White House Exempts YouTube From Web Privacy Rules 235
An anonymous reader writes "The new White House website privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, Obama's legal team has quietly exempted YouTube from this rule. Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video — even those users that do not click the "play" button. As CNET reports, no other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver."
This is disturbing... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Correct.
Why anyone would expect Youtube to suddenly stop using cookies makes no sense to me. They are a private company and follow their OWN market-based rules, not Obama's. He's not a dictator.
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what I would expect is whitehouse.gov to not use youtube, instead of re-writing policy to allow Google to better track visitors to the whitehouse.gov site.
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But google was such a substantial donor [opensecrets.org]!
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:5, Informative)
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So why do they need a special exemption? Make it policy that whitehouse.gov will not use tracking cookies. Youtube is not whitehouse.gov so they can use tracking cookies. No special exemptions required.
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>So why do they need a special exemption?
They don't. The slashdot summary is incorrect. As you stated, the video is not formally part of whitehouse.gov, but an external link to youtube.com and therefore the rules of youtube.com apply. It's perfectly logical.
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's probably why his version didn't make the summary.
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From TFS, it sounds like you may get long-term cookies from whitehouse.gov (regardless of what youtube.com provides) on pages (or paths I suppose; I don't think you can do page-specific cookies) containing embedded youtube videos. It could use some additional clarification for sure.
Naturally, I didn't read TFA either.
One more reason for them to not use YouTube (Score:4, Funny)
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>>>Disturbingly, this administration is not pushing YouTube to modify their policies for the White House channel
Right now I think the U.S. government and Obama have more important things to worry about than whether or not there's a cookie on my c: drive. Even if whitehouse.gov demanded youtube.com Not install cookies, what's the point? It won't change the fact that I *already* have youtube cookies on my machine.
ASIDE:
I was looking at whitehouse.gov with the Wayback machine. Back during Clinton's
Re:One more reason for them to not use YouTube (Score:5, Interesting)
FTFA: "In just the past couple weeks, YouTube has launched dedicated pages for both the House and Senate to show off their own videos, and the site also recently started allowing users to directly download copies of some videos. This latter feature has not yet been widely deployed across the site, and is seems to be limited to videos posted by Obama's team."
So there may in fact be some push from the White House to modify YouTube's policies. We'll see.
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Why not cut a deal with google, pay them x per view to disable cookies OR better yet, NOT embed external videos in a proprietary format, when they can host such videos locally and avoid both privacy AND security issues (one 'mistake' at google could rickroll anybody on whitehouse.gov OR a worse one could launch a flash exploit, a change in political winds could also end up with google suggesting anti-obama videos on his own site (like adwords attached to emails)). Somebody from the NSA should have a quick w
They can't control external websites (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Insightful)
They could host the videos themselves, use another site that doesn't use cookies, or use an alternative version of YouTube's creation that would not use cookies.
There are lots of options, this is simply the easiest.
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You're so funny! Can I have some of what you're smoking?
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Funny)
Smoking is bad for you. Here, we bake it into cookies. You want one?
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Insightful)
But why invest in all that bandwidth and hosting when there's a free, available, willing, and WILDLY POPULAR alternative already here? C'mon. If they hosted it themselves, they would RFP it out to the lowest bidder, futz around with technology issues for awhile (does the BBC iPlayer [slashdot.org] ring a bell?), before finally delivering a subpar product that frustrates everyone. I would MUCH rather they used YouTube for their videos, and spent their time and money on things that matter.
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Informative)
Just wanted to say that I gotta agree with you there. I didn't, but then they got YouTube to add a download option for their videos. You can play them in your browser with fairly standard tech (Even Linux has pretty good flash support now - I know, I use it. It's buggy at times, but YouTube always works fine) and you can download it in MPEG format if it won't play. Works for me.
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Hah, yea, they just added it recently. And by recently I mean I think it was yesterday or the day before.
And yea, OGG would be nice, but then the majority of the population would probably say 'what the hell is this ogg thing?'. MP4 may not be the best, but it'll play on pretty much any OS, and if it doesn't it's easy enough to find a transcoder for it.
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Good for you. I would rather be able to save the videos on my hard drive without violating some corporate website's TOS. Why not just offer a torrent? That would save bandwidth and allow for higher quality video postings, AND people would be able to maintain a local copy if they want to.
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Thanks for the tip!
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Yeah I did not know about that change until...just now.
But... change is what Obama promised all along - and now you act surprised? :*P
np: The Whitest Boy Alive - Done With You (Dreams)
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"I would MUCH rather they used YouTube for their videos"
Good for you. I would rather be able to save the videos on my hard drive without violating some corporate website's TOS.
