google shuttering google video: download now!

from washington post: If you happen to still have anything still up on Google Video that you want to keep, you’d better move quickly. The clock is ticking. After April 29, the site will stop hosting videos; after May 13, the content will be gone forever. The company has added a “Download” button to videos to let people save the content they want from the site. Users are being encouraged to repost their videos to YouTube, which Google bought in 2006.

Google Video has had a long, drawn-out death: the site stopped allowing uploads in 2009, but still hosts millions of videos. When it comes to video, YouTube is clearly Google’s priority. The video site has recently gone on a acquisition tear of its own, gathering companies focused on improving video quality and producing original content. YouTube also launched a live channel to showcase streaming content earlier this month.

The first report about Google’s decision to close the site came from CenterNetworks.
For those who do still have stuff up on Google Video, getting it back seems to be a pretty easy process, according to a letter that went out to Google Video users. Just go to the video’s status page and hit the download button. After you’re done, a message telling you the video’s been downloaded will appear next to the ”Download Video” link.

Archive Team, which describes itself as “loose collectives of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths,” is trying to save all of Google Video’s content, particularly the longer videos that just won't fit within YouTube’s 15-minute time limit. The group has been allocated 100TB of space for the videos on archive.org.

Archive Team was also a huge part of the effort to save the content from GeoCities, one of the most popular web-hosting sites from the 90s, which Yahoo closed in 2009. Were you still using Google Video? Or had you forgotten all about it?

mexico city ufo

Annie Lask saw and heard the UFO, at right, just 20 meters above her, on August 6th, 1997 in a northern suburb of Mexico City. Lask noticed a purple haze in the air and an audible hiss and said, "the outer rim was spinning very fast". The witness doesn't remember getting down from the roof, where she spotted the UFO and had symptoms afterwards. Lask experienced headaches and her eyes burned on a daily basis. You can judge for yourself as to the authenticity of the video in a brief two part You Tube Video of the 1997 sighting. In part two, David Froning, a propulsion engineer with 30 years experience at McDonnell Douglas, judges the UFO to be real and jet powered. Two special effects artists with Digital Domain differ as to whether it is a hoax, but agree the UFO is actually in the picture and not computer generated imagery, or, CGI. Lask's observations leave a critical mind to wonder about the origins of the "purple haze or mist" and the "hiss"? The two part video documentary is less than a half hour about one of the most memorable UFO sightings ever!

youtube will allow users to flag videos for promoting 'terrorism'

from abcnews: Can the will of the people protect the idea of free speech? America's founding fathers said no, but YouTube is going to give it a try. In an effort to scrub the video site of clips that promote terrorism or extremism, YouTube has announced that it will allow its users to flag propaganda videos for removal. As the Los Angeles Times reports, the move is a long time in coming. Sen. Joe Lieberman (Independent-Conn.), has been lobbying YouTube to remove such videos for years. He told the LA Times that YouTube's move is "good first step" toward curtailing an effective terror recruitment tool, though lawmakers would prefer for the videos to be prescreened before they're ever even posted. New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, has also asked YouTube to remove some videos, specifically videos from Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric now seen as a major al Qaeda leader. Our question to you today: Is user flagging a good way to remove terror propaganda videos, or is this a threat to free speech?

flashbacks: lieberman tells internet to 'relax' about 'kill switch' & cyber/space\war: white house prepping national internet identity authentication plan

11/18 defcon: extra staff & virtual property

fbi brass ask google, facebook to expand wiretaps*
google vp issues stark internet warning*
youtube hiring extra staff to tackle al-qaeda videos*
state-led cyberterror set to rise: report*
gates: huge threat of cyber attack*
cyber experts have proof china hijacked US-based internet traffic*
searching for news is riskier than searching for porn, study says*
man made 1/2-a-mil on virtual property*
x-37b secret US space plane may be too mysterious*

defcon 7/8: 'perfect citizen' meets big brother

nsa creating spy system to monitor domestic infrastructure*
report: US building system to detect cyber-attacks*
US plans 'cyber shield' to detect cyber attacks on infrastructure*
nsa says 'perfect citizen' is a research program*
nsa to spy on 'critical infrastructure', says wsj*
the cybersecurity directive goes viral*
download: gao slams white house for failing to lead on cybersecurity*
the lights are going out for free speech on the net*
germany officials launch legal action against facebook*
US largely ruling out nkorea in 2009 cyberattacks*
porn pranksters have field day with youtube injection flaw*

defcon 6/24: more leaks & lawsuits

video: ellsberg says US might 'assassinate' wikileaks head*
wikileaks founder drops 'mass spying' hint*
the strange & consequential case of bradley manning, adrian lamo & wikileaks*
darpa taking fire for its cyberwar range*
judge rules dmca protects youtube in viacom lawsuit*

iarpa wants to scan your youtube clips for terror threats

from danger room: Your Youtube videos could soon be scanned and evaluated for terror threats, thanks to a new project funded by the U.S. intelligence community that’ll create a searchable warehouse of open-source clips.

Iarpa (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity), the spy agency’s out-there research arm, is behind the program, called Automated Low-Level Analysis and Description of Diverse Intelligence Video (ALADDIN).

The advent of cell phone cams and online video hubs means thousands of clips are uploaded every day. And while the quality of UAV or spy-cam feeds is relatively consistent, and the videos usually contain similar imagery, “the unconstrained video clips produced by anyone who has a digital camera present a significant challenge,” Iarpa notes.

Uploaded videos contain such diverse scenes and situations, not to mention grainy images and sound, that it’s much harder to prep algorithms for automated evaluation. And human analysts only have so much time for the “eyes-on-video/ears-on-audio” routine.

In ALADDIN, Iarpa wants a boundless database of open source video clips, and the ability to search “for the occurrence of specific events of interest…”. Once the system finds the relevant videos, it should be able to “rapidly and automatically produce a textual English-language recounting…describing the particular scene, actors, objects and activities involved.”

Of course, despite the challenges of analyzing uploaded videos, spy agencies are probably already doing it. In 2008, the director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Open Source Center noted that “YouTube…carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence.”

defcon 4/15: transhumanism, twitter, radio waves & fireballs

merging man & machine: we are the internet*
youtube goes orwellian:
now requires sms from every new registrant*
how tweet it is!: library of congress acquires entire twitter archive*
russia has no plans to deploy weapons in space*
cyberwar doomsayer mcconnell lands $34m in govt cyberwar contracts for booz*
cyberwar commander survives senate hearing*
mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy*
video: massive fireball reported across midwestern sky*


update: obama lays out future of US space exploration*

defcon 4/1: cybercensors & torrents of controversy

censorship act: new amendment could block wikileaks*
army intel acorn-ing wikileaks? web publisher under attack*
uk lords pass controversial internet piracy bill*
computer-controlled swarm of bacteria builds tiny pyramid*
don't believe the hype: there's no such thing as 'cyber'*

school laptop spy case prompts wiretap act rethink*
isohunt told to pull .torrent files offline, likely to close*
indie filmmakers sue 1000s of bittorrent users*
how the fbi busted one youtube nutjob in under a day*
comcast rolls out broadband meters coast to coast*