YouTube restricts some videos unless you are not signed in and verify you are over 18. I don’t have a YouTube account and don’t want to get one but I do want to watch the video. Also I was in the Middle-East and I couldn’t watch a few music video’s on YouTube as it was censored. So I had to find a way around it. Here is a quick tip which will enable you to play restricted videos where ever censorship is prevalent. I am taking YouTube for this example but you can do the same for other video sharing sites like Google video, Soapbox etc. This info is for educational purposes only and I am not advocating you break any local rules. Please use your common sense for I am not to be blamed for any of your actions that may get you into legal troubles.

• Go to www.youtube.com (or any other video sharing site)
• Search for a video that you want to play

I searched for ‘Call on me’ a song by Eric Prydz on YouTube and I got a few results. I think the top result is fine and I click on it. But I get a message that this song cannot be played as it is restricted due to local rules or company restrictions.

• Right click the link on the song listed in the search and copy the link location. It will be ‘Copy shortcut’ on Internet explorer. I got: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUsJYKdYGmw .
• Modify this link by removing the watch?v= attribute and replacing it with /v/.
• I got: http://www.youtube.com/v/dUsJYKdYGmw . Use this link for later use.
• Then search for a song that you think will be allowed to play and open it. You will be given an embed code. Copy this code.

I got something like…

• Replace the Http:// codes in the code above with the link you saved earlier and use the modified code in a Video gadget or embed it in your blog entry to view your restricted video on your space.

• You can also save a notepad file as a .htm file and save it as all files(see picture below) When you open the html/internet/firefox file and you will see your video and can play it.

For future use the code below and replace the part in bold with a modified youtube video link.

<EMBED src=http://www.youtube.com/v/modifiedYoutubeLINK width=425 height=350 type=application/x-shockwave-flash wmode=”opaque”></EMBED>

You can now watch restricted videos without signing in or in China, Middle-east, and in the future probably in the USA with the way things are going

Done!

Channel 8 is the next best thing to come from Microsoft Communities, designed for students, by students, and for students. It’s hosted on the MSDN website so it’s for students developing and getting their hands knee deep in code and suchlike.

It’s been in the works for some time now but it’s almost ready to kick off. Charles who runs Channel 9 says, “The most important aspect of Channel 8 is the Student, not programming languages. We want to provide a place for technical students to call their home on the web; a place to meet and share ideas with fellow thinkers, and this means Channel 8 will be and provide, in time, many things that matter to students”.

See the splash scren - http://channel8.msdn.com.

As earlier mentioned, Facebook was placing restrictions on it’s Poll feature. They now seem to have removed the restriction.

Matt Hick from Facebook’s Corporate Communications had this to say:

“We made a mistake, and we’ve fixed it. Facebook did not intend to block the names of competitors from the new Polls product. Now researchers can ask questions with any company’s name. I’d encourage you to give it another try.”

When pointed out that is was obvious that they were blocking the competition he replied:

“Some outdated code was used that should not have been. When we learned it was blocking those words, we fixed it. We regret the mistake.”

So there you go folks, it seems like a genuine mistake or not? I am still not convinced by the given explanation as it seems like PR talk to me but what the hell they have rectified it, end of chapter!

TechCrunch reported that Facebook blocks and prevents you from posting any Polls that contain terms such as MySpace, Orkut, etc. So if you mention the competition it will not allow you to post your Poll giving the following error, “The poll question contains restricted text.”

To bypass this, there is an easy hack…

Create a new poll and Type in your Poll Question with a restricted term.

Hold down on the Alt key and press 0173. This creates a blank character. Carry this out multiple times in the restricted term (Before, in-between and after) that is banned, in our case, MySpace.

e.g. Is Facebook better than M(alt+0173)ySp(alt + 0173)ace(alt + 0173)(alt + 0173)

The Facebook algorithm reads it as shown above and lets you publish your Poll. While to the human eye it will be Is Facebook better than MySpace.

Easy? For proof see the screenshot below…

Know problems:

• You might have to try this a few times, for some reason it rejects it at times and allows it after a few tries.
• Also try placing the Alt 0173 in more random places in the restricted term
• I tired placing a ? at the end of the Poll question and did this hack, for some reason Facebook manages to catch the term despite the hack and will not let you publish the poll.

Do you know of any suggestions or hacks? Comment below or Contact us!

The US military is blocking troops from using certain websites for sharing photos, video clips and messages. A memo from General BB Bell, US Forces Korea commander, says use of YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular sites via US military portals will be blocked. The US says the use is taking up too much bandwidth and slows down the military’s computer system. But a US Strategic Command spokesman said a “secondary benefit” was to help operational security.

BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says the decision could stop thousands of soldiers from communicating with friends and loved ones. For many US soldiers serving overseas, YouTube and other similar websites are a popular way of keeping in touch, he says.

The spokesman for US Strategic Command and Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations said: “As these sites have become more and more popular, they’ve had an impact on bandwidth resources and network availability and we’re having to restrict use of some of them.” He denied that the military was unhappy with the nature of content being posted. “We’re not stopping anybody looking at anything. It’s not the nature of the stuff being posted.”

