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White House Exempts YouTube From Web Privacy Rules
An anonymous reader writes "The new White House website privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, Obama's legal team has quietly exempted YouTube from this rule. Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video — even those users that do not click the "play" button. As CNET reports, no other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver."
Wasn't whitehouse.gov itself using tracking cookies as well? Is it not covered under the blanket ban on such things?
Considering how many Youtube videos are embedded on webpages other than the youtube.com domain, the tracking potential of this is unsettling. Disclaimer: I did not RTFA.
... unless they legislate them to remove those cookies. What alternatives to YouTube could they use?
There's no place like localhost
You know, every so often I see the latest story with a red background. I know this is supposed to be for subscribers, of which I am not one. I am not even logged in. Is this a bug?
A cookie to the youtube.com domain? Who cares.
What exactly are we losing by having this? If you're loading anything from youtube, then youtube could certainly log that fact permanently on their end.
Why is this news?
The U.S. government should have its own video servers, or lease them from YouTube, and not depend on commercial sites. Commercial sites can do anything they want any time they want; they don't have to consider internal government policy.
I was going to use Vimeo to host the vids, but got overrided. Frustrations.
THIS IS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT NEWS ITEM OF THE DAY AND UNDERMINES OUR DEMOCRACY!
Obama is evil because his staff allowed You Tube to set a cookie. There's a conspiracy. They've gotten to him, he's in the bag for them. I bet he got use of the orbital mind control lasers in exchange for this.
Jesus christ, what the fuck? YouTube gets to set a cookie on the page. Is that really a huge deal? Now they know you watched the Inauguration video from the White House website! Oh noes!
What is so interesting about my online video viewing habits that the Ideological State Apparatus feels it is worthwhile to let them track it?
And if I delete cookies? Then what use is it?
we can (rightfully) whinge about the Republican Fascist Death Machine, but this is the kind of idiotic actions re: ISA's that the Democratic Party is stuck to as if with glue at its wrists and ankles.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001
Why can't whitehouse.gov?
Incidentally, the download links are to MP4 files that are hosted on whitehouse.gov.
Yes, and the youtube TOS prohibits you from mirroring the videos or viewing them offline.
It's important for the government communications to be format/time shiftable so that we can pretend that we can hold them accountable to what they said in the past.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Very much agree. Putting stuff on YouTube in addition isn't a bad idea for publicity, since a lot of people use it, but embedding it in government websites seems to be asking for trouble, if only from a counting-on-another-business-for-distributing-information aspect. Not to mention essentially promoting the company that owns YouTube. :)
A third party host - YouTube - is allowed to keep tracking cookies. The federal regulation on tracking cookies applies only to federal websites, so that's not really a problem.
People seem suspicious that only YouTube was granted this exemption, but... are there any other third-party hosts that have things embedded in the whitehouse.gov website? If not, I still don't understand the problem here. YouTube is doing the tracking, not the feds. If the concern is over the ability of the feds to get that tracking data, then there are so many other ways they could do that it's not even worth getting butthurt over.
Sounds like this guy is just picking a nit.
=Smidge=
The honeymoon is over already. Obama is going to sell us down the river.
Interestingly, if you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN1S1LdkUeg you'll see that there is a "click to download" option. As far as I can see, all of this account's videos are downloadable.
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
The fact is that this is a colossal waste of public resources. The more time spent on anything but restructuring our economy and removing us from war, the closer we get to our complete collapse as a nation.
This is just a small example of how the federal government wastes its time. Congressional hearings for cheating in Major League Baseball? Check. Joe Biden and John McCain were major players in those hearings by the way. Seeing if video games can be banned from being sold if they are violent? Check. Hilary Clinton and Al & Tipper Gore have had that on their agenda for years. Instead of worrying about issues that matter our government hires teams of lawyers and technicians to track YouTube usage or investigate athletes or to stop GTA from being played.
this is significant is because Google's PAC was the fourth largest contributor to the Obama campaign. So, if anything else, it just shows that Obama is beholden to corporate interests just like every other president before him. No surprise there. On another note, I have my browser configured to delete all cookies when it is closed. This really ought to be the default on all browsers, as the only thing cookies have any use for (to you) is keeping track of your transactions when you're logged into a website. If they get deleted, all you have to do is log in again.
Compared to what the NSA is doing i'd say this is not the end of the world. Get a grip, you can turn them off, unless you're using IE. Then you just don't know you could.
"ZOMG, the new government is evil because now it tells us who is tracking whom!"
