Eideard

A gang of teenagers employed as “hitmen” are suspected of being responsible for dozens of killings, Mexican police said.

Police detained a minor on Friday accused of working as a gunman for a drug cartel after shocking videos and photos were posted online by a rival gang, and local media reported that police were also seeking a 12-year-old hitman nicknamed “El Ponchis,” (the cloak) but there was no confirmation of that from prosecutors.

Pedro Luis Benitez, the attorney general of Morelos, told a local radio station that police had detained a minor who allegedly worked as a gunman for a drug cartel and were looking for another.

He did not say whether the minor who was detained or the one being sought had appeared in the online photos or video. He also did not give the age of the suspects, but he implied they were young enough to be playing with toys.

“It is easy for them (criminals) to give them a firearm, making it appear as it if were a plastic weapon and that it is a game, when in fact it is not,” Benitez said.

There are reports that El Ponchis is a sadistic killer whose preferred method of killing is to slit the throats of his victims. He is believed to be employed by South Pacific Cartel, operating in the state of Morelos, just outside Mexico City…

The material posted online shows boys believed to be as young as 12 years old, pose for the camera with guns and corpses.

The gang is paid $3000 per killing. Not much value for a human life.

Viacom board of directors meeting

Google 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 YouTube service without permission.

Viacom claimed “tens of thousands of videos on YouTube, resulting in hundreds of millions of views,” had been posted based on its copyrighted works, and that the defendants knew about it but did nothing to stop illegal uploads.

But in a 30-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton said it would be improper to hold Google and YouTube liable under federal copyright law merely for having a “general awareness” that videos might be posted illegally.

“Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough,” he wrote. “The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity…”

The lawsuit went to the heart of perhaps the biggest issue facing media companies in the last decade: how to win Internet viewers without ceding control of TV shows, movies and music.

It was seen as a test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law making it a crime to produce technology to circumvent anti-piracy measures, and limiting liability of online service providers for copyright infringement by users.

New York-based Viacom is controlled by Sumner Redstone and owns cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central as well as the Paramount movie studio.

They are typical of the Ferengi who control much of the entertainment “industry” around the world. And industry it is.

All else is myth. Including the Fair Use doctrine which is supposed to give consumers a couple of old-fashioned rights to do with what we spend our dollars and pennies on.

Behold, a new YouTube star rises. There’s nothing terribly new about seeing a teenage girl use YouTube to discuss the world of beauty and fashion. But Blair Fowler, a sixteen-year-old girl whose name seems directly drawn from the pages of Sweet Valley High, has been written up twice this week for her use of video to not only share her favorite fashions, but monetize her YouTube fame with promotional deals.

Fowler was first cited as an example of the teen girl phenomenon of putting your “hauls” (ie — purchases from shopping trips) online, and in fact she is a great point person to consider in the examination of this trend, given her intense yet approachable commentary on what she acquired.

She is reputed to be making over $100K a year already – selling into a demographic wholly composed of 13 to 17-year-old girls. That’s the amount directly dealing with her YouTube videos.

My wife just commented, “Now, we know why we’re climbing out of the recession!”

Several American men arrested in Pakistan this week amid suspicion that they were plotting terrorist attacks planned to go to Afghanistan, a Pakistani police interrogation report said.

The report…sheds more light on a case that led Pakistani police to arrest five Americans Wednesday at a home in Sargodha, a town about 120 miles south of Islamabad. The men will be transferred to Lahore, Pakistan, for security reasons, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told CNN…

“They had deep interest in the religion, and they were of the opinion that a jihad must be waged against the infidels for the atrocities committed by them against Muslims around the world,” said the report, which refers to the five as college students.

The report focused on one of the suspects identified as Ahmed Abdullah Minni, a 20-year-old American born in Virginia. It said he regularly went online to watch attacks on the U.S. military in Afghanistan and that he left comments praising the actions. That caught the attention of militants, and he was eventually contacted by a person named Saifullah, the report says…

The report said the suspects made a plan with Saifullah to go from Pakistan to Afghanistan. They gathered in Karachi and left for Hyderabad on December 1. They tried to hook up with two militant groups — Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Jamaat ud Dawa — but neither showed interest…

Pakistani authorities arrested five men Wednesday, and a sixth man — the father of one of the five — was arrested afterward, police said. Officials said the six men include three Pakistani-Americans, an Ethiopian-American, an Egyptian-American and an Eritrean-American.