However, he added: “Wherever you have sites this popular, you have the potential for malicious activity. A secondary benefit of restricting use of these sites is for operational security.” The block on accessing such websites will not affect those soldiers with their own personal computers. Those, though, are few and far between in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, our correspondent says. The Pentagon only recently started posting its own videos on YouTube, showing soldiers in action in Iraq in a move designed to reach out to a younger audience and to show the successes of the US military.

In two months, the Multi-National Force-Iraq channel has climbed to 16th in YouTube’s most subscribed-to listing and has, the military says, just passed the one million video-views mark. The BBC’s Laura Smith-Spark in Washington says the channel is also a belated attempt to counter the influence of Islamist extremist groups, that have used the internet to post footage of hostages or attacks on US forces.

Source: BBC News

V Sharma shows a security flaw in Orkut, if exploited it exposes the email address of any person.

“Orkut has been in the midst of privacy and security concerns since its launch. There have been many ways through which you can get to know the email address of any person on Orkut even when it is not displayed in the public profile. Although, Google keeps on fixing bugs as and when they are highlighted; however, there seems to be a long way before they can make Orkut a secure social network.”

Orkut: Your Email Address Can Be Hacked

Is email too boring and blogging too tedious?

Bring in Zimoz. A start-up that is based in San Carlos, CA. USA and Mumbai, India that lets you share rich content with your friends on the fly!

Wait isn’t that what blogs are supposed to be for?

Yes, blogs do allow you to share content with your friends and so does email, but not everyone has the time to maintain blogs and emails are not rich enough. Zimoz is going for a niche market where users who want to share rich content with their friends with minimal time and effort needed to create it.

Why Zimoz?

Apparently they were not happy with a previous name that they had picked so they decided that their pet frogs name Zimoz will do just fine. Interesting name that…

Okay, now to the website and the service itself:

The website is easy on the eyes and is nicely designed. The sign up process is relatively straight forward and is simple to go through, yet the activation email takes ages to get sent through and thus hinders your setup experience. I guess this is to prevent bot accounts, But everything from this point is brilliant – the graphics, the website layout, the fresh and clean interface. Moving on…The whole website seems to run in AJAX, a smooth asynchronies website which loads things quickly and without hassle. Everything loads effortlessly, everything seems to work seamlessly with everything else – it’s a pleasure to navigate through. There are little things you have to keep your eye out for such as the little bits of humour and bits which really add to the experience. Creating the actual postcard itself is easy to use, swish, and has a whole load of tools with drag and drop funtionality work brilliantly. You can add a variety of media such as pictures, text, a banner or clip art, even video to your postcard; my friends are away in Quebec at the moment and they’ve sent me a beautiful video of them around the city, and this really adds to the experience of postcards.

You can do pretty much anything in your postcard – it’s so dynamic and easy to use, even the most novice of users could use it with little or no problem. It’s fair to say this website hasn’t been completely polished off – with a few links here and there which look a bit out of place, and a mixture of rich-text and HTML style text, but that’s only a small amount of the whole experience. You can save, share, delete and publish your postcards, and being careful of kids as well, you can also view and report abuse on other people’s postcards if they are not of a fitting nature to people.

There is a social networking element added. Profile creation is easy on the Zimoz home page, latest public and feaured postcards are displayed. Popular and new members are shown too. The postcards are tagged so you can browse them via tags as well. You can explore new postcards and also comment on them, Comments are in the form of spots. You can leave spots anywhere on the postcard with emotional icons. They can be hidden. You can also reply to postcards with a ‘Add to Trail’ function.

So that is Zimoz for you, a new way of creating you own content on the fly and sending it to your friends easily or sharing it with friends made though Zimoz, oh wait are they called Zimozians?

Zimoz opened in beta around Mid-Feb and currently have 50 - 70K+ views/ month.

Check out our postcard!!

Zimoz - Blogging in Postcards

Yep, we’ve broken through to the Web 2.0 stages of this blog and we now have tags. Anyone know how to get this into the sidebar now? We’ve got no idea…

{flashtagcloud}

As is often the case, the media is trying to extract the “interesting bits” from Rupert Murdoch’s keynote interview at the McGraw-Hill Digital Media Summit in New York yesterday. The best tidbit seems to be that MySpace is pulling in nearly $25 million per month in ad revenue, with a growth rate of 30% per quarter.

Read more…

MySpace is being sued by the families of five teenage girls who it is claimed were sexually assaulted by men they met through the social networking website. The negligence and fraud suit against the popular site, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, was filed at a court in Los Angeles.

It comes after a similar lawsuit was filed by the parents of a 14-year-old American girl last year. Last year, MySpace increased security measures to protect its younger users. In April 2006, the website hired a former prosecutor in the US Justice Department’s internet child exploitation unit, Hemanshu Nigam, as its chief security officer.

It also made it impossible for users aged 18 and above to contact 14 and 15-year-old members, unless they knew the younger person’s email address. The girls involved in the latest lawsuits were all aged between 14 - the minimum age for a MySpace account - and 15.

“In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users,” said Jason Itkin, a lawyer for one of the firms representing the families. However Mr Nigam said that “ultimately, internet safety is a shared responsibility”.

“We encourage everyone to apply common sense offline security lessons in their online experiences and engage in open family dialogue about smart web practices,” he added. News Corporation’s shares rose 1.7% in Thursday trading. It bought MySpace for $580m (£333m) in July 2005.

Source: BBC News