the head of the United States dictionaries program at Oxford University Press, was quoted as saying.

The GIF has also captured the attention of the art world. To mark the format’s 25th birthday, Tumblr and Paddle8, an online auction house, held a GIF festival called “Moving the Still,” where public submissions were curated by a panel that included the artist Richard Phillips, the musician Michael Stipe and the writer James Frey. Fifteen of more than 3,500 submissions were chosen and exhibited in a 35,000-square-foot warehouse during Art Basel Miami Beach in December.

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens has been examining the format in installations, including the current Under Construction, which features a 50-foot seamless projection in the lobby featuring thousands of old GIF files preserved from GeoCities, the once-popular Web hosting service.

To Carl Goodman, the museum’s executive director, the GIF provides a link between today’s technologically sophisticated visual culture and the 19th century, before movies, when short bursts of looping motion captured the public imagination on moving-picture devices like the zoetrope.

“The GIF,” he said, “occupies very fertile ground between the still and the moving image.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2013, on page E2 of the New York edition with the headline: Fresh From the Internet’s Attic.

Cybercrime Network Based in Spain Is Broken Up

Cybercrime Network Based in Spain Is Broken Up

MADRID â€" Europol, the European police agency, said Wednesday that it had dismantled one of the most efficient cybercrime organizations to date, led by Russians who had managed to extort millions of euros from online users across more than 30 countries â€" mostly European â€" by persuading them to pay spurious police fines for abusive use of the Internet.

Rob Wainwright of Europol. The criminals used malware to extort money.

The Russian head of the crime network was arrested in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in December. This month, the Spanish police arrested 10 other people â€" six Russians, two Ukrainians and two Georgians â€" along the Costa del Sol, a popular vacation destination in southern Spain, where the criminals are believed to have had their main base of operations.

The search continues, however, for other possible cells operated by the criminal network outside of Europe, investigators said.

The criminal threat, essentially a form of online extortion called ransomware, relied on malware that authorities believe was developed by the Russian-led gang. It locked a user’s computer, and send a message in the form of a fake police warning, demanding 100 euros ($134) to unlock it.

“This is the first major success of its kind against a very new phenomenon that we have only identified in the last two years,” Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said at a news conference at the Interior Ministry in Madrid. “This is a mass marketing scam to distribute this thousands of times and rely on the fact that even if only 2 percent fall victim to the scam, it is still a very good pickup rate.”

Mr. Wainwright estimated that 3 percent of those victimized had paid the fake fines. Europol did not give an overall estimate of how much money the criminals might have gained, but in Spain alone they are believed to have collected more than 1 million euros ($1.3 million), said Francisco Martínez, Spain’s secretary of state for security.

Computer security experts in the United States recently estimated that computer criminals make more than $5 million a year on ransomware, though many say that is too conservative.

Investigators suggested on Wednesday that the software used by the criminals could also be aimed at online users who were actually likely to have made unlawful use of the Internet, by picking up key words linked to illegal activities like child pornography or illicit file swapping. That would make the threat of a fine for abusive use of the Web more believable for the user.

Mr. Wainwright emphasized the complexity of the software, with as many as 48 mutations of the virus detected.

“It used the idiom and logo of each specific police service,” he said. “Even Europol and my own name have been used to defraud citizens.”

In most cases of ransomware, victims do not regain access to their computer unless they hire a technician to remove the virus manually. In Spain, after thousands of complaints, the Interior Ministry set up a Web site to help users uninstall the virus. The Web site received about 750,000 visits last year.

The Spanish police received 1,200 official complaints about the virus since it was first detected in Spain in May 2011.

“What is clear is that the organization had a very well-structured and complex infrastructure developed from Russia,” said José Rodríguez, a chief inspector in Spain who handled the investigation.

But he said that it also allowed them to “keep track of victims in Spain, Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere” from their base in southern Spain. “These people could have operated from anywhere but somehow found it more convenient to do so from Spain,” Mr. Rodríguez said.

The Spanish police said six of the 10 people arrested this month had already been detained, charged with money laundering, fraud and involvement in a criminal organization. The four others remain under investigation. Europol offered no details on the Russian who was suspected of leading of the gang who was arrested in December.

The Spanish police also seized several computers and more than 200 credit cards. They said the suspects also had 26,000 euros ($35,000) in cash, which they were planning to transfer to Russia on the day of their arrest.

Europol and other police agencies are still trying to determine just how much money the criminals gained and what it was used for. The gang laundered the money in Spain and elsewhere and sent it to Russia via electronic payments.

Europol started its investigation in December 2011 from its operational center in The Hague, after six countries reported more than 20,000 victims of the virus. While the virus generally came with a police warning, the gang is believed to have used different versions to deceive more users, including one fraudulent message that was designed to look as if it had been sent by the Spanish association that defends artists’ copyrights.

Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from San Francisco.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2013, on page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Cybercrime Network Based in Spain Is Broken Up.

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