Some people viewing YouTube videos have gotten an alert saying antivirus software has detected a computer virus called Actns/Swif.T. That virus is real enough; it redirects people to a website which then installs a piece of hostile software deceivingly called Antivirus 2009. The software is actually spyware, and notoriously annoying to remove.

But YouTube is not actually infected with a virus, it turns out. Instead, out-of-date antivirus software is mislabeling YouTube clips as a threat.

Panic over, right? No. The video format YouTube uses, Flash, has proven insecure before. YouTube processes users' video files and generates its own Flash files, so it's unlikely that YouTube would host hostile code — but never say never. As people spend more time on video sites and social networks like MySpace and Facebook, they increasingly become targets for virus creators.

The bigger problem here is figuring out whom to trust. Outdated virus-detection software, or the websites they're labeling as dangerous? Blogs which report new viral threats, or the ones that debunk them? Software which labels itself "Antivirus" but actually infects your computer? We're going deep down the rabbit hole, and I don't think Keanu Reeves is waiting for us on the other end.

Google has plenty of business in Washington these days, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Department of Justice. Convenient, then, that CEO Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama weeks before the election, joining his board of economic advisors and appearing in Obama's primetime infomercial. Schmidt doesn't need a government job — he's clearly volunteering to be America's CTO in his spare time.

Schmidt is savvy enough to realize that YouTube's growing prominence as a media outlet could help the company become a larger political player — which is why the site sponsored two campaign debates. Traffic? Come on. YouTube hardly needs the help. Schmidt — who attended one debate with a mistress on his arm, like an old-school power broker — orchestrated the events to maximize Google's political influence.

The outgoing administration has not been friendly to Google, whose management team tilts strongly to the left. The Department of Justice's threat to sue Google if it proceeded with a deal to sell search ads for Yahoo may have been, at least in part, politically motivated.

Google mostly wants a free hand from Washington to cement its lead in online advertising — but it also wants help bullying telephone and cable companies into letting its services and ads flow unimpeded on high-speed broadband lines and cell phones, a cause it has dubbed "network neutrality."

Network neutrality is an abstract issue. But YouTube, helpfully, makes it very concrete to politicians, who have long understood the power of the moving image to influence the public. It's easy to picture Google lobbyists pulling up a politician's YouTube videos, and asking them, "Now how would you feel if Verizon slowed down your videos? Wouldn't it be wrong if AT&T didn't let customers view them on their cell phones?"

Even in its copyright enforcement, Google can club politicians. The McCain campaign complained about YouTube's takedown policy, which has a mandatory waiting period before videos whose rights are disputed can be reposted to the site. Will Democratic politicians — or any politician who votes the right way on network neutrality — find that a YouTube account manager is glad to make that kind of problem quietly go away?

It's a symbiotic relationship, to be sure. Google helps politicians reach young voters on YouTube and hosts their videos for free. YouTube benefits from the free content and the traffic political videos generate; even if it doesn't sell ads directly on the pages, it's estimated that it could make $1 billion a year on search ads — and in that business, merely cementing YouTube's traffic lead helps Google make money.

In that light, isn't there something that stinks about handing the president's weekly addresses to a single commercial outlet controlled by a political ally of the president? Obama's YouTube chats amount to a large, unspoken, behind-the-scenes government kickback. Every election has something dirty about it. And there's no question Google won this contest.

If so, it's scant reward for America's CTO. If transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett's two-minute talk yesterday is any indicator, most of these clips will be no more exciting than a White House press release. Obama himself, though, has one of the most awesome telepresences I've ever seen. Mr. President, get yourself a bulldog and a skateboard and you'll blow Avril Lavigne and Justin Laipply right off the Most Viewed (All Time) page.

There's more than a hint of desperation around YouTube's scramble. And that's as it should be. Google, in its early days, scrambled around for a business model; at one point, it thought it might do enterprise software, which is how it ended up with Schmidt, a former computer scientist, as a CEO.

Mistakes happen.

And that's the point: YouTube needs to make mistakes, lots of them, fast. Google's advertising business is, for now, gushing cash, giving YouTube some room to maneuver. But shareholders are not infinitely patient. The more ways YouTube tries to make money, the better the odds it will happen on something that works. It needs to carefully measure what's working, and tweak its efforts. This kind of mind-numbing lather-rinse-repeat gruntwork is actually something Google is good at; feed its engineers data, and they'll come up with an algorithm for success. What Google can't afford to do is waste time chasing some impossibly elegant solution which springs, full-grown, like Minerva from the skull of Google god-king Eric Schmidt.

