Video Appears to Show Syrian Rebel Mutilating a Soldier’s Corpse

Supporters of the Syrian government posted a graphic video to YouTube on Sunday that appeared to show a rebel commander cutting out the heart and liver of a government soldier and threatening members of the country’s Alawite religious minority. He then held the organs up to his mouth and appeared to take a bite.

The video is one of several posted online in recent months that appear to show people being killed or dead bodies being mutilated, although the perpetrators shown in these videos are typically members of pro-government paramilitary groups called the shabiha. It is less common to see videos of such graphic violence committed by rebels, and this was the first that appeared to show cannibalism.

No previous video showing grisly violence has gone viral in the same way as the video posted on Sunday, which has been viewed more than 560,000 times between its Arabic and English versions.

In the video, a man identified as Abu Sakkar stands over the corpse of what appears to be a government soldier lying in a ditch. He carries a knife in his hand and saws into the corpse’s chest, while someone off-camera says, “God bless you, Abu Sakkar, you look like you are drawing a heart of love on him.” Abu Sakkar then cuts out the dead man’s internal organs, which Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group based in New York, said appeared to be his heart and liver.

Abu Sakkar holds the organs up to his face and threatens both President Bashar al-Assad and the Alawites, who have been among Mr. Assad’s most steadfast supporters. He also refers to Baba Amr, a neighborhood in Homs that became an icon of the Syrian conflict after a siege and bombardment by the government in February 2012 that lasted for weeks, driving away rebel fighters and leaving the area in ruins.

“I swear to God, soldiers of Bashar, you dogs â€" we will eat your heart and livers!” Abu Sakkar says. “God is great! Oh, my heroes of Baba Amr, you slaughter the Alawites and take their hearts out to eat them!” He looks at the organs and holds them closer to his mouth, as if to take a bite. The video then ends abruptly.

In a statement issued on Monday, Human Rights Watch described the mutilation depicted in the video as an atrocity and said that the man who apparently committed it was a leader of the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade. Human Rights Watch accused that brigade of participating in the “indiscriminate shelling” of two Shiite villages in Lebanon, al-Qasr and Hawsh al-Sayyed, in April, but said it was not clear if the group operated as part of the Free Syrian Army.

By comparing frames of the mutilation video to other videos showing what appears to be the same man participating in the shelling that indiscriminately hit Lebanese Shi’a villages and talking about killed Hezbollah fighters, Human Rights Watch believes the person in the video to be Commander Abu Sakkar. Journalists and other commanders have said that Abu Sakkar is the nom de guerre of a former commander from the mainstream al-Farouq Brigade from the Baba Amr district of Homs, in Syria.

Four international journalists told Human Rights Watch that they met him during or after the battle of Homs in 2011 and 2012. Several other videos posted by the Independent Omar al Farouq Brigade also show the man known as Abu Sakkar, wearing the same jacket as in the mutilation video, loading rockets into an improvised rocket launcher before apparently firing them into Lebanon at Shi’a villages in the Bekaa Valley. In yet another video, Abu Sakkar appears with what he claims are the bodies of killed Hezbollah fighters in the town of al-Qusayr.

So, who is Abu Sakkar?

On Monday, Time magazine reported that two of its correspondents had seen the video in April “in the presence of several of Abu Sakkar’s fighters and supporters, including his brother,” and that “they all said the video was authentic.” Time said it had tried to verify that the video was authentic but had been unable to do so.

In its report, Time identified Abu Sakkar as the nom de guerre of a man named Khalid al-Hamad and said, as Human Rights Watch did, that he was a commander in the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, a group of around 60 men active in Homs.

Whether or not Abu Sakkar is actually named Khalid al-Hamad, it appears likely that this was not his first time in front of a camera. A man who appears to be the same person shown in Sunday’s video can also be seen in at least three videos taken near Homs in the second week of April. On Monday, Eliot Higgins, who blogs under the name Brown Moses, posted all three videos on his Web site.

