Tough Times for YouTube

Today is Valentine's Day, which is pretty empty to me, of course. I'm not necessarily depressed or anything, but it is a rather wasteful idea to specify a certain day when couples are obligated to celebrate their relationships. That's just my two cents though. Anyway, darkness has befallen the house of YouTube as Viacom has permanently eluded them. Viacom and all its subsidiaries (including Comedy Central and MTV Networks) will no longer have any deal with YouTube and Viacom will instead host videos to be embedded on their own site, on their own terms. It's worked on Comedy Central's "Motherload" after all, and Viacom does own iFilm, so I'm sure they could use that as a channel for distribution. So in all honesty, they don't actually need YouTube. Viacom is huge enough to hold its own in the digital video arena, but it ends up as a huge blow to YouTube what with the 100,000 orders for content to be taken down and what-not. What doesn't help is the bad press they're getting from having revealed who it was that put up videos of "24" before they aired and vintage episodes of "The Simpsons" on YouTube to Fox. What I find is crazAsy is that people seem really upset by this. If you look in their privacy policy it clearly states: "We may release personally identifiable information...if required to do so by law...or respond to a court order, subpoena, or search warrant." So you kind of surrender your right to privacy by breaking copyright laws. Is that really so shocking? You agreed to it when you made your account, whether or not you read it. I support YouTube in their actions: it's not worth defending someone who clearly broke the law. He knew fully well that he had content that was not yet legally available. Anyway, this still doesn't spell good things for YouTube, but I'm sure they'll bounce back.



As many of you may recall, I enjoy reading Ars Technica reviews, so I couldn't pass up this one for the Nokia N800 Internet Communicator. It's really just a glorified, widescreen PDA, but it looks really nifty. I don't know how useful it would be for the average consumer, but I could see it being a great toy for techies or businessmen. I think once Skype gets on there, it'll then become much bigger for consumers.

The new version of uTorrent is out, and it's better than ever with bandwidth caps on individual torrents and important bugfixes. It's still my torrent manager of choice!

It looks like Apple was not able to garner exclusivity with The Beatles after all. They will definitely be available for download, but those of you without an iPod will not be left out in the cold, which is always good to know.

If you don't think your computer is secure enough then you're probably right. To see what you really need to protect your system, check out this list. I'm not going to lie, it's really long, but it's very useful. There are some awesome just common sense tips on there that we just don't think of about our computers, which are really one of our priciest possessions. So take care of yours!

Programmers should really rejoice in this site. I thought it was just going to be a bland list of tutorials, but it's a really clean, well designed page for navigating resources on a multitude of programming languages including ways to highlight your favorites. Definitely a must-bookmarks for any coders out there.

Let me start of the movie news with some trailers. These teasers for Bee Movie are surprisingly unfunny. I don't get why they wasted the money to shoot them, because they're not very entertaining. It's slightly better than the trailer for Underdog though. The good news is that the trailer for Penelope looks pretty interesting. Doesn't mean it'll be a great movie, but I think it has potential to be a lot of fun.

I've been waiting anxiously for Southland Tales, despite not being well-received at Cannes, and it looks like we haven't seen it yet because they've had trouble with a distribution plan and apparently still want to put some finishing touches on it (as well as a soundtrack). I'm not sure if this implies that they don't have a distributor, but hopefully they're making the edits that were clamored for.

Latino Review got their hands on The Green Effect and seemed to really enjoy it. I was surprised to discover that it's not another flop script, though I'm confused about the actual plot other than that it somehow centers on the environment (hence, the title). So I wonder why it wouldn't get picked up? Are the studios just hesitant to trust him now?

When the author I love, Stephen King, partners up with a creative genius like J.J. Abrams, I definitely sit up and read carefully. Abrams and Damon Lindelof are fans of King and are looking into an adaptation of The Dark Tower saga. I'm not sure in what capacity (big or silver screen) or how many installments, but I've heard those books are great. They're still sitting on my bookshelf, I'm afraid, waiting to be read.

Now for a Wednesday Mind Hump:

1. Who do you love?
Three big categories: my family, my friends, my God. That pretty much covers it!

2. What do you love?
Dancing, music, movies, and technology.

3. Where do you love? (What's your favorite place to be?)
Probably Austin, TX, so far =D