Thanks to a special exemption that the Obama team got from YouTube, you can. (RTFA.)
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What about the security and privacy aspects, these are non-trivial and much easier to solve by just hosting them locally, using an embedded flash player (hell pay google to make it if you want)
And what exactly is wrong with the iPlayer everybody i know techs & non-techs consider it a storming success?
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There is a lot of value in having the government provide the repository for official documents.
Just imagine the complications if the administration takes a position (or wants to post the video of a speech) critical of the company providing hosting services (for free, without a solid contract outlining their obligations).
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Insightful)
They could host the videos themselves, use another site that doesn't use cookies, or use an alternative version of YouTube's creation that would not use cookies.
There are lots of options, this is simply the easiest.
Well, it would cost money for them to replicate YouTube just for government stuff. It's much easier just to use the "free" YouTube service for that. Now if the free service has tracking cookies, well either you decide it wasn't that big of a deal in the first place or stop posting videos. Since everyone seems to really like the videos, and most folks ignore or delete cookies that they don't like; they've decided to live with it.
That's like complaining that google, slashdot, or wikipedia gave you cookies. I mean come on if you use the internet, you'll get cooties, um cookies.
I'm sure a competitor would agree if they asked (Score:2)
There are a lot of aspiring competitors to YouTube, none of which have been able to get much traction. I'm sure one of them would agree to turn off their cookies for whitehouse.gov content in return for the publicity of being chosen to host whitehouse videos. Google might even agree to turn off cookies in the face of that sort of threat.
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I mean come on if you use the internet, you'll get cooties, um cookies.
For my cookie sessions I have firefox Keep until "Ask every time" and 90%+ of the time I choose to allow for session. So, sites that "require cookes" but don't really require them will work just fine. When I close my browser, then cookies that I don't really care about are gone.
Sure, its a pain at first but once you've got your main sites setup then its not that big of an issue.
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:4, Informative)
No point in reinventing the wheel. YouTube is the thing for videos right now, so why not use it? People who keep sniping about gov't waste should be happy about this stuff.
Re:They can't control external websites (Score:5, Informative)
The rule applies to federal agencies. Last I checked, youtube wasn't a federal agency, so it's not really much of a story. Slow news day?
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the reason it's an issue is federal agencies will be posting videos to youtube. Just because they get someone else to do something doesn't mean they're not still responsible for the rules governing it.
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the reason it's an issue is federal agencies will be posting videos to youtube. Just because they get someone else to do something doesn't mean they're not still responsible for the rules governing it.
I still don't see the match. Which federal agency is using persistent cookies to track visitors?
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I still don't see the match. Which federal agency is using persistent cookies to track visitors?
Technically speaking, no Federal agency is using persistent tracking cookies. However, the rule can be broadly interpreted that "no Federal agency's web site may SET such a cookie," and since the video is embedded into the web page, with no inherent option to NOT get the cookie (Flashblock will probably work, but I haven't tested it yet), you browse to a Federal Government website and you get a persistent tracking cookie, which can certainly look like a violation.
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Technically speaking, no Federal agency is using persistent tracking cookies. However, the rule can be broadly interpreted that "no Federal agency's web site may SET such a cookie,"
Now we get more to the guts of it. Which federal agency's web site is setting such a cookie?
We have to get into some subtle definitions of "web site" and "setting" and "is".
It probably works something like this:
1) Your browser gets the html from wh.g
2) Your browser downloads the flash video player from youtube
3) Your flash player does cookie stuff with youtube
So really it's only a suggestion from wh.g that you even download the player.
We need to keep the People empowered to use or not use their software.
you browse to a Federal Government website and you get a persistent tracking cookie, which can certainly look like a violation.
I
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Folks still need vent about the election and politics in general; we may as well get it over with now.
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ideally: the post the videos in an ogg container, encode it with open standard codecs, and make the full content avilable on bittorrent (also an open standard with open source implementations)
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ideally: the post the videos in an ogg container, encode it with open standard codecs, and make the full content avilable on bittorrent (also an open standard with open source implementations)
Congratulations, you just made the content inaccessible to about 80% of your target market. All of the technologies you list require extra software installed to be able to use. Now while you may think nothing of installing ogg player, bittorrent and everything else for the majority of the population that is just too complicated.
I have to spend one day per week on frontline telephone support of people doing basic PC training (ECDL & ICDL). Most of these cretins cant even send an email saying what there p
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
A cookie to the youtube.com domain? Who cares.
