Michelle and Patrick Finger say they aren't going to stop trying to locate their daughter. She became involved with a man who turns out to be a wanted, convicted pedophile. Sadly, the only sight they catch of her now shows up on Internet porno sites.

Michelle Finger says that two years ago, her daughter Angela worked at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas as a cage cashier, which was looked at as a solid job that had already brought her two promotions.

"She worked there for a little under 2 years. She was bright and sweet, and was very close to her family. That all changed in a heartbeat."

She says that through MySpace, two days before Mothers day 2006, her daughter met a man who said his name was Craig Raether. He said he was 27, and that his parents were killed by a drunk driver. His story didn't add up for Angela's parents, but she was interested and they seemed to have little impact on her decision to begin spending time around the man who used the name Craig Raether

It wasn't long according to Michelle, before Angela began acting odd. "She started dressing like a street girl, and acted rude to us all the time. We were fighting a lot. Fathers day came, and she took her dad out to eat, and bowling. We started talking about her brother's upcoming wedding, and I told her we would take her, I didn't want Craig there. Thats the last time I saw her. They left shortly after that not to be seen or heard from for the next year."

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There is a moment of foreshadowing at the end of “Battle at Kruger,” the eight-minute African safari video that has drawn more than 30 million views on YouTube.
David Budzinski, a tourist from Texas, has just recorded a stunning scene straight out of a wildlife documentary. A small pride of lions and a crocodile have pinned down a cape buffalo calf, prompting an angry herd of buffalo to fight off the predators and save the babe. A fellow traveler remarks, “You could sell that video!”

After returning home, Mr. Budzinski tried, but National Geographic and Animal Planet were not interested. Only after the battle alternately terrifying and heart-warming became one of the most popular videos in YouTube’s history did the buyers come calling. Last summer the National Geographic Channel purchased the television rights to the video, and on Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern time, it will devote an hour to a documentary deconstructing the drama.

“We look at YouTube too, just like everybody else,” said Michael Cascio, the senior vice president for special programming at the National Geographic Channel.

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The RIPE Network Coordination Centre, which is responsible for coordinating internet resources within Europe, has explained the cause of the YouTube online video service blackout last February. According to Daniel Karrenberg, head of research at RIPE NCC and colleagues Ticiana Refice and Luca Cittadini of the Universita Roma Tre, Pakistan Telecom simply co-opted YouTube's IP address range as its own. Just one minute later the incorrect route, called a /24 block according to CIDR terminology, of the YouTube address block was entered in numerous routers. As Refice explained, at a meeting of the IP address administrative body RIPE in Berlin on Monday, data traffic then flowed to Pakistan.

For several years, RIPE NCC has had a monitoring infrastructure in place to observe losses of service and attacks. In the analysis of the YouTube attack, the Routing Information System (RIS) helped to evaluate BGP data from some 600 peers at 15 different locations. The data, collected by remote routing collectors, are also archived and made available via a web interface, both now and for later re-examination.

Two additional monitoring systems, Traffic Measurement (TTM) and DNS Monitoring Services (DNSMON), have their fingers on the pulse of the net, via data transfer rates and in the system via root and ccTLD servers. With the help of these tools, At the Berlin meeting, Mark Dranse of RIPE NCC gave a detailed description of the curbed network traffic due to the severed underwater cable in the Near East. Some 60 per cent of Egypt, Sudan and Kuwait were cut off from the Internet as a result.

Using the BGPPlay tool researchers were also able to graphically reconstruct some of the events in the YouTube outage. An hour and twenty minutes after the block in Pakistan, YouTube reacted, announcing the theft of the /24 address block in order to get data traffic back on track. Refice characterised the effect of the block as visible, but not devastating, because there were two competing 208.65.153.0/24 address blocks. Also, the attempt a short time later to decide the battle by co-opting the smaller 208.65.153.0/25 block failed because /25 blocks are usually not disseminated by network operators.The confrontation did not end until it was stopped at Pakistan Telecom or its upstream provider PCCW.

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Google on Wednesday launched its popular video-sharing site YouTube in India.

YouTube debuts in India with a number of partners, including Zoom channel from the Bennet Coleman & Co, UTV and Rajshri Group, among other production houses. All uploaded content on YouTube is protected by its digital hash technology for copyright protection.

This technology makes it very difficult for someone to copy and reload the same content, thus curbing piracy, said YouTube International Manager Sakina Arsiwala. The company also announced what she called as company's `zero tolerance' policy towards security of its users online against objectionable content, including porn.

The Internet giant is expecting a huge spurt in usage from India with the Indian-specific YouTube.co.in along with a country-specific video search for the content popular and relevant in India.

YouTube users have been increasing by 200,000 every month and India becomes the 20th locality (read country) to have a country-specific community and domain. Thanks to such popularity, Google has to always keep at least 10 times the headroom in terms of data centre infrastructure as hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded on YouTube everyday.

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The recently launched television ad by the Democratic National Committee, which uses the “straight talking maverick’s” own words regarding a 100 year commitment of American troops in Iraq against him brings to light McCain’s vulnerability in this new citizen journalism era of politics. The comment by McCain was not asked by a professional journalist, but rather a concerned voter. The moment was not caught on tape by a network news camera, but rather an amateur photographer. And the public did not first learn about this moment on the nightly news, but rather the video sharing site YouTube.

The DNC ad promises to be the first of many instances that may prove that the 71 year-old McCain may not be equipped for the ruthless environment of Presidential politics in the YouTube era. The YouTube era; where every public moment (and sometimes relatively private moments) is recorded by the seemingly ever present electric eye. No longer do campaign staffs have to agonize over which sound bite to use for the next television ad, because the cutting room floor can simply be swept up and released into the public domain for free via YouTube and various other websites. It is once on the internet that clips have the ability to take on a life of their own in the mainstream news cycle.