There is a strong physical resemblance between the man in these three videos and the man who carved the organs out of the corpse â€" he wears the same jacket in all four videos â€" and the speaking voice sounds the same in all of the videos.

In one video, posted on April 8, the man who appears to be Abu Sakkar stands in the middle of a group of men in the back of a pickup truck, preparing missiles to be fired at government positions near Abel, a village outside Homs. He wears a silver vest over a blue shirt and speaks to the camera, saying his brigade is “striking the shabiha and Assad’s army in the village of Abel.”

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This video from April appears to show the same man seen mutilating a soldier’s corpse in a video posted online on Sunday.

In a second video posted the next day, April 9, the same man is shown preparing to launch missiles from the back of a pickup truck. It appears to be the same vehicle. He looks at the camera and says, “Don’t step down, Bashar. We are coming for you,” before launching the missiles. “I swear to God, the sons of Baba Amr are coming for you.”

This video from April appears to show the same man seen mutilating a soldier’s corpse in a video posted online on Sunday.

In a third video posted two days later, April 11, the same man is again seen loading missiles to be launched from the back of a pickup truck. Speaking to the camera, he again threatens Mr. Assad, telling him that “the sons of Baba Amr” are coming for him “from everywhere.”

This video from April appears to show the same man seen mutilating a soldier’s corpse in a video posted online on Sunday.

Google’s Developer Conference to Be Light on New Products

In the past few years, Google’s annual developers conference has grown from being an insiders’ event for software geeks to one in which big announcements about new hardware like Google Glass are made. But this year the conference, which starts Wednesday, will not have much to show in terms of new products, according to a company executive.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Sundar Pichai, a vice president at Google who was recently put in charge of its Android mobile operating system, said this year’s conference, known as Google I/O, would have a strong focus on software developers, not snazzy new gear.

That will be a stark contrast to last year, when Google wowed audiences with a demonstration of Google Glass, its Internet-connected eyewear, as well as a new tablet.

“It’s going to be different,” Mr. Pichai told Wired. “It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system.” He said the event would focus instead on showing software developers what they could do with Android and Chrome OS, Google’s browser-based operating system.

Google’s event is most likely light on news this year because the company is going through corporatewide transitions. Mr. Pichai, who had overseen Chrome OS, replaced Andy Rubin as the senior vice president in charge of Android just two months ago. And new products have yet to materialize after Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, as Google has been quietly shuffling leadership inside the handset maker. For instance, last year it appointed Lior Ron, who had spent six years working on Google Maps, as vice president for product management at Google.

Google’s Developer Conference to Be Light on New Products

In the past few years, Google’s annual developers conference has grown from being an insiders’ event for software geeks to one in which big announcements about new hardware like Google Glass are made. But this year the conference, which starts Wednesday, will not have much to show in terms of new products, according to a company executive.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Sundar Pichai, a vice president at Google who was recently put in charge of its Android mobile operating system, said this year’s conference, known as Google I/O, would have a strong focus on software developers, not snazzy new gear.

That will be a stark contrast to last year, when Google wowed audiences with a demonstration of Google Glass, its Internet-connected eyewear, as well as a new tablet.

“It’s going to be different,” Mr. Pichai told Wired. “It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system.” He said the event would focus instead on showing software developers what they could do with Android and Chrome OS, Google’s browser-based operating system.

Google’s event is most likely light on news this year because the company is going through corporatewide transitions. Mr. Pichai, who had overseen Chrome OS, replaced Andy Rubin as the senior vice president in charge of Android just two months ago. And new products have yet to materialize after Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, as Google has been quietly shuffling leadership inside the handset maker. For instance, last year it appointed Lior Ron, who had spent six years working on Google Maps, as vice president for product management at Google.

Tough Times at Homeland Security

A new wave of cyberattacks is hitting American companies at a particularly vulnerable time for the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency charged with fending them off.

That is because the department has been grappling with the departures of its top cybersecurity officials. In the last four months, Jane Holl Lute, the agency’s deputy secretary; Mark Weatherford, the top cybersecurity official; Michael Locatis, the assistant secretary for cybersecurity; and Richard Spires, the chief information officer, have all resigned.