What exactly are we losing by having this? If you're loading anything from youtube, then youtube could certainly log that fact permanently on their end.
Why is this news?
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Read this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Privacy_and_third-party_cookies
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I didn't see in that paragraph is the fact that you can track a laptop geographically, ie. a user has been visiting the White House page from Iraq and is now showing up from an IP in the US.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.S. government should have its own servers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Incidentally, the download links are to MP4 files that are hosted on whitehouse.gov.
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Very much agree. Putting stuff on YouTube in addition isn't a bad idea for publicity, since a lot of people use it, but embedding it in government websites seems to be asking for trouble, if only from a counting-on-another-business-for-distributing-information aspect. Not to mention essentially promoting the company that owns YouTube. :)
Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers (Score:5, Interesting)
To me, it kinda works both ways. On one hand, you don't want to be dependant on YouTube. On the other hand, you don't want the government to be able to replace a video with another and claim that it always was this way. "We never said that... see our video?" When it's self-hosted, it's too easy to change. When it's YouTube-hosted, it's easy for YouTube to prove the change (and they may still have the old version, who knows). This is good for government transparency.
I would agree that there needs to be a public discussion about pros and cons, but thus far it doesn't seem cut and dried that YouTube hosting government videos is entirely a bad thing. Or entirely a good thing, either.
-- not an Obama supporter.
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Hmm... that's true. On the other hand, they could simply syndicate it, couldn't they? Push the video to both places instead of just one. YouTube hosting isn't necessarily bad - it's the sole YouTube hosting that I'm not too sure about, and also the inherent partnership.
I also am slightly (slightly) concerned (this is a little OT) with the twitter/facebook/whatever else usage, especially with the recent security issues with both of those. What we really need in this country are official Facebook and Twi
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That's kind of what they are doing by also having a link to download the video file directly instead of viewing the embedded youtube player.
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Problem solved.
Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers (Score:2)
Yeah, I don't see why they should use Youtube at all. If it's just an issue of getting the video up on their site, they should be able to do that on their own (including using Flash to embed them). Or is there some other benefit that posting on Youtube gives them?
It seems like it should be enough to make them public domain, so that people can post them to Youtube if they want. The government should even be able to post them both on their own site and Youtube. I just don't understand why they should use
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They do have the videos up on their site, go to the link posted in the summary, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/ [whitehouse.gov] and check the download link. It's a direct whitehouse.gov link.
The advantage they have in posting the streaming version to YouTube is that now the videos are seen by more than just the folk who follow whitehouse.gov. YouTube is the #1, no contenders, site for sharing videos. Myspace, Facebook, nothing else comes close to it's viewer base. Even the "don't upload, just watch" sites
Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers (Score:4, Insightful)
The way government is run, it'll cost a minimum of $500,000 a year to run it's own.
Or... $0 a year.
Re:The U.S. government should have its own servers (Score:5, Interesting)
My initial reaction was the same. But then it dawns on me that the new Administration is using YouTube like any other agent of the Press. Do we demand that the US Goverment set up its own TV stations and newspapers? No. The President announces a press conference and lets the media do their own thing. Occasionally, he does an interview with a specific host of a specific show to convey some particular message. YouTube is simply a recent take on a very old idea.
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My initial reaction was the same. But then it dawns on me that the new Administration is using YouTube like any other agent of the Press. Do we demand that the US Goverment set up its own TV stations and newspapers? No. The President announces a press conference and lets the media do their own thing.
If he was just posting the videos for download and then letting people post them on YouTube, that would be an accurate analogy... but the President invites representatives from many, many news outlets to the press conferences and briefings, rather than always calling this one newspaper when they have something to say.
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... but the President invites representatives from many, many news outlets to the press conferences and briefings, rather than always calling this one newspaper when they have something to say.
Not always. For example, the other night I saw an interview with President Bush and the First Lady on Larry King. There was no press pool.
Now - I don't really pay attention to these things. So I'm not sure how many interviews Bush was giving to other news outlets at the time. But I do know he's given personal one-on-one interviews before. So while I see YouTube as a channel for broadcasting a message, i'd think it would be a good idea if the Whitehouse also sought other such channels as well.
Of course
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a. YouTube deletes their video
b. YouTube ceases to exist
They have the original videos and can always do something else with them. It's kinda like saying that we'd have to create a government funded TV network to host debates. Sometimes idealism just isn't practical so you have to pick your battles.
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Interestingly, if you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN1S1LdkUeg [youtube.com] you'll see that there is a "click to download" option. As far as I can see, all of this account's videos are downloadable.
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More taxpayers money spent on bandwidth.
