Koran, Bible ‘smoked’ on YouTube

Sydney: An Australian lawyer tore pages from the Koran and the Bible and smoked them on YouTube, days after a US pastor’s threat to burn Islam’s holy book triggered deadly protests and global condemnation. 
    In a 12-minute clip entitled Bible or Koran—which burns best? Alex Stewart, who belongs to an atheist group, holds up the Christian and Muslim holy books before tearing out pages and smoking them. 

Federer trick hit on web

London:

Roger Federer demonstrated a trick where he knocked off a bottle off a man's head with hes serve, similar to the legend of William Tell, the Swiss folk hero who was said to have shot an apple off his son's head with a crossbow bolt.

Federer as tounded crewmembers at a photoshoot with his trick, now a video on YouTube. The demo was a part of proving his accuracy. "What's next? That was good, right?" The Telegraph quoted Federer as saying after successfully repeating the trick.

Zardari shoe thrower a hit on YouTube

London: There's no video footage of the incident, and details are scarce but the man who allegedly chucked his shoes at Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari in Birmingham is being hailed as a hero on YouTube.

"Meet the hero of millions," invites on of several videos put up on the website that reveals Zardari's tormenter to be an elderly bearded man from Coventry. He has been named as Shameem Khan - apparently, an incensed supporter of Zardari's Pakistan Peoples party.

Leaked video Angers Lolo

Seven years after her gala wedding Karisma Kapoor has found herself fighting against invasion of privacy. Videos of her wedding functions were leaked on YouTube in a seven-part series - complete with the 'mehendi' , 'pheras' and 'bidaai' ceremonies.

Mumbai captures life in a day

City students shoot and upload clips on YouTube for a Hollywood film

Mumbai-based engineering students Pankaj Rai (22) has never made films. Yet, on July 31, he uploaded to YouTube five short clips about his daily life that he'd directed and edited.

Striker for YouTube's Indian users

Parvathi Ramanathan

Filmmaker Chandan Arora's Striker that released this February has now been made available by Studio18 on YouTube for its Indian audiences. The film was available to download and to stream off YouTube overseas from February 5, the day of its the atrical release. It was the firstever Bollywood film that reached out to a wider audience in a cost-effective manner through the world's largest online video sharing platform.

Lean Back and relax: YouTube dresses upn to vie with TV

July 09, 2010

SAN BRUNO, CALIFORNIA:

The Web's leading video site, You Tube, is trying to learn enough about its viewers to replaces their television remote control.

On Wednesday it showcased a format called "Leanback" that picks out high-defination clips most likely to command a person's attention and then serves up one video after another.

I'm one of the most watched scandals on YouTube: Swami

June 28, 2010

Nithyananda says footage of him with actor affected him socially bur not spiritually

Bangalore:

Freed from the confines of prison, where he spent days on charges of rape, self-styled godman Nithyananda says the purported video footage of him with an actor had not affected him spiritually, but socially.

You Tube adds vuvuzela button to best clips

June 29, 2010

Clicking on key creates noise that sounds like a swarm of insects

London: Video sharing website You Tube has installed a vuvuzela button, which plays the distinctive buzzing soundtrack over its videos. The button is in the shape of a football on the bottom right hand corner below the screen. It allows vuvuzela fans to overlay its sound on videos of political events, animal capers and music videos, that often sound hilarious. However, many technology blogs have condemned the video sharing website's popularising move, which almost fades out the original sound of the clips, The Telegraph reported.

YouTube case: round one goes to Google

June 25, 2010

New York: Google Inc won a landmark victory over media companies as a Manhattan federal judge threw out Viacom Inc's $1 billion lawsuit accusing the Internet company of allowing copyrighted videos on its You Tube service without permission. However, Viacom said it plans to appeal to the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Pakistan unblocks YouTube, Facebook still banned

Islamabad

While blanket ban on YouTube was lifted, objectionable links on the site will remain blocked, Pakistan telecommunication authority spokesman Khurram Mehran said

Pakistan has partially unblocked the popular video sharing websites YouTube, but links to " sacrilegious or profane material" will remain restricted, a top government official said on Thursday.

Pakistan blocked YouTube last week in a bid to contain content deemed blashemous, a day after it cut off access to social networking sites Facebook indefinitely because of an online competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad.

" We have lifted the ban on only that part which is not displaying any sacrilegious of profane material," Naguibullah Malik, secretary of information technology and telecom, said. But while many of the videos connected with the competition were blocked, others remained accessible in Pakistan on Thursday morning. Most Muslims consider any representation of the Prophet Mohammed to be blashemous.

