youtube

If you were paying attention last month, you might remember alarming headlines reporting an anti-Islam YouTube video "sparks violence in Libya," is "inciting violence," and caused "U.S. embassy workers' deaths."

One problem: those reports were untrue.

A flurry of disclosures in Washington, D.C., this week revealed that the Obama administration's blaming of the YouTube video for prompting a military-style attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi was wrong. And those revelations have reignited a long-running partisan debate over national security and security funding.

Republicans suggested that the White House's efforts … Read more

YouTube's ongoing effort to keep visitors on its pages for longer took a new twist today, when the video portal said it will start ranking videos by how long people watch them.

The move makes it more difficult to game the system by choosing a provocative thumbnail image for your video in an effort to drive clicks. Instead, creators will be rewarded for actually getting viewers to watch the whole video.

It follows a similar change the Google-owned company made to its suggested videos feature earlier this year. "These changes better surface the videos that viewers actually watch, … Read more

Uploading a YouTube video causes it to be converted to the format used for streaming by the service. If you ever lose your videos, you could always grab the converted versions from the YouTube site, but what if you want the originals?

Google Takeout is now offering the ability to download the original versions of your videos, as mentioned by the Google Data Liberation blog. Takeout allows you to export data like settings, groups, or photos from Google's other Web sites and services.

Unfortunately, you can only download all videos together at this time. There's no option to … Read more

Google today bowed to demands from Brazil to restrict access to a YouTube video that had attacked a mayoral candidate.

"Late last night, we learned that our final legal appeal has been denied and so now we have no choice but to block the video in Brazil," Fabio Coelho, head of Google's Brazil operations, said in a post today. "We are deeply disappointed that we have never had the full opportunity to argue in court that these were legitimate free speech videos and should remain available in Brazil."

The move came a day after Brazilian … Read more

Brazil made good on its promise today and detained the country's head of operations for Google, according to the Associated Press.

The debacle began last week when Google refused to remove denigrating video clips of a politician from YouTube as ordered by a Brazilian judge. Laws in the country limit public criticism of political candidates.

Since Google failed to remove the clips, Judge Flavio Peren initiated a statewide, 24-hour suspension of Google and YouTube, while also ordering the arrest of Google executive Fabio Jose Silva Coelho.

According to the Associated Press, Brazil's federal police said that Coelho should … Read more

A friend of mine recently sent me a direct message on Twitter, it said "lol u didnt se them taping u" and had a link to Facebook. I hadn't remembered being taped in the past few days and I'd never seen my friend use this type of Twitter-shorthand, along with typos. To me, it was obviously spam.

I'm not the only one to be getting these spammy direct messages on Twitter that lead to bogus Facebook links. Apparently a lot of people have been complaining of these messages, according to Sophos analyst Graham Cluley who … Read more

YouTube is looking to help video makers grow their global audience. Google's video hosting platform announced today that videos can now be translated into more than 300 different languages -- from Turkish to Tagalog to Tswana.

"Growing a global audience on YouTube means having your videos reach many people, speaking many languages," YouTube product managers Jeff Chin and Brad Ellis wrote in a blog post today.

YouTube has two types of translating services. One is the automatic caption translation service that uses Google Translate and has more than 60 languages. The other service translates more uncommon languages … Read more

It's the logical next step in iPhone development: a much, much, much longer screen. It's 18 percent thinner and 795 percent taller than the previous iPhone. A parody video has popped up on YouTube to tout the phone's ability to reduce "scrolling fatigue" and offer full-body FaceTime.

The video, called "A Taller Change Than Expected" comes from YouTube comedy troupe Satire, makers of the "We're NASA and We Know It" video. NASA Mohawk Guy, complete with stars in his hair, makes a cameo appearance rocking his extra-long iPhone 5 as a guitar.… Read more

YouTube fans who don't upgrade their iOS device to the latest version can relax: the company plans to continue supporting the old iPhone app indefinitely, CNET has confirmed.

A representative said the TV-cabinet YouTube app that has been a part of iOS from the beginning will continue to function on the older devices, even as it disappears as a pre-installed app in iOS 6. Users can continue browsing the selection of videos inside the old app, which are free of advertising.

It may not seem like much of a surprise that YouTube will continue supporting the old app, and … Read more