MacGyver will now be available on YouTube, and you won't have to watch it in frequently taken-down 10-minute chunks. Yeah, you didn't know that was a CBS show, and you didn't care. But it's on YouTube! Californication, too. It airs on Showtime, which is owned by CBS. But what it really means to me is that my Duchovny-obsessed writer, Paul Boutin, is going to get even less done. Thanks, YouTube!

And departed Silicon Alley Insider reporter Michael Learmonth wasn't entirely wrong in his article saying that Google had nixed the idea. Google and YouTube won't necessarily be offering live streaming video to users of the site any time soon. Why, when the search advertising company is already stuck subsidizing YouTube and venture capitalists are happy to continue subsidizing sites like Justin.tv and Ustream with their own money?

Since Wired links to Bloomberg News as the source of its information, one possibility is that Bloomberg published a story about the new channel before they were supposed to. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot at Bloomberg these days. Seeing the article, YouTube PR panicked and pushed out a blog post that triggered a Twitter message. Then Bloomberg pulled its story and YouTube PR followed suit. Update: In an updated post, Wired now calls the link to Bloomberg their own "big goof."

Another possibility: Bank of America, named as a channel partner, pulled its support from the project because it either doesn't have cash to throw at experimental sponsorships or would prefer to keep a low brand profile while weathering the current financial crises.

The efficiency of communication is deeply correlated to the time it takes for data to be accessed and transmitted. Text based data will always be faster to access and transmit than video based data (not just talking the web here), and therefore will be more efficient. Text is already highly accessible and ubiquitous, and anyone who thinks video is going to replace text is not only an asshole, but probably retarded.

Chad Hurley is a douche bag who got lucky and got rich. The company he built hemorrhages money and has done nothing but create an outlet for outcasts and undesirables to communicate their nonsense in a space insulated from society. YouTube is nothing more than an expensive mental institution.

This is almost as ridiculous as when Zuckerberg referred to Facebook as an OS. Fucking lucky idiots.

The move seems more politics than pragmatics. Most Al Qaeda videos are posted outside YouTube. LiveLeak has plenty. Lieberman's been after YouTube since May, but the Google-owned site didn't update its community guidelines until the day before 9/11's seventh anniversary, at a time when Al Qaeda's momentum is fading.

Look, I'm as jingoistic as the next guy. But if Lieberman wants to fight Islamic militants on YouTube, what he needs isn't a ban, but a countercampaign: More clips that show insurgents missing the target and running from U.S. troops. I'll bet there's a lot more such footage out there.

The terms of service for Google's popular email product Gmail contains the same language as the Chrome TOS mentioned above, but it's also got this Orwellian gem tucked in it:

Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service.

Not that Google is actually going to stop you from sending that dirty email about sex and drugs to your dirty friends, but they could.

Facebook is the Internet's most popular photo-sharing site. Which, according to Facebook's terms of service, means Facebook could be a very profitable stock photo firm if it wanted to be.

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

The terms of service for YouTube also say that uploading anything onto the site gives them license to do whatever with it. More obnoxiously, YouTube also says that even after you delete content from the site, they're allowed to keep it forever:

You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable

My favorite obnoxious terms-of-service clause is in the license for AOL's instant messenger client. You're only allowed to use AIM for lawful purposes, so no pinging your friends about smoking up or scalping tickets. Also, turns out you can't say dirty words or obscene things over the service, which probably means most people can't talk about their bosses, last night's overtime loss, or that girl in fourth period:

You May Use the AIM Products for Lawful Purposes Only. You may use AIM Products for lawful purposes only. You may not post on or transmit through community areas (e.g., message boards, chat, e-mail, calendars, instant messaging products) or other means any material that (1) violates or infringes in any way upon the rights of others, (2) is unlawful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, vulgar, obscene, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable, (3) encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, (4) gives rise to civil liability, (5) violates any policies posted in any community areas or (6) otherwise violates any law. You also may not undertake any conduct that, in AOL's judgment, restricts or inhibits any other user from using or enjoying the AIM Products, including without limitation the community areas.

