By Maggie Shiels

YouTube is making the tens of millions of videos it hosts more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing by putting automatic captions on them.

The Google-owned company said this use of speech recognition technology is probably the biggest experiment of its kind online.


Previously captions were only on a small amount of content.

“A core part of YouTube’s DNA is access to content,” said the firm’s product manager Hunter Walk.

YouTube said by opening all this content to those who have not really been able to access it in the past should democratise information and “help foster greater collaboration and understanding”.

Initially the feature will apply to English language videos, with other languages being added in the coming months.

In November last year, YouTube rolled out automatic captions to a handful of partners including the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University and National Geographic.

‘Real solution’

The technology behind speech recognition has been around for about 50 years, said Google engineer Mike Cohen, and has finally become good enough to be used on a large scale.

“I have been working on speech technology for 25 years,” Mr Cohen told the BBC.

“There have been steady improvements and this is the culmination of lots of work over years and years. We have had to work on a wide variety of problems like accent variation, background noise, the variation in language, in pronunciation.”

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Violent ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, China may be the next stop in the “Twitter Revolution.”

The power of social networking and new media to change the world was evident in Iran last month and is proving to be a force in the ethnic turmoil in Xinjiang, China, as well. Intended for users to keep track of what their friends or favorite celebrities are doing minute by minute, Twitter has become the social network of political change.

In an attempt to quell the chaos and prevent rioters from organizing in the Xinjiang province, China has cut off mobile phone service and attempted to block Internet access.

Chinese versions of YouTube and Twitter (Youku and Fanfou) had text messages and video scrubbed from their sites.

But some gruesome images posted to Twitter got out, including several shots showing dead bodies, apparently of ethnic Chinese men and women, lying in the streets.

According to Reuters, a Fanfou search for posts with the key word Urumqi turned up zero results while Twitter, which is hosted overseas, yielded hundreds of comments in Chinese and English.

Last month’s protests against the results of the presidential election in Iran was referred to as the “Twitter Revolution,” as the opposition relied heavily on Twitter and YouTube to get the message out to the world. Neda Soltan, a woman killed while attending a demonstration in Tehran by state militia, became a martyr after a graphic video of her death was posted on YouTube.

Like China, the Iranian government uses Internet filtering and has shut down several key bloggers who were providing riveting coverage of last month’s protests. The U.S. State Department even got involved, asking Twitter at one point to delay a scheduled software update to protect Iranians who were using the service.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/07/06/2009-07-06_aaweraweraweraraew.html#ixzz0KlNbnYLF&C

The U.S. military yesterday launched TroopTube, a new site to upload and share videos, more than a year after the U.S. Department of Defense banned YouTube from military networks for being a bandwidth hog.TroopTube is designed to help military families connect and keep in touch when separated, according to a note on the new site. Users can quickly upload videos that can be shared privately with a subset of users or with all users on the site, the note said.

TroopTube is run by Military OneSource, which provides online information and assistance to current and former military personnel and their families.

MilitaryOne directed a Computerworld reporter to the DOD press office for a comment regarding TroopTube. That office directed a Computerworld back to MilitaryOne.

The DOD blocked YouTube — and other social networking sites such as MySpace.com — on military networks in May 2007, saying that videos consumed too much bandwidth.

According to an Associated Press report yesterday, the military worked with Delve Networks to build TroopTube. Users of the site can register as members or former members of one of the branches of the armed forces, a member of the soldier’s family, a civilian DOD employee, or a military supporter, the story said. While members can upload videos from any Internet connection, a Pentagon employee screens each for taste, copyright violations and national security issues, the Associated Press said.

Delve CEO Alex Castro told the Associated Press that his company built tools for approving and sorting incoming videos on TroopTube. Delve’s system can also turn a video’s sound into a text transcript, the story noted. Castro added that the DOD views TroopTube as a retention tool aimed at deployed soldiers who are eager to stay in touch digitally with their friends and families.

Deceptive YouTube attack evolving as it spreads on the Internet is part of a growing trend of hackers to prowl popular online social networking communities in which people trustingly share web links and mini-programs.”We are seeing tools like this not just for YouTube, but for MySpace, Facebook, America Online instant messaging …,” Trend Micro software threat research manager Jamz Yaneza told AFP on Thursday.