Candidates currently being considered to fill their posts include Beltway officials and executives from the antivirus software makers Symantec and McAfee, according to people briefed on their professional backgrounds who were not authorized to speak publicly about the department’s hiring process. But these people said the leading candidates lacked critical ties to Silicon Valley and to the hacking community from which Homeland Security has said it so urgently needs to recruit.

For the last four years, the department has said it needs to expand its cybersecurity force by as many as 600 skilled hackers if it is to keep pace with the influx of increasingly sophisticated threats.

“We need students,” Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, told students at San Jose State University last year. “We need young people who really understand this technology who are creative and innovative.”

But in the last 10 years, most students who graduated from the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program, a National Science Foundation program that awards scholarships to students with cyberskills in exchange for a federal service commitment, went to the National Security Agency, where they work on offensive missions. At Homeland Security, the emphasis is on keeping hackers out, or playing defense.

Ms. Napolitano convened a 15-person task force last year to figure out how to attract more students. The task force included security experts from Facebook, the N.S.A. and the Idaho National Laboratory, the Energy Department’s lead nuclear research center. Its co-chairman was Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security training organization, and Jeff Moss, founder of the well-known Black Hat and Def Con annual hacking conventions in Las Vegas.

Among their recommendations: Make Homeland Security cool again by partnering with the organizers of hacking competitions, whose participants would much prefer to “move fast and break things” at Facebook or Twitter or Google, than cut through red tape at the Department of Homeland Security.

To make the department more than a bureaucratic afterthought, people inside the agency say they hope it will fill one of its top vacancies with a hacker “rock star” not unlike Mr. Moss, whose Las Vegas conferences annually draw the best minds in computer security, or Peiter Zatko, the hacker better known as Mudge, who recently left his position at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, for Google.

“Where is cyber at D.H.S. right now?” one person at the agency remarked. “Who is minding the shop? And what have we been talking about for the past four years?”

Daily Report: New Wave of Cyberattacks Against U.S. Corporations

WASHINGTON â€" A new wave of cyberattacks is striking American corporations, prompting warnings from federal officials, including a vague one issued last week by the Department of Homeland Security. This time, officials say, the attackers’ aim is not espionage but sabotage, and the source seems to be somewhere in the Middle East, David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth report in The New York Times on Monday.

The targets have primarily been energy companies, and the attacks appeared to be probes, looking for ways to seize control of their processing systems. The attacks are continuing, officials said. But two senior administration officials said on Sunday that they were still not certain exactly where the attacks were coming from, or whether they were state-sponsored or the work of hackers or criminals.

“We are concerned by these intrusions, and we are trying to make sure they don’t lead to something much bigger, as they did in the Saudi case,” said one senior American official. He was referring to the aggressive attack last summer that affected 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest oil producers. After lengthy investigations, American officials concluded that Iran had been behind the Saudi Aramco attack.

Another official said that in the new wave of attacks, “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East,” but he did not say whether Iran, or another country, appeared to be the source.

Last week’s warning was unusual because most attacks against American companies â€" especially those coming from China â€" have been attempts to obtain confidential information, steal trade secrets and gain competitive advantage. By contrast, the new attacks seek to destroy data or to manipulate industrial machinery and take over or shut down the networks that deliver energy or run industrial processes.

ABC to Live-Stream Its Shows via App

Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, and Albert Cheng, its executive vice president.

This week ABC will quietly revolutionize its app for iPhones and iPads with a button called “live.” Users around New York and Philadelphia will be able to live-stream all the programming from ABC’s local stations there, the first time that any major broadcaster has turned on such a technology.

The functionality will be featured at ABC’s upfront presentation for advertisers on Tuesday. It is, among other things, an attempt to keep up with the rapidly changing expectations of television viewers.

It also reflects the increasing role that subscriber fees play in the broadcasting business: the live stream will be available only to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers, even though the stations’ signals are available free over the public airwaves.

