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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.
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!?!
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.
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
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"
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.
If a video of someone's preschooler summarizing Star Wars requires a tracking cookie to access, well, if you want to stay completely private, you just go without the video.
If the President of the United States is using a service as an official distribution channel, though, it's not enough to say "If you don't like the policy, don't view the content." The President's official communication is, in essence, something that the American People have a *right* to view, and not to be tracked while doing it.
Let's just get a little 1984 here: What if it became, somehow, "right" to always watch the President's videos? Or wrong? And so, with the law behind them, the government subpoenaed those tracking cookie results, and determined who was being a good/bad little boy/girl?
Or more mundane: say someone works for Google, and has some access to that data. And has political differences from his/her spouse... so they look up the home IP in the tracking database for the President's videos. Domestic squabbles ensue because someone's listening to "that one" when they're not "supposed" to be.
Participation in the political process is both voluntary and an entitlement for most Americans between 18 and death. Tracking any part of that participation has the potential for abuse, and could have a chilling effect.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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.
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"
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.
Yes, because you lose freedom by using a freely usable (yes, freely,, fuck Stallman, fuck Bush, and fuck anybody else who wants to co-opt the word to means something that it does not mean) plugin that works just fine. OH NO I CANNOT RECOMPILE IT WHATEVER IS THE WORLD COMING TO
Zealots of all stripes are equally heinous.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
They were just experimenting with the latest video.
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/white-house-denies-it-is-shunning-youtube/
> ...what's the big deal?
Back in ancient times when tracking cookies were invented there was a furor over them and the US government promised not to use them. That rule is still in effect. That's all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
And let's not forget the obvious part, here: Akamai is already done. It works. It is the most efficient way we have (network-wise) to broadcast video across the current[1] Internet. Reinventing that wheel, and probably doing it badly, isn't going to save a dime.
[1]: I've been waiting for eons for multicast IP to become a reality for the general population, but it seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
Kid-proof tablet..
If President Obama wants bandwidth, bandwidth is what President Obama is going to get. It may take a little while to set up, but believe me, he's not going to be told he can't have it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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]
Zealots of all stripes are equally heinous.
I find your anti-zealot zealotry intriguing :-)
sigs are hazardous to your health
I think "free" as the adjective to "freedom" has been around longer than "free" as a synonym for "gratis". The "free as in freedom" users have a case that can be trivially proven to go back as far as the Virginia Bill of Rights in 1776 ("...all men are by nature equally free and independent...").
That being said, there is one reason to reject non-open source software: Lack of trust. Due to the code not being publicly accessible you have no way to tell what the software might do and no way to tell it doesn't damage your system except by trusting the company that made it. It doesn't help that virtually every EULA and software license states "this might actually do anything or nothing and you can't sue us over it". Whether or not that's acceptable depends on the user's evaluation of how risky running closed code is. Some decide it's not worth it and stick to F/OSS for their private use.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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)
Ken Thompson is calling on line two!
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I think "free" as the adjective to "freedom" has been around longer than "free" as a synonym for "gratis".
Yes...but Stallman is attempting, just like George W. Bush and most American politicians I can remember, to redefine "free" to mean "restricted in the ways I want it restricted." Stallman's "free" is not free; it is just as encumbered as some piece of proprietary code, just in a different way. BSD/MIT is arguably "free" in the actual sense of the word. I'd almost say that MPL/CDDL is "free", and where it's not is a lot more reasonable than the GPL.
That being said, there is one reason to reject non-open source software: Lack of trust. Due to the code not being publicly accessible you have no way to tell what the software might do and no way to tell it doesn't damage your system except by trusting the company that made it.
Open source is trustworthy? There is no such thing as trustworthy code. Even some Gentoo ricer depends on a compiler somebody else built. The only way to verify that that bootstrapping compiler doesn't do something nasty, as in kt's case, is to rely on the goodwill of others.
You know, just like you do with proprietary software.
The idea of open source being intrinsically more trustworthy is a sham. Open source has tons of advantages in certain situations--but "trust" is not one.
Some decide it's not worth it and stick to F/OSS for their private use.
Seriously, though, I don't really care if people insist on being stupid and just using open source. But it's when they fucking brag about it, hurf-durfing that the rest of the world should twist to their personal corner-case choices (and he was doing that by implication if nothing else), they need to be backhanded once in a while.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
However, those restrictions are actually intended to preserve certain freedoms, namely the freedom to retain access to the code even if it's modified by someone. Countries work the same way; they restrict, for instance, someone's freedom to sue you for things you say in order to protect your freedom to voice your opinions. Whether the GPL actually works as well as intended can be debated but it certainly isn't some kind of oppressive regime intended to give Richard Stallman control over the world's software.