Malik said his ministry had acted on its own in blocking YouTube, but that Facebook was banned on the orders of a court. " We had banned one URL of the Facebook but the high court ordered the banning of the entire Facebook," he said.

The next hearing on the case will be May 31. The publication of cartoons of the Prophet in Danish newspapers in 2005 sparked deadly protests in Muslims countries. About 50 people were killed during violent protests in Muslim countries in 2006, five of them in Pakistan.

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70% for permanent ban: Poll

A poll has revealed that 70% people in Pakistan want a permanent ban on the social networking website Facebook, while another 15% support the Lahore high court's order to ban the website till May 31

Acccording to the ProPakistani.pk poll, the participants expressed sheer anger on Facebook for displaying blasphemous drawings of Prophet Muhammad. Eight per cent Participants said that a single URL ban was enough, while the remaining seven per cent felt they did not want ban on Facebook at all.

Jabran Rafique, a student, said thousand of people had complained to Facebook to remove the blasphemous content but no action was taken

Pak blocks Twitter, Blackberry after Facebook and YouTube

Islamabad

Pakistanis protest against Facebook, which encouraged users to post images of Prophet Mohammad, in Islamabad,on Friday

After blocking Facebook and YouTube, the Pakistani authorities on Friday widened the crackdown on websites with blasphemous contents by restricting access to the social networking website Twitter. They have also blocked Blackberry Mobile services, pushing Pakistan back to pre-historic times. No reason was given for banning Blackberry's service.

Pakistani users were unable to log into Twitter after internet service providers blocked access to the site. When users tried to log into the sites, there browsers displayed the message 'This site is restricted'. Over two days, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has blocked websites like Facebook and YouTube, citing "sacrilegious contents" as the reason tor the action.

The ban,which includes certain pages on Flickr and Wikipedia, came a day after access to Facebook was suspended on orders from a Pakistani court. Some Islamic lawyers won that injunction, arguing that a contest, started by users for drawings of the Prophet Mohammad and called 'Everybody Draw Mohammad day', was offensive.

The authorities have blocked over 450 URLs.

The government acted against Facebook and YouTube after it failed to persuade the websites to remove the "derogatory material," the PTA said.

Mean while, thousands of protesters took to the streets across Pakistan and called the contest to draw caricatures of the Prophet open "cyber terrorism".

In Islamabad, religious leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-ul-Dawa issued a decree calling for the killing of those who were involved in initiating the competition as well as those taking part in it.

In Lahore, workers of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-ul-Dawa staged protest rallies, burnt US and Swedish flags and demanded the youth boycott such sites.

According to Wahaj-us-Siraj, a spokesman for ISPs in Pakistan, Facebook and YouTube were among the three most-viewed websites in the country. "At least 3.5 million use these websites regularly," he said, adding the sacrilegious content was also against the policies of the websites, which boast of strict use-and-abuse rules.

"We are bound to check child pornography websites, because it is something wrong and has nothing to do with the freedom of speech. Similarly, these caricatures are another example of absurdity."

The two websites generate revenues by posting Pakistan-specific advertisements, Siraj said.

"However, it is very hard to say how much they actually earn from Pakistan, but many telecommunication companies were using these websites. The hit would be substantial," he said, adding, "We have already stopped all advertisements for our clients on these websites."

• 170mn population of Pakistan
• 60% people are under the age of 25
• 25mn Number of Internet users in Pakistan
• $1,00,000 Bounty offered by al-Qaeda to the person who kills Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks
  
  Row over Prophet cartoon in S Africa: A South African weekly on Friday published a cartoon of Prophet Mohammad, raising fears of reprisal attacks during the football World Cup in June. The cartoon depicts the Prophet on a psychologist's couch saying that his followers do not have a sense of humour.
  
  'I didn't start the Facebook page': Cartoonist Molly Norris has distanced herself from the row over 'Everybody Draw Mohammad Day!', saying, "I never created a Facebook page for EDMD. A stranger to me did so." She said, "I made a cartoon about the TV show South Park being censored,"
  
  Ban not justified: Pakistani people have the right to know about the world. The extremists want to snatch this tight from the people which will help extremism.
  
  The competition hurt Muslims. But only that link should have been blocked. It's just that one page.
  
  Bans Elsewhere: China routinely controls users' access to many sites, and was locked for months in a battle with Google over censorship controls
  
  In Turkey, authorities had imposed a sweeping ban for months on YouTube because of offensive material to the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Thailand also blocked YouTube in 2007 over content that officials said was disrespectful to the king.