I'm sorry, but our government has spent way more cash on much, much, much more trivial things than bandwidth. Secondly, bandwidth today is dirt cheap, and how many people are going to be viewing these videos at a time? I imagine not very many.
Botnet of PCs that download/stream videos from whitehouse.gov, effectively causing a DDoS.
I'm all for hosting them on YouTube AND the government's site, bu
OH NOES! PANIC! (Score:4, Insightful)
THIS IS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT NEWS ITEM OF THE DAY AND UNDERMINES OUR DEMOCRACY!
Obama is evil because his staff allowed You Tube to set a cookie. There's a conspiracy. They've gotten to him, he's in the bag for them. I bet he got use of the orbital mind control lasers in exchange for this.
Jesus christ, what the fuck? YouTube gets to set a cookie on the page. Is that really a huge deal? Now they know you watched the Inauguration video from the White House website! Oh noes!
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The orbital mind control laser. You know too much.
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Re:OH NOES! PANIC! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OH NOES! PANIC! (Score:5, Funny)
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,
,
(well unless you're in Europe).
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Listen, the story isn't that websites can set cookies. Everyone knows this is the case.
The story is that YouTube was specifically exempted from the requirements.
So the question becomes "Why would you make a specific exemption for one provider and not for an entire class of providers?"
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That's an interesting question and one that I asked too before I read the article. Looks to me like the exemption is for "the video provider" and later on they explain that the video provider is YouTube and what YouTube does with the tracking cookies.
I'm sure it can easily be updated to include any other video providers they might choose to use.
Why make overly broad exemptions? (Score:2)
Maybe only YouTube presented a sufficiently convincing case for the exemption.
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Does anyone know if this is actual LAW, as in enacted by Congress and signed by the President; some sort of well defined bylaw or just a Policy? In any of those cases it seems like there could be an equal protection question if some other streaming video provider felt like doing a law suit.
Re:OH NOES! PANIC! and we're STILL in Iraq (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been two days and we're still in Iraq and the economy is still in the toilet AND NOW THIS?!!?
So, who wants Bush back?
Thought so.
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Exactly. If you're really concerned about it, set your browser to 1) not accept third-party cookies and 2) delete cookies on exit. You can set Firefox (and probably Opera) to keep certain cookies if you want to remain logged into certain sites all the time.
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That's right, if we have learned one thing from the past administration, we know that today it is cookies from youtube, but tomorrow it is warrantless wiretaps and waterboarding (not to be confused with snowboarding).
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I think it goes more like... "Hm, there's this communications tool we could use, but the lawyers say there may be a problem." Then the question is, do they...
a) Demand that a private company give the Federal Government's web-embedding special treatment compared to other sites?
b) Duplicate the functionality of an existing communications mechanism at public expense?
or c) Write up a waiver making it clear that, while you might expect *no* long-term tracking cookies to be saved to your browser when you hit a F
So... WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
What is so interesting about my online video viewing habits that the Ideological State Apparatus feels it is worthwhile to let them track it?
And if I delete cookies? Then what use is it?
we can (rightfully) whinge about the Republican Fascist Death Machine, but this is the kind of idiotic actions re: ISA's that the Democratic Party is stuck to as if with glue at its wrists and ankles.
RS
Re:So... WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
It's because YouTube hosts the videos, not the White House site. And the White House has no viable way to make YouTube not use tracking cookies on the content it serves up depending on the site the videos were embedded on. So they have a choice: allow YouTube to set it's normal cookies even when the videos are embedded in pages on the White House site, or never use YouTube for videos in the blog.
This isn't political. It's not about the White House, or the Democrafts, or the Republicans. It's about how YouTube tracks it's users. All users, all sites/blogs/whatever that drop YouTube videos into their pages.
Other sites comply just fine (Score:5, Informative)
Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001 [america.gov]
Why can't whitehouse.gov?
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Other gov sites broadcast video just fine without using cookies: http://www.america.gov/multimedia/video.html?videoId=8789243001 [america.gov]
That site set a session cookie on my browser as soon as I showed up. How do you know they don't use it for tracking?
Why can't whitehouse.gov?
Youtube is the cookiemonger here, not wh.g.
When people start trying to regulate the presentation layer of all this data, they're asking for way more trouble than they know. Please stop it before greasemonkey gets turned into a munition or something insane like that.
The only reasonable way to look at this issue is that YOU are the client and YOU are running software that went to wh.g, and the
So um (Score:5, Insightful)
A third party host - YouTube - is allowed to keep tracking cookies. The federal regulation on tracking cookies applies only to federal websites, so that's not really a problem.