We can rest assured that Joe Lieberman and John Boehner will hold press conferences calling for Congress to hold full investigations on the role played by free access to Facebook and YouTube in this case. Having strong friends of freedom like this in Congress will guarantee, blah, blah.

Meanwhile, the latest rumor is these idiot kids will be deported back to the U.S. where they will be dealt with appropriately – or not – depending where we are in the election cycle.

UPDATE: Latest rumor says they’ll face trial in Pakistan before any chance of deportation.

Love the movie. Love the clip.

Is anyone doing Balloon Boy costumes for Halloween?

U2′s concert at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in California on Sunday will be streamed live on video-sharing website YouTube.

Manager Paul McGuinness said that, as the gig was already being filmed, it was “the perfect opportunity to extend the party beyond the stadium”.

Fans in 16 countries, including the UK, the US, Australia and India, will be able to watch the show at 0330 GMT.

It will be the band’s penultimate concert of the year.

YouTube said it would place adverts around the video “in the normal manner”, and that clips from the concert would be available on the site after the gig ends.

McGuinness said that U2 had “wanted to do something like this for a long time”.

Way cool!

“It’s virtually impossible to violate rules, and this is something that the public really doesn’t understand….”

A depth of evil that is almost incomprehensible.. though not necessarily uncommon.

A father managed to deliver his baby son after watching DIY baby delivery video clips on YouTube.

Feeling nervous about the imminent birth of his child Marc Stephens had a look at childbirth videos on his home computer.

Four hours later his wife, Jo, went into labour three weeks earlier than expected and, as paramedics rushed to help, Stephens was able to put his new-found knowledge into action and helped deliver 5lb 5oz Gabriele.

Stephens, 28, a naval engineer, told yesterday how he had already learned how to play the guitar and solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle from YouTube videos. So it didn’t seem too much of a leap for him to check out the whys and wherefores of childbirth.

He said: “I spent about half a hour on Google and watched a couple of videos on YouTube…After he finished looking at the sites at about 10.30pm the couple went to bed, only to wake up at 2am with Jo, 28, in labour…

The baby was delivered safely and both mother and child are doing well. Jo, who has three other children, said: “I was quite relaxed. I have to say, out of all my four labours, that was the one I enjoyed the most. Marc is one of those people who can put his hand to anything.”

Har!

At least one representative of the venerable news agency, which recently declared that it was tired of the Internet riding on its coattails, was apparently unaware the agency had an official YouTube video channel.

The AP recently sent a letter to WTNQ-FM in Tennessee–an affiliate of the Associated Press, by the way–accusing the country music radio station of copyright violation for embedding videos from the AP’s official YouTube channel on its Web site, according to a station employee’s blog. The AP channel includes embed code for its videos, which allows any Web site or blog to embed the videos on their sites–a feature that can be turned off…

Frank Strovel, WTNQ’s operations manager, writes in a blog that the station received the following message from the AP’s regional radio representative in Chicago: “I noticed you are posting our video content with out a license and have to ask you to remove the AP video content from the site ASAP. If you would like to know more about our web services please contact me.”

While this may be a simple misunderstanding, representatives for the AP and WTNQ could not immediately be reached for comment.

AP doesn’t have a clue.

Thanks to Uncle Dave for pointing this idiocy out over at our “Big Blog”.

YouTube, said it will block all music videos to British users – sort of about now – after it was unable to reach a rights deal with the main songwriters’ collection society.

The world’s largest video sharing site said PRS for Music, a British collection society that collects royalties on behalf of nearly 50,000 composers, was asking it to pay “many, many times” more than the previous licensing agreement that has expired.

“The costs are simply prohibitive for us — under PRS’s proposed terms, we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback,” the company said in a blog on Monday.

The move is the latest sign of the tension between YouTube and the music industry and also indicates the video site’s resolve to keep operating costs under control as it strives to generate meaningful profits for Google…

But PRS disputed YouTube’s version of events and said: “We were shocked and disappointed…blah, blah…”

I don’t know if this will ever get interesting – other than suits vs. suits. Meanwhile, YouTube/music fans in the UK get screwed.