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White House Ditches YouTube
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that in an apparent response to privacy complaints, the White House has quietly moved off of YouTube as a method for serving the President's weekly video address. Choosing instead to use a Flash-based solution and Akamai's content delivery network, this comes just days after YouTube began to roll out their own new policies regarding privacy of visitors.
Wise choice.
I never understood why they would choose YouTube over other Internet "channels". It is not exactly a "neutral choice".
If the president would like to speak to the American people, why not choose something not affiliated with any company.
But, as a non-American, what do I know.
...but what's the big deal? I did RTFA, for the record, and it just doesn't seem like it make a whole lot of sense. Visitors get a tracking cookie, which happens literally all the time when you visit websites. So why is this suddenly a big deal when it involves the President's blog? I...just don't get it. Why should someone care so much about such a trivial little thing like a tracking cookie? Anyone want to provide a poor user like myself with some enlightenment?
That is, the site would be free to keep logs on the videos viewed by visitors to its own site as well as those embedded on blogs, but it would opt to immediately forget all identifying information associated with requests from government sites.
First I watched some hairy milf porn, then some stuff on how ot win on "Call of Duty", then I watched some heavy metal and cop killing rap music videos, a Joel Osteen sermon, then I watched this guy with an Uzi with a silencer knock off a bunch of targets (way cool!), and then I watched Obama's weekly address.
A few hours later, this black helicopter lands in my front yard and a bunch of guys kick my door down! I mean, WTF!?!
It's not that hard to uh, just delete the cookies. Not to sound drastic or anything.
Flash? When HTML 5 is done they can use the tag.
"Choosing instead to use a Flash-based solution"
Last time I checked, YouTube uses flash as well.
Biden recommended the withdrawal after YouTube refused to give him their "number".
with youtube, there were a lot of people who weren't interested in politics that might stumble upon the video. This is the type of people who obama wants to target.
What they need to do is release the video at both the .gov site and youtube.
Yes, but they want something they can use for THIS presidential term.
Thank you! Thank you! I'm here all week! Try the veal!
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
A fraction of the stimulus can have video.gov up and running in one week.
Don't successful websites always take about a week according to their founders?
Keeps the hordes from making useless comments because government can write the privacy policy and find out everything about anyone - except for WMDs. Imagine that - no YouTube comments like 'lol', or 'i mean dude'.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
I'm not saying that they shouldn't use flash, although it certainly crossed my mind. Vendor lock-in is bad, especially for government services.
Good for the federal government. They shouldn't be picking certain video sites over others just because it's the cool thing to do. Particularly one that is owned by a powerful company like Google.
No doubt the videos will be quickly ripped in uploaded to youtube, and a zillion other video sharing sites so people aren't stuck with the government website if they don't like it. And it's all legit because the videos are in the public domain.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Yeah, I heard it's coming out the same day as Duke Nukem Forever.
Troll? For valuing my freedom above the ability to watch 3 minute segmented episodes of anime and the other things of critical importance residing on youtube, I get modded troll?
If Gnash worked with Youtube, I'd use it. But it doesn't, whether through some error of my own, mirrored across my circle of friends, or due to some defect. Since I refuse to install a nonfree application *just* to go to youtube, I don't go. Don't assume that absolutely everyone uses youtube.
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They are now the state, to protect copyright, even those of their foes. Welcome to bureaucracy Obama policy wonks. Who wins in the end: Youtube. Really--cause if this continued the 1st SNAFU on youtube would have been blamed on Google and the big G would lose creditability--political wonks never admit blame nor fault. Wrong choices, maybe, but not blame.
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And if gov't can build a better youtube (which I doubt), well then that's change I can believe in. Otherwise, all this political discussion of economy, jobs, and stuff is just to prop up the current system in order to support a political party's agenda--in other words, HYPE.
I block the hell out of akamai, and now, it seems i have to let it all in just to get to see the Presidential Addresses?
Why not just post them to ads-free FTP sites. Put a link on the whitehouse page and let me run the thing in my local media player (xine, mplayer, kaffeine, etc, and if it's a DIRE situation, then, umm, ms media player...).