For that matter, all computers are not trustworthy and should not be entrusted with anything important like money transfers. Anything not EAL 7 certified is not formally proven to be correct and non-malicious and thus not really trustworthy.
Of course you can say that as long as there is one possible attack vector it makes no sense to avoid other attack vectors as your BIOS or CPU might be malicious anyway, so making sure anything beyond it is non-malicious is a moot proposition. However, others might not work under the assumption that their computer is automatically compromised and actually care about what the OS and userland do.
To use an analogy: Why do they print the contents of processed food on the packaging? There's no proof that your specific box actually contains exactly what they wrote and even if they did an analysis, someone could have injected something nasty while it's on the shelf so you can't really tell what's in there anyway. Still, working under the assumption that the package is labeled correctly you can, for instance, avoid ingredients you're allergic to with high confidence.
Are you crossposting or something? The poster didn't brag about anything; they just remarked that they wouldn't use nonfree software. There is an argument against Flash video there: Flash video doesn't work everywhere, Gnash users just being one example. It's a fairly ubiquitous platform but shouldn't solely be relied upon. Another example would be people using recent versions of Firefox under OS X as Flash video tends to have issues with weird flickering artifacts there.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
However, those restrictions are actually intended to preserve certain freedoms, namely the freedom to retain access to the code even if it's modified by someone.
By doing so, they make it non-free. It's not a hard concept.
Countries work the same way; they restrict, for instance, someone's freedom to sue you for things you say in order to protect your freedom to voice your opinions.
Precsely. And that is why I laugh at the idea of a "free country."
Whether the GPL actually works as well as intended can be debated but it certainly isn't some kind of oppressive regime intended to give Richard Stallman control over the world's software.
Really? That's not a troll, that's an honest question. Stallman quite clearly believes that all software must be free. What makes you so certain that Stallman doesn't view the GPL as a method as a way to push for this (and yes, I do consider his stated aims oppressive, as I write CDDL and BSD code).
For that matter, all computers are not trustworthy and should not be entrusted with anything important like money transfers. Anything not EAL 7 certified is not formally proven to be correct and non-malicious and thus not really trustworthy.
Of course you can say that as long as there is one possible attack vector it makes no sense to avoid other attack vectors as your BIOS or CPU might be malicious anyway, so making sure anything beyond it is non-malicious is a moot proposition. However, others might not work under the assumption that their computer is automatically compromised and actually care about what the OS and userland do.
Bullshit, sir. If you're going to make one comment of security, you'd better be ready to own the security argument the whole way down. "Having the source code" isn't an indicator of security--especially as I'd be quite comfortable betting that the original poster sure as hell isn't going over the source code for his applications and, if he's not, there's only an illusion of security relying on the idea that the developers are trustworthy, at which point he's gained nothing. Personally, I assume nothing is secure, open-source or closed, and don't do anything on a computer without being willing to accept the consequences of it not being secure.
To use an analogy: Why do they print the contents of processed food on the packaging? There's no proof that your specific box actually contains exactly what they wrote and even if they did an analysis, someone could have injected something nasty while it's on the shelf so you can't really tell what's in there anyway. Still, working under the assumption that the package is labeled correctly you can, for instance, avoid ingredients you're allergic to with high confidence.
This analogy would be much stronger if not for the whole "oh my god, peanuts will kill you" scare of the last couple months, where the source of the upstream product was dirty.
The poster didn't brag about anything; they just remarked that they wouldn't use nonfree software.
Which is why I said it was implicit. If you intentionally choose to make things more difficult, fuck off, you're an irrelevant segment. There are implicit standards in play, and Flash is one of them. (Open, too, aside from their codecs, which IIRC are documented by others.) It isn't the rest of the world's fault that Gnash sucks (and it does).
There is an argument against Flash video there: Flash video doesn't work everywhere, Gnash users just being one example. It's a fairly ubiquitous platform but shouldn't solely be relied upon.
When it successfully targets more or less everyone, use it.
Another example would be people using recent versions of Firefox under OS X as Flash video tends to have issues with weird flickering artifacts there.
This is a m
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I'd like to clarify something: in this particular case, I think that offering links to video files is a good idea. I don't mean to imply that. Flash video is a bad mechanism for this for other reasons than "the poor widdle Gnash users can't use it," namely that something like Youtube may not exist five, ten years down the line.
But my point is that arguing against a de facto standard is just stupid. Unseat the standard by doing something better and better marketed, or get in line. Other choices are a tacit acceptance of being irrelevant.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/03/white-house-videos-on-youtube.html
Scott Draves