Both Mozilla's terms of service for Firefox and Microsoft's EULA for Internet Explorer 7 don't have these weird clauses.

In the view of one Madison avenue agency exec, Google bought YouTube back in 2006 "because they didn't want someone else to, and now they don't know what to do with it." Clients don't always want to take over an entire site and would prefer to purchase a smaller run of good inventory. Site takeovers can work as an expensive one-off — think movie premieres — but don't help promote a brand over the long term. But Google doesn't have a YouTube product to serve that need. As a result, the exec told Valleywag, the YouTube sales people try to sell the same things over and over again, just with new names. Well, at least now they're trying new sizes, too.

And hey look, Craig Newmark! And Digg is there, too, suggesting Google might have been serious about buying them when they planned this event. Upload your video to YouTube with this "YouTube Upload Station. The YouTube Upload Station is so much more than a MacBook with a T1 connection because it is a democracy engine.

Go, Google. Go, Barack. Go, getting praise in all the papers for reaching out with social media. But please, massages from a company that misspells iPhone? Save that for the Republicans.

(Photos by Steve Rhodes)

YouTube execs estimated that if just 10 percent of the service's users took advantage of live streaming, the company would have to add 20 to 25 percent to its huge server and bandwidth infrastructure to support it.

Sounds like another sign that YouTube's popularity, while giving it a great position in the market, has become something of an Achilles' heel — every video played, every user added cost the company money, and neither creators or consumers are paying. Advertisers are only interested in a small percentage of videos on the site, and YouTube can't even sell all of that inventory. So adding new features such as live streams or improving quality would only serve to dig Google's $1.65 billion money pit even deeper. The episode is enlightening in one regard, though. It demonstrates how much influence YouTube's founders have at the company — little to none.

(Photo by Ben Cooper

However, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law which sets up a process for notifying sites like YouTube of copyright infringements, issuing a counternotice is not so simple. YouTube requires the notice must be submitted by mail. The IOC is officially liable to both the creator of the video and to YouTube for legal fees and other costs related to improper copyright claims, but I doubt Google would risk their rights to broadcast Olympic highlights to Rwandans by holding the IOC accountable.

1. Open YouTube.com in your browser.

2. After the site loads, find the option in your browser for editing cookies. Here's the instructions for Firefox 3.0:

• Click the Tools->Options (Windows) or Firefox->Preferences (Mac) menu option
• On the Preferences pane that appears, click the Privacy Tab.
• In the Privacy panel, Click on Show Cookies...
• In the Cookies panel that appears, search for "youtube" in the search box.
• Look for a cookie named "youtube.com GEO"
• Select the GEO cookie and click Remove Cookie

3. In the same browser window that has YouTube loaded, set your own GEO cookie by trying to open this URL in your browser. Be sure to remove any line breaks that might creep in from cutting and pasting.

 javascript:alert(document.cookie="GEO=bb84fb3cd7df0311bb5026df4d6b524fcxkAAABLUixubyByZWdpb24sc2VvdWwsLCwsLC0x; path=/;domain=.youtube.com") 

You should get a dropdown dialog box that says "The page at http://youtube.com says GEO=bb84fb3cd7df0 ..." This is not an error message, it's a notification that you've set the cookie successfully.

4. You should have a rigged GEO cookie for YouTube now. Try opening youtube.com/beijing2008. If you don't get the splashy red Beijing 2008 page shown above, you may not have set the cookie correctly.

Because an appearance on a political blog was enough to surprise the New York Times's Saul Hansell into remarking on an instance he found "festooned with ads." Though the screenshot featured a video taken from television news and therefore the thumbnail itself was already overly busy with infographics, which contributed most to the impression of the "gaudiness of MySpace." The fact that one of the Times's technology bloggers took so long to take note of an AdSense video unit in the wild tells the real story — even with the promise of a slightly less pitiful revenue sharing check, nobody is using the thing.

The suit was filed in Rome civil courts, and will certainly test the Italian implementation of the European Union Copyright Directive — a law similar to the DMCA in the U.S., but considered a little more friendly to copyright holders. It can't help YouTube that the case will be argued in a country where Berlusconi was just reelected to another term as prime minister after being acquitted last year of corruption charges stemming from allegations of bribing judges. (Photo by AP/Andrew Medichini)

Nonsense. How typically self-important of Internet users, to think that Viacom cares about the dozens of South Park videos they watched. Viacom is not being disingenuous in saying it never meant to violate Internet users' privacy, I've come to believe.

