tube

A high-profile incident this weekend in which Pakistan's state-owned telecommunications company managed to cut YouTube off the global Web highlights a long-standing security weakness in the way the Internet is managed.

After receiving a censorship order from the telecommunications ministry directing that YouTube.com be blocked, Pakistan Telecom went even further. By accident or design, the company broadcast instructions worldwide claiming to be the legitimate destination for anyone trying to reach YouTube's range of Internet addresses.

The security weakness lies in why those false instructions, which took YouTube offline for two hours on Sunday, were believed by routers … Read more

In the age of Google and YouTube, anybody can become a celebrity, villain, or laughingstock in no time. All it takes, for example, is for someone to publicly post another's (embarrassing) private video online, which is what happened to one Canadian teen acting out a scene from Star Wars.

There are also those Web sites out there with the purpose of shaming others. These sites criticize ex-lovers and dress down lousy tippers. But some anonymous postings can greatly harm the reputations of people, with the posters suffering no repercussions.

Read the full Newsweek story at: "The flip side of Internet fame"… Read more

YouTube goes completely black all over the world for two hours. Is the culprit a complete system failure or a sophisticated denial of service attack?

No. It's a single ISP in Pakistan trying to block access to YouTube in that country. The Pakistan government ordered access to YouTube shut down in that country after cartoons appeared on the site that some Muslims found offensive. Presumably by accident, the ISP took out YouTube everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, YouTube was inaccessible for two hours. The company said that a network in Pakistan was to blame and that it was investigating.

There'… Read more

Updated, 9:40 p.m. to add YouTube's explanation of what caused outage.

YouTube suffered a two-hour long, system-wide outage on Sunday that the company said was triggered by a network based in Pakistan.

"For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols," said YouTube spokesperson Ricardo Reyes in a statement "Many users around the world could not access our site. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening … Read more

Put this feature in the category of neat looking but potentially headache inducing. It's a recently-introduced YouTube feature that lets users view videos in a floating array of thumbnails. Users of Digg's swarm visualization will feel right at home, as both share a slightly similar interface (albeit Digg's is a little more useful).

To access the warp mode click on the full screen button in any YouTube video (the one on the far right) and then move all the way over to the left to the strange triangle-looking button. Clicking it zooms the video out into a … Read more

Via Danwei, a fan-produced music video for a song by Electric Six: "Getting into the Jam." Starring this guy.

Despite the immediate threat of a hostile takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo's kicked it into high gear. In just two weeks Yahoo has released a hot new product (Yahoo Live), announced mobile social communication tool OneConnect, acquired online video platform provider Maven Networks, killed off its music service and replaced it with Rhapsody, and launched a completely new version of collaboration suite Zimbra.

This morning the parade of changes continues with the relaunch of Yahoo Video. Besides an all new layout, Yahoo Video is coming a little closer to YouTube. It is emphasizing editor-chosen content alongside the most popular videos on the service. One of them being the new trailer for Indiana Jones, which oddly enough looks significantly better, and is available in HD on Yahoo's Movies property.

The Flash video player (the most important part of the service) has been given a face-lift with slightly higher resolutions and a new wide-screen display that can be embedded on blogs or other Web sites. User file size limits have been increased to 150MB, letting users upload larger videos files sizes that tend to come with wide-screen clips. Standard 4:3 video simply plays in the player with black bars on each side.

Also revamped are personal profiles. Users can create playlists and embed them on third party pages. Like YouTube's efforts, there are tiny thumbnails for each clip, and the creator can swap the order and choose whether it plays continuously.

New to the mix are "networks," which are a simple way to browse content by genre. The videos come from various Yahoo properties, and each network is skinned to match. It's a distinctively different feel at each network, and does a much better job at encapsulating content and the feel for each brand than YouTube's efforts with its partner channels.

I've embedded an example of the new video playlists after the break. Also, if you want to read more about the update, Yahoo's got a full listing of the changes on the Yahoo Video blog.… Read more

As we wrote on Monday, CNN's citizen journalism pet project iReport was due to get a site of its own. Today the service finally went live as iReport.com, and is already filling up with user content both old and new.

iReport's site has a lot in common with YouTube, showing off a grouping editor-selected videos (and photos) on the top of the page alongside a queue of the latest news content that's been uploaded by users. Each iReport user gets their own page with a listing of their uploaded photos and videos. Similar to Current, content is marked to show if it's been featured on CNN's televised or Web news reporting. adding incentive for others to click on it.

In addition to hosting any news story videos uploaded by users, iReport dishes out assignments to fledgling videographers and photo journalists. On top of the list is the 2008 Presidential elections, alongside weather reports, the ever popular "offbeat images", as well as "stories from Second Life," Linden Lab's MMORPG. Users can upload up to 10 videos and videos at a time, with each one taking up to 100MB in size.

Interestingly enough, the videos on iReport.com cannot be embedded on third party sites, although there are links to share it on five major social bookmarking and news services. Users also have the option of making the file downloadable, letting others grab it to play on their PCs or portable media devices. Syndication (albeit direct) is the name of the game.

In the future the service plans to increase the ties between stories, as well as where users are reporting from by integrating world maps. Already there is a "more on this story" feature that groups together content by assignment. The service also employs tags and a "newsiest" feature which "combines freshness, popularity, activity, and ratings" in an algorithm not unlike the ones found on social news sites like Digg and Reddit.

More screenshots after the break. … Read more

You can't really keep anything a secret in the New York media industry, but Google managed to do a pretty good job of it on Wednesday night.

The Mountain View megalith rented out the Terminal 5 uberclub on the West Side for an event it called "Videocracy," which is Google-ese for "Hey, advertisers, this is why you should cozy up to YouTube." The company also reportedly made a number of hints at the video site's direction, talking about some in-the-works features.

It was a strictly no-press event; Silicon Alley Insider reporter Michael Learmonth weaseled … Read more