ABC, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, said the live stream would be available in the other six cities where it owns stations sometime this summer. It is also in talks with the companies that own ABC’s more than 200 affiliates to make the “live” button work in their markets.

ABC finished the first of its affiliate deals, with Hearst Television, on Sunday afternoon; it said the live streams would work in Hearst’s 13 markets, including Boston and Pittsburgh, in the coming months.

The mobile app may prod the other broadcasters to follow ABC, much as they did seven years ago after the network started to stream full episodes of shows the morning after their TV premieres. ABC had originally planned to introduce a live-streaming feature for its apps in 2014, but decided to speed up that process this year.

“We keep a very close eye on consumer demand,” said Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, which includes the broadcast network. “We watch how people are behaving with their devices, and we really felt that we needed to move faster.”

Internally the project was code-named Project Acela, a reference to the high-speed train between Boston and Washington. A team led by Albert Cheng, Ms. Sweeney’s executive vice president for digital media, was given a deadline of May 14, the date of the ABC upfront. While Apple devices came first, other phones and tablets will be supported in the coming months, Mr. Cheng said. Securing the necessary rights from programming providers was laborious, but ABC will be able to stream all of its stations’ local newscasts, syndicated talk shows like “Katie,” and national series like “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The live-stream functionality comes at a time when ABC and its broadcast rivals are trying to keep the attention of audiences that are increasingly turning to cable channels and Internet streaming services like Netflix.

It gives ABC another talking point about how it is adapting to audience preferences; in this case, viewers will be able to carry “Good Morning America” with them as they move around the house in the morning, or tune into a weekend basketball game while out with friends. The live stream will work anywhere in a local market, the same way an old-fashioned TV antenna would.

During a demonstration of the app in her New York office on Friday, Ms. Sweeney said she was struck by how personalized television becomes when it is live-streamed to a person’s phone.

The app is also an implicit rebuttal to Aereo, the start-up backed by Barry Diller that is being sued by major station owners for streaming their signals to paying subscribers in New York. Ms. Sweeney reiterated her view that Aereo is illegal but said the plans for the app’s live-stream feature predated the service.

The app, to be named Watch ABC, in line with Disney’s existing Watch Disney and Watch ESPN apps, will allow users to watch ABC shows on demand, like the network’s previous app had. In the future, ABC will withhold its most recent TV episodes from the free versions of Hulu and ABC.com, further limiting access to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers only.

The mobile live stream will not carry the same ads as the television broadcast; instead, it will include the same sorts of digital ads as on ABC.com. This is in part because the Nielsen Company is not able to measure mobile viewing of live television yet.

“What you see here is the same live programming,” Mr. Cheng said as he used the app, “but what we are doing during the commercial break is actually inserting new ads into the stream.”

Over time, live-streaming of ABC stations could cannibalize big-screen viewing of those stations, but ABC could make up the difference through streaming ads. Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, pointed out this month that an increase in online advertising partly compensated for declines in TV ad revenue in the first quarter of the year.

Transmitting television via live stream requires new deals with traditional distributors, like Comcast, DirecTV and Verizon FiOS, and with the owners of ABC’s affiliates. Gaining Hearst’s backing ahead of Tuesday’s upfront was important to ABC because it lent some local support to the app effort.

David Barrett, the chief executive of Hearst Television, said in a statement on Sunday that his company, recognizing “that consumers want the ability to view our stations’ programming on any device that has a screen,” was eager to work with ABC on the app.

Some station owners may bristle at ABC’s arrangement, however, given the other mobile television efforts that are under way. In some cases, these efforts require a miniature antenna, or a dongle, to be plugged into the phone.

A technology company called Syncbak has a live-streaming app for phones that does not require a dongle, but currently, it can carry only local programming, not syndicated or national programming.

CBS took a minority stake in Syncbak last month, stoking talk that it might use the technology to live-stream the stations it owns.