So why are they seeking the data? The case revolves around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Internet service providers a "safe harbor" for hosting copyrighted content. But that protection rests on the notion that the people who operate a website don't really know what's on it.

If Viacom can show YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, or other top officials, viewed copyrighted content while logged into the site, wouldn't that weaken YouTube's rights under the DMCA? Even worse, what if Hurley or Chen uploaded copyrighted clips themselves?

Tellingly, in reaching a deal to protect YouTube users' privacy, Viacom and Google excluded data about YouTube and Google employees' use of the site.

Google's best defense might be to go negative, airing reports about Viacom executives' use of the site. That might not give YouTube any more legal protection — but it would make its legal foes squirm. Viacom's Ifilm subsidiary, for one, has been caught hosting copyrighted content without permission.

There's one thing that might save Chad and Steve: They've never seemed that interested in online video. The pair, both former PayPal employees, stumbled onto the idea, and conceived of YouTube first as a site to host shopping videos for eBay listings, then as a video-dating site. They've always been more interested in cynically exploiting online video as a business than exploring the potential of the medium. An announcement of Google's sale to YouTube is one of the few times the two actually made an appearance on it.

So there's the irony: The less Chad and Steve used YouTube, the more likely they'll come out of this lawsuit unscathed. But Viacom's legal strategy suggests that every video they viewed will count against them.

After reviewing the episodes, Crowley found that the were nearly all shot at the Spike TV Guy's Choice award show, a Viacom event to which the crew was invited. (Even we posted some footage of their interview with MySpace vixen Tila Tequila). Looking up the contact info on the takedown notices, Crowley noticed that the issuer was just five blocks away from the Mahalo office in Santa Monica, and after some phone calls was assured it would all be back online shortly.

Under the language of the DMCA, rightsholders can be held liable for issuing improper takedown notices. Mahalo, however, won't be taking Viacom to court. Instead, Crowley chose to "insist that they buy us sushi." And not just the cheap stuff — he's looking to dine on abalone.

The archly dystopian series of Web videos feature 20somethings in L.A. using a wide range of Google's Web products. Google via text message? Customized maps? I bet most of the series' viewers had no idea Google even offered such services. Sure, the horror-film-lite endings won't play well in Larry and Sergey's candy-colored, hyperliteralist utopia. But it's high time Google starts figuring out some way to market itself besides pointing to the exercise balls and free food.

• Does the fact that you're screening Tropic Thunder for a bunch of local tech reporters rather than the usual film critics suggest that you're not particularly confident in the film's critical reception?
• How will the lost $450 million financing deal for a slate of movies that would have included Tropic Thunder affect your Paramount movie studio?
• Why do you keep making poor Jeremy Zweig tell reporters that your lawyers didn't ask for YouTube users' personal information when you did, in fact, ask for their usernames and IP addresses — information most Internet users would consider personal? And what's he supposed to say now that you've agreed to mask them?
• Isn't Viacom's investment in social network Flux at best an irrelevancy and at worst a mess?
• Why is Viacom's MTV, after 13 years of trying, incapable of running an online music service anyone wants to use?

Viacom wanted to carve out the records of YouTube employees' video views to show that they knowingly viewed copyrighted content — and in some cases, uploaded it. But Google could easily use its records to show Viacom employees doing exactly the same thing. It would hardly be a shocker: Viacom's Ifilm site is rife with pirated videos, but the site's traffic is too insignificant for copyright holders to get fussed.

Showing Viacom's double standards is an obvious move. What Google's lawyers are probably too naive to contemplate: Scouring YouTube's video logs for truly embarrassing videos viewed by Viacom employees, and leaking them to gossip blogs. That would be a dreadful invasion of privacy, of course — exactly what Viacom was asking for, before it finally backed down.

None of the invited reporters, as best we can tell, are film critics. Instead, they cover technology and business. Here's my bet: Most will show up, if only to get facetime with Viacom's CEO, who rarely makes it to northern California. But if Viacom really wanted to offer local hacks a good time, Zweig should have invited Dauman's son, Philippe Jr. For one thing, Philippe Dauman Jr. works at Google, which means he'd have an interesting perspective on the copyright dispute. And the kid knows how to party. Heck, if Junior shows up, we'll skip the movie and go wherever he leads us. We hang out with journalists far too often, and we're sure he's more fun than the lot who'll show up to the screening.