In other words, "When we link to a third party, non government owned, website to host videos, they will set their own tracking cookie as per their own policy. We've checked with our lawyers, they say this is OK and written a waiver to that effect. But just in case you don't want the cookie, we also include links to the videos to accomidate you."
What a non-story story.
Also read the governments requirement on cookies you can have them but you have to give a reason and purpose. It came from when you had that mass scare of cookies are evil and should be blocked and has never been changed, all federal sites just have the same boilerplate comments and ignore the it.
> Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies
> whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video -- even those users
> that do not click the "play" button.
Unless, of course, they choose not to accept the cookies, in which case they don't receive them. The videos still work fine.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The government aren't tracking you. (Well, probably they are, but this isn't it).
The entirety of this story is: Whitehouse.gov has embedded YouTube videos. Whitehouse.gov has no control over what cookies YouTube sets. Therefore, whitehouse.gov can either not embed YouTube videos or exempt YouTube from the cookie-ban.
Did you ever go to a blog with a YouTube video? Then you got "tracked" in the exact same way as you will on whitehouse.gov. By YouTube, not the government.
The problem here isn't that a youtube tracking cookie set in part thanks to government website could make your computer explode. The problem is the precedent it sets, government favoritism of youtube/google. Like when congress made youtube the official video sharing site for their content. The government shouldn't be picking favorites. They should release their own videos, on their own site, in the public domain and let people rip them over to youtube if they want.
The U.S. government should have its own video servers ...
Possible issues to solve before implementation:
Ideally, I'd like to see the government distribute videos via bittorrent, so they don't have to have servers that are that good, OR use a commercial site. Have a direct link to a low-quality video, and have the high-quality one available as a torrent.
Problem solved.
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Actually quite the opposite - reinventing the wheel by creating a government-only version of Youtube would be a colossal waste of public resources. When there's a free-market solution already out there Uncle Sam should be enthusiastically embrace it instead of adding to government waste
To me, it kinda works both ways. On one hand, you don't want to be dependant on YouTube. On the other hand, you don't want the government to be able to replace a video with another and claim that it always was this way. "We never said that... see our video?" When it's self-hosted, it's too easy to change. When it's YouTube-hosted, it's easy for YouTube to prove the change (and they may still have the old version, who knows). This is good for government transparency.
I would agree that there needs to be a public discussion about pros and cons, but thus far it doesn't seem cut and dried that YouTube hosting government videos is entirely a bad thing. Or entirely a good thing, either.
-- not an Obama supporter.
right on!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDlSOPhm5QM&feature=channel_page
It's been two days and we're still in Iraq and the economy is still in the toilet AND NOW THIS?!!?
So, who wants Bush back?
Thought so.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Hmm... that's true. On the other hand, they could simply syndicate it, couldn't they? Push the video to both places instead of just one. YouTube hosting isn't necessarily bad - it's the sole YouTube hosting that I'm not too sure about, and also the inherent partnership.
I also am slightly (slightly) concerned (this is a little OT) with the twitter/facebook/whatever else usage, especially with the recent security issues with both of those. What we really need in this country are official Facebook and Twitter accounts... and then, all we need after that is to have them hacked. :P
Yeah, I don't see why they should use Youtube at all. If it's just an issue of getting the video up on their site, they should be able to do that on their own (including using Flash to embed them). Or is there some other benefit that posting on Youtube gives them?
It seems like it should be enough to make them public domain, so that people can post them to Youtube if they want. The government should even be able to post them both on their own site and Youtube. I just don't understand why they should use Youtube as their primary means of dissemination.
The way government is run, it'll cost a minimum of $500,000 a year to run it's own.
Or... $0 a year.
While I think offering them as torrents is a good idea, I would hope that it wouldn't be strictly necessary. If the federal government can't manage the infrastructure necessary to host some public videos, it seems like we're in some trouble.
I like how you apparently don't know what this is about, so describe it as "monitoring what websites we browse even more" and don't know how much time or money was put into the decision, so label it a "colossal waste of public resources".
I guess in the absence of facts, the thing to do is make things up and be angry about your invented reality.
I understand what's going on. The White House isn't allowed to track users, and Google is. So the White House is going to let Google track the users. Then when the POTUS wants to find out who's been at the site, he'll issue some kind of EO to google to release that information in the name of "National Security".
Insidious. Clever!
