Updated at 4:40 p.m. PDT with Google comment.
YouTube was busy deleting porn videos on Wednesday after users of forums at a rival site and an imageboard site declared a "Porn Day" campaign against the popular video service.
The forums at video site eBaum's World and 4chan organized the mass porn "carpet bombing" on YouTube, according to Ars Technica.
YouTube has been removing the videos as fast as it can, but even videos that are removed are still showing up in search results with explicit images in the thumbnails, the report said.
It could take a couple of days for all the explicit results to be removed from the search results, Google spokesman Scott Rubin told Ars Technica.
In a phone interview with CNET News late on Wednesday, Rubin said that in addition to the porn videos were removed as soon as community members alert YouTube to them, certain channels where the posters were bragging about the campaign and listing the videos were being disabled.
"This group of pranksters thought it would be funny to load a bunch of porn to YouTube," he said. "This is an unfortunate, and I think poorly directed, prank. I think our systems are doing really well at removing content that violates the guidelines."
A Connecticut substitute teacher arrested four years ago for allegedly showing students porn on a classroom computer has been cleared of the felony charges--for now--after experts pointed the finger at spyware.
Julie Amero, 41, agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct, pay a $100 fine, and surrendered her teaching license, according to the Hartford Courant. The ordeal left her hospitalized for stress and heart problems, the report said.
The Superior Court judge in Norwich on Friday tossed out the charges that she had endangered children by intentionally causing "pop-up" pornography to display on her computer and ordered a new trial after computer forensics experts presented evidence about the spyware. Judge Hillary B. Strackbein said the conviction was based on "erroneous" and "false information."
Despite the expert evidence, and the fact that state prosecutors never conducted a forensic examination of the hard drive, New London County State's Attorney Michael Regan said he remained convinced of Amero's guilt and was prepared to take the case to trial again.
The security expert who led a team of forensic volunteers in the case is outraged that officials are dismissing the evidence about the dangers of spyware.
"Regan's pronouncement of his certainty of her guilt speaks to his ignorance and unwillingness to learn the facts of this case, and the facts of what PC viruses can do to a computer and, in some cases, a life," Alex Eckelberry, chief executive of security firm Sunbelt Software, wrote on The Julie Blog, a site spawned by the Amero case and which is focused on seeking fairness in the intersection of law and technology.
"All of our forensic investigators felt it was a complete miscarriage. It was clear she was absolutely innocent," he told the Hartford Courant. "The mistakes and misinformation that occurred in that courtroom were astounding."
Amero suffered because the school system failed to keep the computer updated with software to block the pornography, experts said.
The case serves as an important lesson for everyone--use antivirus, antispyware, and other security software and update it regularly.
(Via Brian Krebs' Security Fix blog at The Washington Post.)
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