The Fox network, a unit of the News Corporation, is also known to be working on live-streaming functionality for its stations, though it is not expected to be available soon.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 13, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Watching a Network on the Go.

In Taiwan, Lamenting a Lost Lead

Chris Stowers for The International Herald Tribune

Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek Computer, at Asus’s headquarters on the outskirts of Taipei in April.

TAIPEI, Taiwan â€" Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek Computer, has epitomized the Taiwanese electronics engineer for a generation: a slender figure in rumpled, baggy trousers, he once helped Intel solve heat problems in its Pentium 4 microprocessors.

Asus’s product, the PadFone 2, lets the user slide a cellphone into the back, turning a tablet into an oversize cellphone.

So it has been a surprise over the last several years to see Mr. Shih, now 60, reinvent himself with snug-cut Italian suits, innovative designs for tablet and notebook computers and scathing criticisms of Taiwan’s test-obsessed, engineering-oriented educational system.

“I don’t think the Taiwanese got very good training to drive the mentality of innovation,” he said during an interview at Asus’s headquarters here on the outskirts of Taipei. (Mr. Shih also demonstrated his flexibility in the interview, assuming the lotus position while wearing a dark blue Armani suit with a sky-blue Armani tie.)

Fostering innovation has become a mantra among corporate leaders and government officials alike in Taiwan this year because the island’s huge consumer electronics industry has run into serious trouble.

Worldwide sales of PCs, for which Taiwanese companies control over 90 percent of the final design and manufacturing, are declining steadily. Sales of smartphones, for which Taiwanese companies control less than a fifth of the market, are rising briskly. Tablets based on the Android operating system, which most Taiwanese companies, with the exception of Asus, have been slow to embrace, are also on the same upward trajectory.

“Outside of Asus, all the others are struggling,” said Helen Chiang, a Taiwan electronics specialist at the IDC research firm.

Foxconn and Acer have each reported that sales in the first quarter dropped 19 percent from a year ago. HTC’s sales plunged 37 percent, although that was partly because the company began shipping the annually improved version of its best-known smartphone in late March instead of February. At Quanta, a 70,000-employee contract designer and manufacturer of notebook computers, sales have shown double-digit percentage drops from year-earlier levels for 14 consecutive months.

Foreign rivals have proved more nimble. In South Korea, Samsung is expanding rapidly in smartphones, tablet computers and other sectors. After embracing the Android operating system early, the company has built on its huge economies of scale in the mass production of components, like display screens and microprocessors.

In China, Lenovo and many smaller manufacturers are relying on labor that, while no longer cheap, is still less expensive than in Taiwan. That helped make Lenovo the only one among the top five PC makers worldwide to eke out a gain in shipments in the first quarter â€" although by only a tenth of a percent.

And in the United States, Apple, Google and Amazon have shown themselves adept at producing breakthrough consumer products, while pending legislation would allow them to import more foreign engineers at a lower cost than hiring and training domestic engineers.

As notebooks and other Windows-based PCs have lost ground, first to Apple tablets and now to Android-based designs, even Microsoft has been indicating dissatisfaction with the pace of PC innovation in Taiwan. Despite a longtime aversion to hardware, Microsoft recently introduced its own Surface tablet.

“The Surface tablet is a pretty strong signal to the whole Taiwan PC ecosystem that they’re not innovating enough,” said Bill Whyman, a senior managing director at the ISI research firm.

One exception to Taiwan’s difficulties is Asus. Its many new Android-based tablets, including one that it has branded with Google, allowed it to surpass Amazon in the first quarter of this year to become the third-largest player in the global tablet computer market, behind Apple and Samsung, according to IDC.

And some of its designs are downright clever. One new model, the PadFone, lets the user slide a cellphone into the back, turning the tablet into an oversize cellphone. Another tablet, the Transformer, features a detachable keyboard with a wireless connection and a two-sided display panel that can show a movie on one side to entertain children or guests while the other side is a regular computer display for the owner.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 13, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Taiwan, Lamenting A Lost Lead.