• Viacom's favorite tech reporters:
• Miguel Helft, New York Times
• Elinor Mills, CNET
• Owen Thomas, Valleywag
• Jackson West, Valleywag
• Scott Morrison, Dow Jones Newswires
• Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
• Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times
• Rob Hof, BusinessWeek
• Mark Hachman, Ziff-Davis
• John Paczkowski, AllThingsD
• Mark Glaser, PBS
• Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek
• Eric Auchard, Reuters
• Liz Gannes, GigaOm
• Brad Stone, New York Times
• Matt Richtel, New York Times
• Vindu Goel, San Jose Mercury News
• Eric Savitz, Barrons
• Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek
• Tom Claburn, CMP
• George Anders, Wall Street Journal
• Steve Johnson, San Jose Mercury News

Google and YouTube's entire defense against Viacom's copyright infringement suit posits that even though YouTube employees know there shouldn't be full episodes of the Daily Show on the site, there's no practical way for them to be able to prevent it. Viacom lawyers think the argument is cover for willful ignorance. Now they aim to prove it by showing that YouTube employees themselves viewed and uploaded copyrighted content on YouTube and did nothing about it. Google continues to say it will not hand over data on its employee's viewing habits, but it might not have a choice in the matter. During lawsuits, companies turn over employee's private information contained in memos, emails, and so on all the time.

But the online percentage of that upfront spend has been slow to rise over the few years since YouTube was still being incubated at Sequoia, and remains in the single digits while the advertising industry is bracing for a downturn. At a certain point, VCs will come to their senses and stop subsidizing the bandwidth that makes these sites possible, while cable and network sites and startups like Hulu, with the copyright permissions and the content that sponsors love, will continue to outpace any revenue garnered from user-generated content — which one study estimates will account for only 4 percent of the industry's already paltry online video revenues.

Some YouTube advertisers, for example, had to pore over three separate legal contracts. Before Google salespeople around the country could propose certain deals to YouTube advertisers, they first had to get approval to do so from a temporary worker in California. And lacking a fully automated billing system for YouTube, Google staffers had to calculate some bills manually.

I'm sure Google would rather just automate the process and provide a link to the relevant documents — because it's apparent any business system at the company involving humans is at least as inefficient as it is anywhere else, if not more so. Problem is, sponsors looking to spend big on a campaign want to shake hands on a deal with a media buyer who's wined and dined them and let the lawyers and secretaries hammer out the boilerplate, not click through Web forms before paying for a seven-figure buy with Google Checkout.

Human-powered filtering may still be the most reliable tool for searching out porn. But the guidelines by which porny videos are judged down in YouTube's San Bruno headquarters are unclear. Which is the point, and one I'd even argue, if YouTube weren't playing peek-a-boo with their actual porn prevention practices. If people don't always know what's pornographic, how can an algorithm? Oh, the IMs I used to get from a pal at Yahoo asking my opinion on whether or not a man in a rubber catsuit was too much to let slide! Nobody knows for sure what other people are wanking to anymore. Yet that's what we're led to believe, like when YouTube touts its in-house pattern-matching porn-searching software.

YouTube's been owned by Google for a while now. And if anyone knows what's turning their users on, it's search engines. Are they running text queries, as well, to establish a lusty link between how many times one hunts down boot-fetish videos with how many requests they bang the YouTube database with for Style.com runway clips showcasing fall footwear collections? And are they then blocking that user from uploading some over-the-top shoe-shining clip?

The only way to keep people who don't want to see porn from seeing it is to pay other people to watch it for them. If anyone has some YouTube-produced "How to Spot Smut" training documentation around, we'd love to spend a nice night in going over it with you.

Mr. Varian, Google’s chief economist, acknowledges that the company has been criticized for its lack of transparency. But he says that the Google approach is a byproduct of its virtue as a fast-moving learning machine. “The system is constantly evolving to optimize efficiency, improve ad quality and make the pricing smarter, so you don’t want set rules that say we do X and we don’t do Y,” [Google chief economist Hal] Varian explained.

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the company did say they won't do evil, and "trust us" has been the talking point every since. Frankly, I kinda preferred Microsoft's "cross us and we'll crush you." Now that's transparency. Anderson Mancini