Of course, now that I've figured this out, I'll be expecting a visit from some droll men in suits and sunglasses. I better have some tea ready for them.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
What they're OBVIOUSLY trying to do is find out what bin Laden is viewing on YouTube.
Or maybe the US Federal government is so big with so much diversity in personnel that they can have their webmonkeys play with websites to keep the general public informed as to what is going on (transparency in government, hopefully, though propaganda is just as likely at this point) while their military/intelligence personnel can focus on the war, and their economists can focus on, well, the economy.
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
You think their webmonkeys will contribute positively to these issues?
I wonder how many people and lawyers and lobbyists where hired and used to make this one decision about tracking internet usage? A team of ten? Possibly fifty? How much did this one decision cost in terms of hours? How many billable hours are we talking on taxpayer burden? $500,000? $1,000,000 worth of taxpayer money?
Think of it this way: that's a million bucks they CAN'T spend on the war instead. And these lawyers and support staff probably all live in the US and will likely spurn on the economy in their own area (largely DC, but they might order anal toys on-line from MA or something). If you're having difficulty thinking of it this way, don't worry, so am I.
Personally, I think that a legislative solution to a technical problem is troubling in its own right. There are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that would love to be able to issue waivers to themselves to bypass some annoyance (e.g., waste treatment, carbon emissions, etc.), but they can't. Abuse of a small power on day two of your new job is NOT a positive step. Apparently, you need to hire more technically-minded webmonkeys. But, make no mistake: it's a SMALL thing.
-- not an Obama supporter.
It states clearly and explicitly in their own privacy statement that Youtube is exempt from the tracker cookie issue and the reason why.
we really are scraping the barrel when a news story can be summed up by event + adverb = conspiracy.
So everything the government publishes on the internet should be hosted by a non-governmental organization? After all, the government could simply edit their websites to remove embarrassing information.
That's kind of what they are doing by also having a link to download the video file directly instead of viewing the embedded youtube player.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Maybe only YouTube presented a sufficiently convincing case for the exemption.
My initial reaction was the same. But then it dawns on me that the new Administration is using YouTube like any other agent of the Press. Do we demand that the US Goverment set up its own TV stations and newspapers? No. The President announces a press conference and lets the media do their own thing. Occasionally, he does an interview with a specific host of a specific show to convey some particular message. YouTube is simply a recent take on a very old idea.
They do have the videos up on their site, go to the link posted in the summary, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/ and check the download link. It's a direct whitehouse.gov link.
The advantage they have in posting the streaming version to YouTube is that now the videos are seen by more than just the folk who follow whitehouse.gov. YouTube is the #1, no contenders, site for sharing videos. Myspace, Facebook, nothing else comes close to it's viewer base. Even the "don't upload, just watch" sites are below it in terms in traffic.
Allowing more people to hear your message = good as far as I'm concerned. If I ever have an issue, it'll be when I start seeing "Five for Five!" ads in the middle of his speeches.
I said that YouTube was a bad idea early on, because of the discrepancies between YouTube's policies and the policies surrounding government content. You cannot save YouTube videos on your hard drive without violating their TOS. This is another example of the discrepancy. Disturbingly, this administration is not pushing YouTube to modify their policies for the White House channel.
Palm trees and 8
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's delivered by a CDN, why don't they get them to deliver the video too..
Focus people. FOCUS. Cookies from YouTube and we are wetting our pants over the privacy implications. Jesus Christ, get a fucking grip.
I am glad they used YouTube and didn't spend big bucks developing their own solution. In the unlikely events that:
a. YouTube deletes their video
b. YouTube ceases to exist
They have the original videos and can always do something else with them. It's kinda like saying that we'd have to create a government funded TV network to host debates. Sometimes idealism just isn't practical so you have to pick your battles.
My initial reaction was the same. But then it dawns on me that the new Administration is using YouTube like any other agent of the Press. Do we demand that the US Goverment set up its own TV stations and newspapers? No. The President announces a press conference and lets the media do their own thing.
If he was just posting the videos for download and then letting people post them on YouTube, that would be an accurate analogy... but the President invites representatives from many, many news outlets to the press conferences and briefings, rather than always calling this one newspaper when they have something to say.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The CNET article says that YouTube sets a cookie when you view a White House page with an embedded video. So the Inaugural Address page, which does not label the video as being from YouTube, would give you a YouTube cookie.
Incidentally, what happened to the Press Room pages? Where's the daily briefing? Where are the past press event pages? What a bunch of web maroons.
Of course, the tracking is a privacy issue that shouldn't be overlooked.