C'mon, Administration! Be platform/software/player neutral. Don't be a "player hater"...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Oh, OK, sweet. MP4 and other options ARE available...
Stupid me. THIS is why slashdotters should RTFA, FIRST, heheheh....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
That's not going to happen until the general American public moves off of MSIE 6 and 7, which will unfortunately take years. Sorry, but Flash video isn't going anywhere any time soon.
How is a tag any better than the tag used now? The browser will still load Flash, because it will be a Flash file that is offered. It will be Flash file because everybody - and on Slashdot everybody means "at least 0.1% of the population" - and I mean everybody (ie, maybe 0.2% of people) uses Flash and only Flash.
The tag will just tell the browser to load a Video. It won't - and can't - mandate which client to use.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
Anything the federal government creates is in the public domain anyways... I'm sure anything posted on whitehouse.gov will be posted on youtube by any number of bloggers.
What exactly are the privacy concerns that are valid at YouTube.com that aren't are *.gov?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
When HTML 5 is done they can use the <video> tag.
Yes, but they want something they can use for THIS presidential term.
It works in my browser. Maybe the government should promote standards by using the new technology and directing users to a browser that is innovative and current and supports the standard.
I guess the revolution will be televised after all.
Albeit with super spin put on it.
Relax. It's good for you!
U-turn on YouTube, or was it a low-blow/low-tech reach-around? LOL!
Seriously, though, YouTube just has wayyyyy to much distraction on it and maybe the viewers might get bored and click on another link in the side bars....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Is it to hide the embarrassingly few number of views of the address?
Smoke some weed, you'll be less anxious.
Privacy? on the Internet? Time to wakeup and smell the coffee. If an Intelligence,(ignore the oxymoron), Agency wants to learn about you, they will; that's their job. I can think of some good reasons to put the presidents messages on youTube. Cost, zip. And if the president starts getting some hits on his submittals, then possibly he can have youTube add some advertising on the bottom of the video clip; and generate some money to ease the burden of us tax paying types. It helps get money flowing again, and "that's a lot of change."
from the article "This solution, which appears to use Akamai's content delivery network, does not make use of tracking cookies."
Yes it does use cookies. Adobe's Shared Object Library cookies. Right click on any flash video and go through the privacy manager and look at the list of all the sites you've visited.
Shoddy /. reporting FTW. Don't you guys have any tech savvy at all?
Akamai is an odd choice of platform if The White House is concerned about privacy. Akamai serve about 20% of the world's Internet traffic and function as a "content delivery platform" for many big-name websites. Most of the work they do is in caching images and interactive media, as well as serving ads for many websites to improve loading speed. They are like Google in many ways, in that they have a massively distributed server network that spans 70 countries and are ingrained in many peoples' browsing experience.
One of the things they are best known for is Internet usage statistics. They provide good indicators of general Internet use and use of specific services.
Also like Google, they track users using various means, and use the details to profit. Most importantly, they use this information for advert targeting.
There are two dissimilarities between Google and Akamai (ignoring the obvious dissimilarity of the two companies' models): Akamai have spent most of their life trying to find ways to make a profit and Akamai receive a lot less public scrutiny because their services are transparent to the end-user.
If YouTube was abandoned due to Google's privacy practices, privacy advocates should be as concerned about the privacy practices of Akamai. Indeed, the extent to which Akamai tracks users needs to be investigated and exposed for the sake of public scrutiny.
I'm a vegan. I'll be here all weak.
Not only should the President's weekly radio address be available as a YouTube-esque Flash video--so should the actual video files.
Better yet, hash the video files and post the hash values on whitehouse.org. This way, anyone who wanted could mirror or archive the videos, and anyone downloading it from anywhere could prove that it's the real thing.
Great news, from what I hear under previous agreements, YouTube would have owned the rights to the bailouts, Citibank, holdovers from the Bush administration, the credit crisis, tainted peanut butter and America. I don't think my Google stock could have handled that.
As soon as it's a standard perhaps that would be a valid criticism. That's not the case right now. According to the document itself, it's not even in the candidate stage.