This video sharing technology can work positively for a candidate, such as the wide reach given to Obama’s soaring rhetoric earlier in the Democratic primary, or by giving birth to a grassroots phenomenon by portraying the underdog speaking truth to power, as happened in the case of Ron Paul.

However, this new era can also create new problems for the candidates. It can force into the limelight moments along the campaign trail that the candidate would rather forget, and in the past the corporate media might have overlooked.

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A bunch of Wellington Parkour enthusiasts seem to have made the biggest New Zealand-originated splash on Youtube since former Lonelygirl15 (Kiwi actor Jessica Lee Rose) shot to fame with her authentic looking video diaries that turned out to be heavily scripted and acted.

A Parkour video directed by Wellingtonian Shahir Daud has attracted nearly half a million views in three weeks after being featured briefly on the front on the Youtube.com website.

What exactly is Parkour? Wikipedia has a pretty good answer. It's the art of moving from one place to another as efficiently as possible. This can involve jumping off buildings, leaping over walls and in the case of Shahir's video The Chase hurling yourself off a bridge into Wellington harbour.

The movie Breaking and Entering, which I watched over the weekend and was the last effort from British director Anthony Minghella before his untimely death last month, featured some teeange kids who combined Parkour with stealing computers from inner-city offices.

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The Google-owned video-sharing site attracted 70 percent of the U.S. traffic to video Web sites in December 2007, but dozens of lesser-known sites are still fighting for a share of the $500 million that will be spent on advertising at online video sites this year.

"YouTube has carved out a very large footprint in the online video space, but there's still a lot of room for other players to come in," said Paul Verna, senior analyst for research firm eMarketer. "People are looking more and more to replicate the TV experience on their PCs, so that means there's room for a lot of different flavors."

Nearly 53 percent of Americans will watch videos on the Web regularly in 2008, a 12 percent increase over 2007, according to eMarketer. Video clips shorter than five minutes dominate viewers' attention online, but a growing number of consumers are interested in live streaming video and professional content, Verna said.

Los Altos-based Ustream.tv Inc. raised $11.1 million in April for its live streaming video site, which launched publicly in March 2007.

The site has almost 3 million unique viewers a month, and 80 percent watch live video instead of archived programs. Ustream is able to better monetize its content because it can deliver viewers who watch video for an average of 30 to 40 minutes, said founder Brad Hunstable.

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As a self-proclaimed "average teenager," I'm going to go out on a limb and make a statement that my peers will surely chastise me for: YouTube.com is the root of all evil.

I hesitate to say such a thing because YouTube has become a dominant aspect of my generation's culture. Nearly every one of my friends is recognizable in some video clip or another, and we've all experienced the magic of late-night Internet boredom that leads to random YouTube searches.

Every teen has a favorite video that they watch daily, just for the humorous pick-me-up. My 14-year-old brother, for example, idolizes a clip of the world's fastest clapper (12 per second!), while I constantly click back to instructional videos showing step-by-step directions for obscure line dances. The use of the word "YouTube" has even morphed into a verb: "Did you record that kid break dancing in the cafeteria this morning?" "Yeah, I already YouTubed it. Lol."

But it seems like the youthful generation responsible for YouTube's success has taken advantage of its brilliant convenience, unwilling to accept that with every login comes great responsibility.

By now, we've all heard about the cheerleaders in Polk County who allegedly beat up their friend, then intended to proudly post a video of it on YouTube as a trophy. They're being punished accordingly, but one has to wonder what the greater crime is: blatantly assaulting a peer, or going the extra mile and basking in the glory of such violence by sharing the experience with the world?

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New Orleans hopes to hold a U.S. presidential campaign town meeting in September, and while the candidates have yet to agree, the debate has already been announced on YouTube.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and other community leaders said the forum, planned for September 18, will use Google's technology and the YouTube's Web-based video platform as a means of incorporating American voices into the discussion. Google owns YouTube.

"New Orleans is rebuilding and we are excited about the future. We're ready to welcome the candidates to our city to discuss that future," Nagin said on YouTube in a video to announce the debate. "The Internet is allowing that discussion to take place in ways that are more democratic and empowering than ever before."

Invitations have been extended to Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and presumed Republican nominee John McCain, but no campaign has accepted yet, a spokeswoman for the forum said.

New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is a popular spot for political appearances.

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards announced his candidacy and withdrawal from the race in the city.

And last week, McCain visited New Orleans where he delivered a sharp criticism of the Bush Administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina.

Among the millions of clips on the video-sharing Web site YouTube are 11 racially offensive Warner Brothers cartoons that have not been shown in an authorized release since 1968.
Some of the cartoons were removed on April 16. A message saying the cartoons were no longer available because of a copyright claim by Warner appeared in their place. By evening the messages disappeared, and some of the cartoons were back. Representatives for YouTube and Warner would not confirm whether the companies had tried to remove the cartoons.

Ricardo Reyes, a YouTube spokesman, said YouTube relies on copyright holders to identify infringing content and on users to flag offensive content. If people do not complain, videos remain, he said. Mr. Reyes said that copyright violations are removed “very quickly” once identified, but the problem “is that ownership is often tough to determine.” He said many users “unknowingly post because they don’t know the law.”

A representative for Warner wrote in an e-mail message that “Warner Brothers has rights to the titles” in question and that “we vigorously protect all our copyrights. We do not make distinctions based on content.”

The cartoons, known as the “Censored 11,” have been unavailable to the public for 40 years. Postings no longer appear if YouTube is searched for “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” a parody of “Snow White” and the most famous of the cartoons. But a search for “Coal Black” does find the cartoon.

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