YouTube

With Google owning YouTube, the Internet’s principal delivery system for Flash-based video, it was perhaps inevitable that the company would bundle the Flash plug-in with its Chrome browser. The announcement came today from both Google and the team developing the open source Chromium component on which Chrome is based. The move now officially places Google in contention with proponents of HTML 5, who had held out a glimmer of hope for a non-proprietary, non-plug-in video format for the standard’s new [VIDEO] element. In its blog post today, the Chromium team indirectly blamed the standards process for not having solved what it perceives as the problem of specifying how plug-ins should operate, and credits Mozilla — which makes Firefox — with helping to rectify that issue. ...

Google Inc., owner of YouTube, said an outage of the popular video-sharing site Thursday was technical and not caused by outside tampering. “YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved,” a spokeswoman for Google said in a written statement. “We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.” The outage apparently lasted for just over an hour, from roughly 7 to 8 a.m. ET. ...

“Dirty” or “Flirty” Ok. It’s an old formula for a successful business: pay girls to have fun with you. This time the schtick is getting on-line gamers to pay $8.25 (US) to play an online game with a female for 10 minutes. The women get to keep 40 percent. The site is GameCrush. It just opened last night and it seems to be a success (screen shots below.) “GameCrush is being touted as the first social site for adult gamers with the women online able to set their gaming mood to either ‘flirt’ or ‘dirt’, IGN reports. _ _ “The men online are known as Players and the women as PlayDates and Players pay to play while PlayDates get paid to play. _ _ “Players browse PlayDate profiles — of which there are currently 1200 — view photos and even chat with girls for free.” _ _ “At the moment it only supports Xbox 360 and some games on the GameCrush website. GameCrush plans to support PlayStation 3, Wii and World of Warcraft.” ...

Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China may lead the Chinese government to block access to its sites. Google on Monday announced it has stopped censoring search results in China. The announcement came amid speculation that the search giant would pull out of China entirely and sets up a showdown with the Communist leadership there. In a 3:03 p.m. ET post on its official blog, Google said it stopped running the censored Google.cn service on Monday and was routing its Chinese users to an uncensored version of Google based in Hong Kong. ...

Do you know what the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player is? If you don’t, you may very well fall for this: Flash Player 11? There are more than 3 million pages linking to this alleged version 11: Most pages are from unsanitized forums, but there is even a Google Ad for it! Ooooops…. The screen below depicts the social engineering trick: What appears to be an X-rated video with a Windows Media Player logo (that is odd!). ...

Today we are going to take a closer look at bots and botnets. On the black market, selling bots and botnets is quite profitable, which makes creating them a popular activity for criminals. It helps that bot sources and creation kits are available on the Internet, allowing even script kiddies to create their own botnets. Another reason bots get created is that some people who get bored in their daily lives tend to do things that in their opinion might earn them respect or admiration in front of their peers or in various Internet chat rooms. ...

Most of us are familiar with how high profile news events are used for malware distribution. We’ve seen it many times such as with Tiger Woods’ scandal and the earthquake in Haiti. Now the recent earthquake in Chile is used to prey upon unsuspecting folks interested in what’s going on with the post-quake and tsunami. This shows we should really be careful in our choices of where we go to get information. Try any related search term or phrase related to “Chile Earthquake”, “Tsunami”, etc. I’ve done so and will walk us through a few examples of risky to malicious content that my search turned up. This type of malware distribution tends to target the broadest audience possible, so I entered the search term “Chile” and then let Google auto-complete my search to “Chile quake 2010 tsunami” to load what is a popular search phrase. Almost immediately, among some recognizable news site results are random blog posts touting words like “download” or “.exe”. We should be suspicious of these. ...

Hollywood celebrity Corey Haim has died in typical tabloid fashion: “under investigation.” And we all know that celebrity death equals Internet scams by the boatload. There are a number of spam runs currently circulating on video sharing sites such as Youtube, ready to catch out the curious and the unwary. Shall we take a look? “Suicide or killed! Watch Corey Haim first found dead” Classy. Visiting mycelebzone(dot)com will pop open a Hotbar prompt, which you need to install to “see the content”: ...

Sources on a number of forums tell me that a certain application is going to be released into the wild in a few days, promoted heavily via sites such as Youtube to attract as many potential victims as possible. I thought it might be beneficial to get a head start on the bad guys and get word out before they hit their big green “Go” switch. What is it? I believe the following screenshot can answer that question: ...

It’s time for your daily dose of “spot the fake program / avoid the fake program”. What is it this time? Well, if you have family members who are into webcams and chatting you might want to point them to this writeup because a new challenger has entered the ring: Yes, “Chat Cam” is a rather smart looking (and entirely fake) program designed to make end users think they’re taking part in a large community of webcam owners. Clearly, the creator had the recently launched Chatroulette in mind when they made this one (if you’re not familiar with it, Chatroulette is a site where you jump from webcam chat to webcam chat over and over again, all within one large community of strangers. In practice, you tend to mash the “Next” button endlessly as one “chat” after another fails to materialise). This is what Chatroulette looks like – you’ll notice the similarity as we move further into the writeup: ...