Archive Posts

Israeli soldiers who marched to a Ke$ha tune may have to get off the dance floor. Six gun-toting soldiers who break into a rehearsed dance number while patrolling a West Bank street in a lighthearted video posted on YouTube are facing possible disciplinary action.

The brief clip, which appeared online this weekend, shows a half-dozen Israeli Defense Force soldiers from the Hod platoon of the 50th battalion walking down a street in Hebron, according to Israel's Haaretz.com. As they reach the center of the street, the military men stop and kneel. A few moments later, Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" begins to play, and the soldiers break out in a coordinated dance.

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Google has rushed to fix a weakness at YouTube that allowed hackers to add inauthentic pop-up messages as well as redirect users to other websites. Code added in the comments of YouTube videos would be triggered when people watched the video. One notable example was of a pop-up message informing the reader that Justin Bieber, a Canadian singer, had been killed in a car accident – something that was wholly untrue. YouTube’s owner, Google, said that the issue was resolved within two hours.Google is continuing to check YouTube’s vulnerabilities to ensure there are no further weaknesses that could be exposed.

The battle between HTML5 and Adobe Flash for dominance over video on the Web is likely to end poorly for one of the two, and lately it’s been looking worse and worse for Flash. But today, Google-owned video site YouTube has come out with a list of its own reasons why Flash is here to stay - for now - and HTML5 simply isn’t qualified to handle the job at hand.

Overall, YouTube software engineer John Harding’s argument comes down to one simple statement: “We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does - there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video.”

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Is this a titanic battle for the future of the moving image? The very fabric of the how video is delivered is apparently up for grabs, with the struggle to decide the future framework for its delivery, increasingly obvious and palpable.

Perhaps the biggest name in online video, YouTube, recently weighed into this arena with some opinions of its own. YouTube is owned by Google so its opinions cannot be viewed as entirely politically  neutral, but either way.

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Three Wiltshire hoodies have been arrested and bailed after taking a double-decker bus for an early morning jaunt, part of which popped up on YouTube. Two 16-year-old girls and a 21-year-old man swiped the vehicle from a depot in Amesbury in the early hours of 18 June and headed off down the A345 towards Salisbury. In the process, they hit a tree before "smashing to a halt into parked cars on an Amesbury estate", as the Telegraph puts it. According to cops, the trio "caused around £30,000 damage, including to a green Volkswagen Polo, a silver Honda Jazz and three other £200,000 buses at the depot".

Inspector Martyn Sweett said: "It was utter stupidity, extremely reckless and they are rather fortunate that, because of the time of day that they took the bus, that they didn't kill anyone in the road. "To drive a bus like that takes a considerable amount of training. You have individuals who are completely untrained and they are driving round this huge bit of equipment on the roads."

After years of refusing advertising from online casinos and gambling operators, YouTube has begun publishing ads in the UK related to gaming. Ladbrokes has been accorded the privilege to be the first Internet gambling company to have an ad featured, but YouTube executives say businesses licensed for gaming in Italy, Spain, and France, as well as the UK, will be permitted to purchase ad space.

YouTube history is to turn down ads related to gambling, but the company was acquired by Google in 2006. Google was forced to stop publishing casino advertising in the US after a settlement with the US Department of Justice, but the search engine company has allowed UK ads to contain gaming material.

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With broadband speeds rising worldwide, plenty of people have the network connection to watch HD videos online without too much trouble. YouTube, like most other video sites, has been streaming HD videos for quite a while, but there’s always been an annoying issue, most of the times, the videos start streaming in the lowest quality available. This is annoying enough for individual videos, but, for playlists, it completely ruins the experience.

Thankfully, YouTube is finally showing signs that it’s doing something about it, at least partially, with the introduction of a new “Settings” button inside the new player, which helps you define your default playback settings. YouTube has always had a Video Playback Quality page, but it’s now making it more visible and accessible.

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YouTube will launch a breaking news feed this summer - the latest move by the video-sharing site to develop its news and journalism features. The YouTube News Feed will work with the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California to track news as it breaks on the site.

"The news feed will provide a stream of breaking news videos on YouTube, with a focus on strong visuals, non-traditional sources and the very latest uploads (…) Our goal with this news feed is to learn more about the news ecosystem on YouTube," says YouTube's head of news and politics Steve Groves in a blog post.

The feed is the latest in a series of features aimed at promoting more newsworthy videos and clips on the site, including previous launches of a citizen news channel, training guides for journalists in its Reporters' Center, and reporter's channel.

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Vancouver city officials are looking into the demolition of a building after two walls and a lamp standard collapsed into heavy rush-hour traffic, just missing a flag person. The incident, which was videotaped by a resident in the area and posted on YouTube, occurred early Thursday evening when the streets were still full of pedestrians and drivers. The videos showed the north wall of the building falling onto Helmcken Street, followed by the west wall collapsing onto Hornby Street about 10 minutes later.
 

Someone had found out a commercial in which Bollywood Actress Bipasha Basu had featured almost a decade back when she used to be working as a model. An interesting thing about the video is that Bollywood Actor Vivek Oberoi is also there in the video.

The video has recently gone viral since Bipasha Basu was not popular when the commercial was done but now has become a leading actress in the country. According to sources, Bipasha has said that his parents and John Abraham (current boyfriend) have been supportive to her. I have attached the video of the New York Lotto Commercial.

I did not find it so much provocative or anything as it was being claimed by the Indian News Channels.