The <video> tag doesn't work like that. You reference a video file directly, such as: <video src="http://videos.example.com/the_video.ogg"></video>
Your browser displays the UI for the video -- Flash isn't involved at all. (Unless Adobe made Flash interpret the <video> tag while running in IE, which would be cool, but at the same time contradictory to their lock-in philosophy.)
Grab a copy of the latest Firefox 3.1 beta and start playing with it. Without Flash installed.
You used to be cool.
Oh no! The CAPTCHA is "baboon". Does that mean I am a racist?
They were just experimenting with the latest video.
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/white-house-denies-it-is-shunning-youtube/
Not affiliated with any company, hey? You mean like Adobe Flash?
Since the address is an official communication, why can't it be hosted on "whitehouse.gov"?
The President can't get enough bandwidth for it? The FedGov has bandwidth out, as Zappa would say, "the provervial wazoo"!
Jeez, this is actually pretty easy to fix. Just ask the tier-1 providers to provide no-cost peering to the whitehouse.gov site.
(Unless, of course, they want to face:
while (investigation.practices) == false {
if ((cash_in > 1000000000) || (good_press > $0x1000000)) && (rahm.canKillThisIfItGetsOutOfHand($Limbaugh_Now) && (ISPonLimbaughSide(Situation)))
Ah - forget the coding - just tell them there's bailout cash coming their way if they make it go viral.
The "US Government" might have more bandwidth than god himself, but if you think it is easy to stroll up to whatever IT guys own the fat cisco router and carve off a hunk of bandwidth pie, you've never worked in government.
I'm posting this anonymously so as to not interfere with any office politics, but trust me, it isn't easy. I know of somebody who works for a local government who sits on top of some serious bandwidth. This person maintains the energy management system used by the government office. Said systems need to be accessed remotely. Said systems also need to talk to each other on some kind of Ethernet based network. YOu think they can just use the existing network? You think they can use the internet bandwidth for remote access? Nope. State regulation prevents them from using it--it it would punch weird holes in the firewall and basically put the IT guys in a position where they loose part of their "turf". Thanks to the combination of both government politics and regulation, despite the fact they have a gigabit internet connection, they had to pull in a seperate, slow as hell DSL connection for their remote access.
So no, it doesn't matter if the government has lots of bandwidth... if it upsets the precious turf owned by the IT staff, you can forget about it.
Akami is probably much cheaper than trying to play government-agency politics. Plus they don't exactly have the time it would take to get all the right approvals to route above and around the stubborn IT staff.
And the new flash is really good.
It has a nice crisp closed captioning.
Pay royalties to watch an MP4?
What planet are you and the guy that modded you up on?
[UID-HeinzIntel]
First fail !
There, fixed that for you :)
They only stopped embedding youtube videos on the whitehouse gov site
THANK YOU!
Stupid misleading headlines and summaries... grrr
You can't take the sky from me...
As if that stopped manufacturers from "implementing" 802.11n.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If it costs about as much to protect "your content" from foreign leeches with the tech used, the inability of that tech to be 100% effective and the inability of that tech to be 100% transparent and accurate in allowing legitimate users access (and so increasing support costs in fixing these issues) than you can expect to get by getting all these people to pay, then there IS a justification for just going "Meh, download it. Here's a BT seed".
Heck, if the cost of bandwidth is reduced enough by using BT without DRM/restriction (so that lots more people can seed it without touching BBC bandwidth), that alone could save them as much as they lose by having their content unrestricted.
People STILL buy "Pride And Prejudice", even though it's available free and out of copyright.
Shame on you, Slashdot! That was NOT at 5-level Funny. Maybe a 2. MAYBE.
No, not even a 2. Not close.
I'm literally angry at your suddenly lapse in judgment over humor.
I always thought the should officially use miro (not as the only distribution form).
It would show a lot of people what bit-torrent really is about, and would save them a LOT of money.
I'd evacuate all high schools in 20kms around you, you are that kind of maniac.. oh, guess it's easier to evacuate you. hey FEDS here! here! /. is becoming the gathering point of fanatical zealots.. muahahaha when trolling meets reality!
also, Fuck You.
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/03/white-house-videos-on-youtube.html
Scott Draves