What really concerns me, though (since I can disable cookies and still watch the videos), is that by embedding YouTube videos, or even links to them, instead of hosting the videos on government infrastructure, the White House is promoting YouTube, a private, for-profit company.
Ok, so the govt. sucks at doing stuff like this, and YouTube does it well. So, I suggest that the govt. procure a YouTube-like system from YouTube, and then use that.
- an (otherwise) Obama Supporter
My initial reaction was the same. But then it dawns on me that the new Administration is using YouTube like any other agent of the Press.
Not really. The analogous situation would be if they provided a video file to download (HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent, whatever), and YouTube, Slashdot, etc, all distributed it themselves because their viewers were interested. The only difference the technology makes is that the whole world can fit in the press conference, rendering the third-party pretty unnecessary. And now you seem to be arguing that because in meatspace, not everybody can fit in the conference room, we should duplicate the now-unnecessary third-party, because... why exactly? Because that's the way it's always been done?
Last I checked, YouTube is not a federal agency. Why do they need a waiver from a rule which prevents federal agencies from using long-term tracking cookies to track users?
Yeah but with all that information there is almost surly someone or some organization keeping a copy for themselves. Then when the Government makes the switch they get some extra bad PR. This is the reason why Government publications are Public Domain, so that there WILL be a copy (or copies) around. Public Domain is what creates transparency.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
... but the President invites representatives from many, many news outlets to the press conferences and briefings, rather than always calling this one newspaper when they have something to say.
Not always. For example, the other night I saw an interview with President Bush and the First Lady on Larry King. There was no press pool.
Now - I don't really pay attention to these things. So I'm not sure how many interviews Bush was giving to other news outlets at the time. But I do know he's given personal one-on-one interviews before. So while I see YouTube as a channel for broadcasting a message, i'd think it would be a good idea if the Whitehouse also sought other such channels as well.
Of course, I'd be especially please to see all those messages available on whitehouse.gov in various formats including Ogg.
It's kinda like saying that we'd have to create a government funded TV network to host debates.
PBS?
There are a lot of aspiring competitors to YouTube, none of which have been able to get much traction. I'm sure one of them would agree to turn off their cookies for whitehouse.gov content in return for the publicity of being chosen to host whitehouse videos. Google might even agree to turn off cookies in the face of that sort of threat.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, introduce the general public to the wonders of BitTorrent why don't you. That's far safer then a nasty evil cookie.
Like saving a child from a dog on the pathway by throwing it onto the road.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
It's not a matter of whether they have the infrastructure, it's a matter of cost.
If the videos get distributed via bittorrent, then that reduces the government's total cost of distribution. The upload bandwidth can be paid for by the viewers of that high-quality video, rather than every single taxpayer.
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99% of viewers of these videos will already have the YouTube cookie on their machine anyway, it's one of the most visited sites in existence. Especially considering the amount of Obamas campaign videos he released on YouTube, I would be surprised if most people didn't have this cookie anyway.
I'm sure Joe the Plumber will figure out the tubes one day.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
The only difference the technology makes is that the whole world can fit in the press conference, rendering the third-party pretty unnecessary.
Not every message coming out of the White House involves a press conference. There are times when the message is framed in a much more personal format. Although I do agree that an online presence has advantages over some traditional formats. But keep in mind that the limited room capacity could already be overcome through the printed word. Yet press conferences still remain a staple. There are multiple venues available and a reason to use each one.
And now you seem to be arguing that because in meatspace, not everybody can fit in the conference room, we should duplicate the now-unnecessary third-party, because... why exactly? Because that's the way it's always been done?
I'm not saying this is The Way. What I'm saying is that YouTube is being treated the same way other communications technologies have been treated in the past. And while each technology offers unique traits, ultimately they are tools to facilitate communication. You use the tool that makes sense.
In the early 1930's President Franklin D. Roosevelt began broadcasting his now-famous "fireside chats" largely on a single radio station - WGY of New York. I'll leave the details as an exercise for the interested reader. But these Presidential addresses were formated to be informal and plain-spoken, direct to the American public. YouTube strikes me as a similar thing as the early radio station WGY; both cutting the edges in their respective technology niche.
Using YouTube allows them to have comments, rankings, and seem like the Government is interested in being a member of the internet community; which most agree was a large part of how Obama was able to raise so much support, particularly amongst the under 30 crowd.
