Brands pull YouTube ads over images of children

Lidl, Cadbury maker Mondelez, Mars and other companies have pulled advertising from YouTube after the Times newspaper found the video-sharing site was showing clips of scantily clad children alongside the ads of major brands.

Comments from hundreds of paedophiles were posted alongside the videos, which appeared to have been uploaded by the children themselves, according to a Times investigation. One clip of a pre-teenage girl in a nightie drew 6.5 million views.

The paper said YouTube, a unit of Alphabet subsidiary Google, had allowed sexualised imagery of children to be easily searchable and not lived up to promises to better monitor and police its services to protect children.

In response, a YouTube spokesman said: "There shouldn't be any ads running on this content and we are working urgently to fix this".

German discount retailer Lidl, Diageo - the maker of Smirnoff vodka and Johnnie Walker whisky - and chocolate makers Mondelez and Mars confirmed they had pulled advertising campaigns from YouTube.

"We are shocked and appalled to see that our adverts have appeared alongside such exploitative and inappropriate content," said Mars in a statement. "We have taken the decision to immediately suspend all our online advertising on YouTube and Google globally... Until we have confidence that appropriate safeguards are in place, we will not advertise on YouTube and Google."
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Rohingya crisis: Desperate for news, refugees tune in to 'WhatsApp radio'

Sat in his hillside grocery shop in a Bangladesh refugee camp, Rohingya Muslim Momtaz-ul-Hoque takes a break to listen to an audio recording on his mobile phone, while children and passers-by gather round to hear the latest news from Myanmar.

“I listen because I get some information on my motherland,” said Hoque, 30, as he plays a message on WhatsApp explaining the Myanmar government’s proposals for repatriating refugees.

Hoque has been in Bangladesh since an earlier bout of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 1992, but the number of refugees in the camps has swelled dramatically to more than 800,000 in recent weeks, after a massive Myanmar military operation sent around 600,000 people fleeing across the border.

Tens of thousands of exhausted refugees have arrived with little more than a sack of rice, a few pots and pans and a mobile phone powered by a cheap solar battery, and many are desperate for news of what is going on back home.

With few news sources in their own language and low levels of literacy, audio and video messages distributed on apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube have become a community radio of sorts for the Muslim minority.

Dozens of WhatsApp groups have sprung up to fill the information gap. Their offerings range from grainy footage of violence, to listings of the names and numbers of people missing in the chaos of the exodus, or even an explainer from educated Rohingya on how to adjust to life in the camps.
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YouTube gets new design, brings more features to app

YouTube, the online video streaming portal, has updated its mobile app for intuitive user experience. The YouTube app update applies Google’s Material design that brings host of new features and redefined the existing ones of the app.

Here are the key new features added to the app:

Design: The navigation tabs are moved to the bottom and now features two new tabs – Library and Account. The header is coloured in white so that the content can take the lead.

Gestures: The app supports double tap gestures on the left or right side, which fast forward or rewind 10 seconds of a video. In the coming months, accoridng to the YouTube official blogpost,  the app will get more gesture support that will allow users to jump between videos with a swipe of your hand -- swipe left to watch a previous video or swipe right to watch the next one.

Speed control: The app now supports playback speed control. You can either slowdown or fast-forward the videos at whatever speed you prefer.
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NASA uploads hundreds of early test flight videos on YouTube

If you are a space buff get ready to watch videos of rare historic test flight, launch and landing footages on YouTube, media reports said.

NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Centre in California was currently in the process of uploading hundreds of archival videos, including those of hypersonic jet takeoffs and shuttle landings, the Verge reported on Wednesday.

The project is part of the space agency's continued effort to better open access to its archives, as well as help inform the public about the types of research and record-setting milestones the agency achieves each year across various fields of aerospace engineering.

Out of a total 500 clips, nearly 300 have been uploaded to YouTube thus far, with some footage going back many decades, the report added.

The clips include everything from the assembly of the D-558 Skystreak aircraft back in 1947 to a 1991 takeoff of a Lockheed Martin SR-71 stealth jet to hypersonic test flights of the unmanned NASA X-43A in 2004.

Previously, the AFRC's video library was available only through the Dryden Aircraft Movie Collection on the website of the Dryden Flight Research Centre, which was the name of the Armstrong facility before a 2014 change.

