Diebold can’t get dumber. Future of YouTube and Google, and the futility of suing video sharing sites.

January 25th, 2007

Diebold, the voting machine builder that seems to think “security” is a special add-on service that doesn’t need to be safeguarded, has yet stepped in another pile of its own dog poo. Turns out they offered to make replacement copies of keys for its voting machine. And they posted a picture of the exact keys on its website. Well, some intelligent Web browser saw those pictures, got a few blank keys, and using the Web image drilled himself some new keys and opened the voting machine.

Now that Google has purchased YouTube, what are they going to do with it? Well, today you can see YouTube video results alongside the Google Video search index. Plus, they’re testing its AdSense technology with video as well. The way this will work is that a content owner bids on words for which there are existing video commercials. Those video commercials are then packaged within the video content itself.

But until then, they’ll have to settle an issue with 20th Century Fox who served YouTube with papers seeking the identity of a user that’s posted episodes of 24 and The Simpsons on the video sharing network. It will probably be a court order before that happens as Google has historically not willingly turned over identities of its users. Episodes of 24 can be viewed just an URL away at the French site, DailyMotion, which has users posting episodes of many other TV shows as well.

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