If they posted it to their own HTTP server, it would seem just like another PSA. If they hosted it themselves, there would (I would imagine) huge implications regarding comment-moderation, every single design decision in the system open to every possible conspiricy theory (everything is a worm on the hook). If they do it this way, they avoid all that nonsense and and let YouTube be the content/comment police.
Having the community element is huge; as it makes them look more relevant to the internet culture, and probably works well with the fact that most Obama whitehouse staffers probably already know how do physically "produce and post" a video to youtube with very little change in training, which is efficent. Not to mention that a portion of folks that would never visit whitehouse.gov or would visit the youtube video to just bitch about it or flame are still watching it. You're getting eyes you would have probably never gotten. Having the video on YouTube also allows every youth political club or blogger to embed the video directly to their site/blog without the Government incuring bandwidth cost.
Given the ability to look use HTTP Referers; and IP-to-Geography resolution software, the Gov't can get all the useful information it needs about surfers without using cookies, and the fact that it can't "publicly" get the logs from YouTube for the sole purpose of gathering demographic data, means that the cookie is pretty benign; and no more invasive than whatever YouTube does with the cookies whenever you watch a video on any site.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
In what way is the BitTorrent protocol inherently harmful to users, computers, or the Internet?
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I agree that bittorrent is a good solution. My point is that there's a difference between "We can host it ourselves, but we decided to use bittorrent because it's more efficient," and "We can't host it ourselves."
Even ignoring cost, bittorrent is, in a lot of ways, a more robust solution than relying on a single server or even several mirrors.
I was responding to a very minor thing, really, which was: "so they don't have to have servers that are that good..." Regardless of whether they're using bittorrent, I don't particularly like the idea of the whitehouse using servers that are somehow sub-par or crappy. It might just be a language thing, and by "good" you just mean that they shouldn't need to build Google-level infrastructure just for sharing a couple videos, and I'd agree with that. But for heaven's sake, the whitehouse shouldn't be hamstrung technologically in order to save a few thousand dollars, given the size of the budget.
127.0.0.1 youtube.com 127.0.0.1 whitehouse.gov #etc.
It might just be a language thing, and by "good" you just mean that they shouldn't need to build Google-level infrastructure just for sharing a couple videos, and I'd agree with that.
Yeah, that's basically what I meant. Sorry for the confusion.
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Why is this not tagged "notnews"? Those aren't even their cookies.
Honestly, cookie hysteria was so 10 years ago. Attack of the furry blue nutcases all over again.
Would be why Barack cannot use his blackberry, yet they can use youtube...
Xaotik Designs
This just sounds like google got essentially no-bid contract from the whitehouse. Google/youtube is basically geting a benefit (albeit probably marginal value), from having tracking cookies and being "exclusive". Other competitors probably didn't get a shot at the "business" and currently don't seem have a similar exemption and would not get the benefit from this and it gives the appearance that Google has a slight advantage over some other video streamer (maybe hulu?)
Sadly this seems to be a small backstep from the steps that Obama made to help make the inauguration funding seem less like yet another influence pedaling opportunity (e.g, cap donation to $50K, etc, etc) and seem like Google being able to "buy" access to cookies on a government website. Perhaps if the videos were served from a domain where the information obtained from the cookies are made available under the FOIA that might be okay, but it seems to me that google may have essentially traded some server/storage cost for the ability to send more targetted ads to people that view videos on whitehouse.gov and charge advertizers for that targetting. Clever for them.
To me this is like Intuit getting permission to mail out government income tax forms to taxpayers and inserting a coupon for turbo-tax. I'm sure H&R block or Hewitt wouldn't be too happy about Intuit getting a no-bid contract to access to the names and home mailing addresses of people who request forms from the IRS and do taxes themselves, (rather than do their taxes on-line or send the to a professional tax preparer) for the price of printing and sending out some bulk-mail. This type of targetting advertizing would probably be much better !/$ than sending out junk mail.
The government is allegedly getting something for free in both cases, but that's just because it's giving away something of value to get it which doesn't happen to be money. To make it worse, it didn't give all the players the same opportunity. What's the problem, you say... Well rename google to halliburton and think about Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq. Sure there aren't many companies that wanted to do some of the work (and in the case of putting out oil field fires, not many companies actually qualified to do it), but people were screaming bloody murder about the fact it was no-bid.
now you got it. HOPE for some better news someday... 01.21.2013 actually..
Commercial sites can do anything they want any time they want; they don't have to consider internal government policy.