Now that it's all on YouTube, it will be indexed by Google and more easily available through the company's search engine.
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Facebook to produce own TV series, games

Facebook is starting production on high-quality television series and gaming shows to be broadcast on its platform, one of the social media giant's executives said today.

The online platform, which has around two billion monthly users worldwide, is working on the project with a small group of partners and hopes to start putting out episodes of its forthcoming series by the end of the summer, Nick Grudin, the vice-president for media partnerships, said in a statement to AFP, confirming a report in the Wall Street Journal.

"Our goal is to make Facebook a place where people can come together around video," Grudin said, noting that Facebook and its collaborators would "experiment with the kinds of shows you can build a community around — from sports to comedy to reality to gaming."

Facebook is funding the shows on its own at first, he said, "but over time we want to help lots of creators make videos funded through revenue sharing products like Ad Break," a software tool that allows adverts to be directly inserted into Facebook's online content.

Facebook did not identify its content-production partners, but the Wall Street Journal said they include Hollywood studios and agencies representing actors and another creative talent from the film and television industries.

Facebook is ready to spend up to $3 million per episode, a budget which puts it at the upscale end of television production in the United States. In doing so, it is a following a trend set by other internet giants that were once satisfied with allowing their platforms to be used for distribution by other producers.

Netflix, Amazon and the online television platform Hulu — a joint venture by Disney, Comcast, 21st Century and Time Warner —have thrown themselves into content production, as have YouTube and Apple, although on a more modest scale.
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Google introduces tools to prevent ads with undesirable content

Google, which has seen a slew of companies withdraw ads after they appeared alongside extremist content, said on Tuesday it was introducing new tools to give firms greater control.

"We know advertisers don't want their ads next to content that doesn't align with their values," Google's chief business officer Philipp Schindler said in a post on the internet giant's blog.

"So starting today, we're taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content."

The move came a day after an apology by a senior Google executive after the British government and a handful of top firms including Marks and Spencer and HSBC bank pulled their adverts after they appeared alongside extremist content on its internet platforms.

Schindler said Google will tighten safeguards to ensure that ads show up only against legitimate creators on its video-sharing site YouTube, and "is taking a hard look at our existing community guidelines to determine what content is allowed on the platform".

A boycott by firms worried about damaging their image could cause incredible damage to Google as advertising makes up the overwhelming majority of the internet giant's revenue.

Schindler said Google acknowledged that companies have brand guidelines which dictate where and when they want their ads to appear and that it wants to give them more control to do that.

"In the coming days and months, we're introducing new tools for advertisers to more easily and consistently manage where their ads appear across YouTube and the web," said Schindler.

The British government put its YouTube advertising on hold on Monday, saying "it is totally unacceptable that taxpayer-funded advertising has appeared next to inappropriate internet content - and that message was conveyed very clearly to Google."

A Marks and Spencer spokesman said: "In order to ensure brand safety, we are pausing activity
across Google platforms whilst the matter is worked through." (READ MORE)

The YouTube videos you watch can be tracked

If you thought what you watch on YouTube is no one's business, you could not be further detached from reality. Researchers have found that your online video viewing habits can be tracked.

Gaps in YouTube's encryption enable both government intelligence agencies, hackers and internet marketers to determine which videos a user is watching, said the researchers.


"We built a simple yet robust machine-learning algorithm that can identify which video you watched — within a predetermined set of videos — with a high degree of accuracy," said one of the researchers Ran Dubin from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel.

"The algorithm is based on an in-depth study of how video services work, how video content is encoded and how a video player requests information to play it," Dubin said.

Dubin was able to use this algorithm to determine if someone had watched a specific video from a set of suspicious, terror-related videos.

Intelligence agencies could access this technology for tracking terrorists or other suspicious individuals.

Internet marketing companies could track the number and make-up of viewers watching an ad, according to the research presented at the Black Hat Europe meeting in London.

"It's important to know that video encryption is not as secure as we once thought," Dubin said

"Google, YouTube's parent company, is not likely to patch the gaps, since it would be prohibitively expensive to create a traffic obfuscation mechanism for every user's every video request," he added. (READ MORE)