“All the various social networking sites have been hit with some page or another.”

Hackers using the YouTube attack send people links to what are said to be must-see snippets at the Google-owned video-sharing website.

The links, instead, connect to convincingly realistic replicas of YouTube pages and tell people that a software update is needed to view a requested video.

Agreeing to the update lets the hacker install malicious software that could log keystrokes, steal data, or even take over people’s computers, according to David Perry of Trend Micro.

Victims are not likely to catch onto the invasion since the hackers’ software is able to stealthily link to the real YouTube website and play a promised video.

“This works as your typical drive-by download,” Yaneza said of hackers planting malicious software in machines while rerouting online traffic.

“Essentially this can be used as a tool to serve up everything — botnets, key loggers. Visually, you can’t differentiate this from your regular YouTube page, it is done so well.”

While some computer users might be able to spy something unusual about the online address, or “URL,” of a bogus page, the safest thing to do is not trust links and instead go directly to YouTube for recommended videos.

“The reason they are using YouTube now is that during the elections we are looking at YouTube a lot,” Perry said of hackers. “It is using social networking software in an anti-social way — anti-social networking.”

Hackers at a recent gathering of software savants in Las Vegas told AFP that social networks are prime places to take advantage of people’s trust.

While people may be wary of links or programs emailed to them by strangers, they eagerly open such offerings from “friends” in social networking communities.

Online evil doers can easily create false social networking profiles and even impersonate people who may be well known or respected. The imposter can then build a network of trusting contacts in online communities.

Estimates are that as much as 40 percent of social networking profiles are fakes, according to figures cited by Cloudmark Inc., a company specializing in protecting Internet messaging systems from spam and hackers.

A poll conducted in the United States in June for Cloudmark concluded that 83 percent of the people using social networking accounts received unwanted “friend” invitations or messages steering them to dubious websites.

“Friends” are granted access to pictures, message boards, contact lists and other personal data stored in social networking profiles.

“Unfortunately, the very qualities that make social networks successful — the wide variety of communication channels, the openness of the networks and the size of the audience — are also powerful lures for spammers and hackers,” Cloudmark says.

Be wary of taking strangers in as friends at social networking websites and only install trusted applications when customizing profile pages with mini-programs, sometimes called “widgets,” according to Cloudmark.

Security specialists say to also limit the amount of personal information revealed to the Internet through profile pages.

“Understanding the risks and knowing how to protect yourself is critical to avoiding scams and other threats” said Cloudmark chief technical officer Jaime de Guerre.

“As spammers, hackers and other online criminals broaden their scope to social networks (people) must be especially vigilant and employ safe practices while engaging in online communities.”

Facebook, YouTube, MySpace era. Cyberspace is the place to be, but often not the place to be seen, for student-athletes.

For the past several years on campuses nationwide, coaches and athletic department personnel collectively have cringed at the thought of what can show up in cyberspace on those sites that demonstrates objectionable behavior by student-athletes.

“It is a hot topic in college athletic departments,” said Christine Susemihl, senior associate athletic director at Colorado State. “Even institutions that several years ago were not touching it find they have to. They at least have to have dialogue with their student-athletes.”

The broad question has become, “How to deal with it?”

Administrators at Florida State and Kentucky have issued ultimatums to their athletes to be careful what they post, according to USA Today, and Loyola University Chicago forbids its athletes to belong.

A sampling of Division I schools along the Front Range shows a variety of approaches toward dealing with such sites, though all say it is an issue they are monitoring.

At the University of Colorado, associate athletic director Ceal Barry believes putting the onus on individual sports to nudge their student-athletes toward responsible behavior is the best course.

“I feel like it’s very difficult to legislate,” said Barry, the school’s former women’s basketball coach. “We don’t have a departmentwide policy … what are you going to do, make (offenders) run laps?”

Instead, Barry said, CU’s student handbook features a section outlining guidelines on cyber activities developed by the student-athlete advisory committee. The belief was, “If it came from their peers, it would be more effective.”

In most instances, it has been. But along the way, there have been slip-ups.