Um, so? The absolute worst that happens is that YouTube says "no" and we are exactly where we would be if they hadn't hosted it. It's not like they upload it then delete all the other copies. The government is using a free service to save money and if that free service stops working, they will pick another free service or start paying for it. Why do you want the government paying for something they could get for free?
Learn to love Alaska
Can we at least be happy that the president even knows what YouTube is?
Unlike Bush Jr or Bush Sr?
[End Of Line]
The U.S. government should have its own video servers, or lease them from YouTube, and not depend on commercial sites. Commercial sites can do anything they want any time they want; they don't have to consider internal government policy.
This whole issue would go away entirely if whitehouse.gov set up a bank of Torrent trackers. Let us pay for the bandwidth and keep outfits like Youtube out of it completely. Of course, that would send entirely the wrong message. What, you mean Bit Torrent can be used for legitimate purposes? Sure, dude, whitehouse.gov puts up all its videos that way. Hell, if they really wanted to do it on the cheap just post them to The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
Obama's media sponsors probably wouldn't like that very much.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
> Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies > whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video -- even those users > that do not click the "play" button.
Unless, of course, they choose not to accept the cookies, in which case they don't receive them. The videos still work fine.
What do you mean posting a well though out reply? This is /.
Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Tick "Always clear my private data when I close [Browser Name] -> Settings -> Tick at least Cookies -> OK -> Close
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
That's the (former) President Elect's Youtube account's videos, ChangeDotGov. You're looking for the "whitehouse" account's videos. They also have the "Download" link.
The Official Channel of the White House. (These videos are public domain per White House copyright policy)
And just like that the wind changed direction. These folks do indeed know their stuff and they're hitting the ground running. Those videos were up sooner than I would have though possible for government work. Can you believe it's only day three? What will tomorrow bring? Are they going to hire a video enabled Truth Corps to stream American Success Stories from every corner of the land to defeat the drumbeat of doom from the mainstream media? Solicit same from the general public? Offer tours of Area 51 and revive the economy with the proceeds from the gift shop? What? I'm actually excited to know.
Oh, [tinfoil hat] and if there's been a "Whitehouse" account on youtube since Joined: January 21, 2006, where are the videos from before three days ago? Was it always there unused, or was there content there that now is gone? [/tinfoil hat]
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The POTUS headlines three stories on the /. main page, and not only did nobody get killed - they're all news for nerds, and they're all positive. Shoot, two of them are even stuff that matters. A POTUS trifecta on /.
I have to go lie down now.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Canadian cents...
Preferences->security
check box under cookies which says "only from sites I navigate to"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You always receive the cookies, it's up to you whether they get stored or flushed.
"What really concerns me, though (since I can disable cookies and still watch the videos), is that..[snip]...the White House is promoting YouTube, a private, for-profit company. [snip] So, I suggest that the govt. procure a YouTube-like system from YouTube, and then use that."
/sarcasm
Where do you stop? Should the pentagon buy up every company who's products it supports (eg: Lockheed C-130 Hercules or IBM WebShere)? That's going to get expensive very quickly, are you prepared for the inevitable 4000% tax hike - or will you just lament the fact that removing the logo's to avoid massive tax hikes has reduced transparency?
In a democracy the answer is simple, but it's also at odds with human nature: Watch your government more than they watch you.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
because CHANGE is what goes in there, you certainly won't have anything left in your wallet or bank account after Congress and this Administration get done stimulating themselves
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
most slashdotters subscribe to the whitelist notion when it comes to cookies. only my bank, my netflix, and slashdot get to assign cookies...i dont remember adding any 'tubes' to that list.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If he was just posting the videos for download and then letting people post them on YouTube
Thought about this for a while, and maybe that "solves" everything. Post the video in a wide variety of formats AND a link to youtube with a disclaimer.
Personally, I don't see any issue with the situation, but the above "solution" seems to cover all bases.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
MSN should also have gotten an exemption, since they actually contributed more.
And if you're going to be using your money to buy influence in Washington, allowing tracking cookies for YouTube videos on the Whitehouse website is a pretty crappy return on investment.
Personally, I don't see any issue with the situation, but the above "solution" seems to cover all bases.
Except for having the convenience of embedded video with a gigantic PLAY triangle in the middle of your web page.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
No way. And who are you kidding... who do you think will RUN these servers? The government? They will contract a private firm like it does for EVERYTHING ELSE. The government doesn't do anything itself but push papers.
The only thing you'd be getting from your suggesting is a huge price tag for the building of the infrastructure and then the yearly maintenance.