People seem suspicious that only YouTube was granted this exemption, but... are there any other third-party hosts that have things embedded in the whitehouse.gov website? If not, I still don't understand the problem here. YouTube is doing the tracking, not the feds. If the concern is over the ability of the feds to get that tracking data, then there are so many other ways they could do that it's not even worth getting butthurt over.
Sounds like this guy is just picking a nit.
=Smidge=
Re:So um (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes -- it seems that YouTube is the only one granted this exception because they're the only third-party embedded content.
Incidentally, I was actually somewhat surprised when I went to whitehouse.gov to discover that it didn't use any third-party JavaScript and worked just fine with JavaScript disabled.
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The government has strict rules about the content they put up; it has to be 100% accessible to people with disabilities, and javascript causes a lot of problems with that.
On the one hand, this is obviously a no-brainer, because the gov't should be accessible to everyone. On the other hand, it means that developing websites is so expensive that they don't do it often, so even agencies that might be inclined to put things online don't do it because of the hassle.
full of sound and fury; signifying nothing... (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, "When we link to a third party, non government owned, website to host videos, they will set their own tracking cookie as per their own policy. We've checked with our lawyers, they say this is OK and written a waiver to that effect. But just in case you don't want the cookie, we also include links to the videos to accomidate you."
What a non-story story.
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And the policy says it happens when you click play. So either CNET is full of morons which, since I visited that page and then checked what cookies were modified on my computer today - not finding any from any .gov or youtube site, is likely. Or they managed to find one of those "glitches" that the policy also spoke of.
Read the links in the article Non-Story (Score:2)
If you don't want cookies block the damn things. (Score:5, Informative)
> Visitors to the official White House blog will receive long-term tracking cookies
> whenever they surf to a web-page with an embedded YouTube video -- even those users
> that do not click the "play" button.
Unless, of course, they choose not to accept the cookies, in which case they don't receive them. The videos still work fine.
I get it! (Score:2, Insightful)
Insidious. Clever!
Of course, now that I've figured this out, I'll be expecting a visit from some droll men in suits and sunglasses. I better have some tea ready for them.
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Federal Agencies (Score:2)
Last I checked, YouTube is not a federal agency. Why do they need a waiver from a rule which prevents federal agencies from using long-term tracking cookies to track users?
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I saw it too, the only thing I noticed is that at the time the story had 0 replies. Maybe it means "hot off the press"?
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More like "time for frist psot pissing contest!".
Re:whitehouse.gov (Score:4, Funny)
Hum.... nuked bananas.... <drool> /Homer
Re:whitehouse.gov (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm... naked Bananarama... /me
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I like how you apparently don't know what this is about, so describe it as "monitoring what websites we browse even more" and don't know how much time or money was put into the decision, so label it a "colossal waste of public resources".
I guess in the absence of facts, the thing to do is make things up and be angry about your invented reality.
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Is this what our government is wasting its time with? Monitoring what websites we browse even more? Is knowing what John and Jane Doe viewed on YouTube going to restore our economy or end the war? Shouldn't those be the priorities instead?
What they're OBVIOUSLY trying to do is find out what bin Laden is viewing on YouTube.
Or maybe the US Federal government is so big with so much diversity in personnel that they can have their webmonkeys play with websites to keep the general public informed as to what is going on (transparency in government, hopefully, though propaganda is just as likely at this point) while their military/intelligence personnel can focus on the war, and their economists can focus on, well, the economy.
We are at war with two countries that we have no business being involved with. Our entire economy and capitalistic system is rapidly collapsing while rampant bailout spending is furthering the problems with no oversight whatsoever. Unemployment and homelessness are continually rising as are foreclosure rates. We have one of the worst education success rates and literacy rates of developed nations but we spend the most per capita of all developed countries on education. Global warming destroying our habitat and living space. Why isn't the federal government focusing 100% on those issues? Even a second of manpower wasted on monitoring YouTube usage by John Doe is a complete waste of federal resources.
You think their webmon
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If that's all the he does to pay back his 4th largest contributor, that'd put him in contention for least corruption politician ever.
I don't think shows anything other than Obama's web staff like using YouTube on the White House web site.
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umm....sure... Google lobbied Obama so that he would get his White House staff to allow cookies on Youtube videos. That's a big win for Google. lol.
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Slashdot sensationalistic reporting frequently uses "quietly" to give a sense of wrong doing or subversive action.
I suppose it strokes the ego of the reporter as it they feel they are uncovering some dirty laundry when typically the event or action wasn't quiet or just wasn't important enough to warrant a press conference. In this case both apply.