Youtube

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking...

THE AD: A 30-second ad for Cheerios cereal features a black dad, white mom and biracial child. THE REACTION: The ad produced enough vitriol on YouTube last week that Cheerios requested the comments section be turned off. COMPANY STANCE: The company is standing by the fictitious family, which reflects a black-white racial mix uncommon in commercials today, especially in TV ads, while mixed-race families are on the rise in real life. The national ad will continue running as scheduled for...

Newlyweds and avid runners Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky were standing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the bombs exploded. They each lost a leg, and Kensky's right foot was badly hurt. Their families said in a statement that the event shook many people's faith in humanity but that the outpouring of support that followed restored their own. Friends quickly set up a Web page that has raised more than $600,000 from 10,900 donations for Downes and Kensky. Others uploaded video tributes ...

Robert L. Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television more than 30 years ago, is setting his sights on the Internet. Last week, Bethesda-based RLJ Entertainment introduced two paid channels on YouTube as part of a pilot program on the popular video-sharing site. The first channel, OnCue, offers movies, documentaries and other programming targeted to African American and urban audiences for $1.99 a month. The other, Acorn TV, specializes in British drama and mysteries for a monthly fee of $4.99.

Most venture capitalists will tell you that a good idea isn't worth much - the value is in execution, which is very hard. But that doesn't stop people from coming forward to take credit when someone hits a home run. We saw it with Google and countless others. Someone gets rich, and someone else says they stole the idea. This time it's YouTube. Herbert Elwood Gilliland III emails us to say that YouTube's name and idea was his, and that he told Chad Hurley about it years ago. After a different conversation he says he had with Sergey Brin in 2007, more...

Just because he won a nationally broadcast singing competition and has thousands of fans watching him sing on YouTube doesn't mean his constant singing was always welcome growing up. "When we were kids, he was always singing," said TaLia Wayne, 31, of Burtonsville. "Sometimes we would just be like, ‘Jerome, could you be quiet?' " Jerome Wayne didn't stay quiet for long and, on July 19, he landed a recording contract with Hollywood Records by winning ABC's...

It's no surprise that YouTube users have illegally uploaded hundreds of full-length films to the site. What does seem odd, however, is that in several cases, movie studios have apparently not tried to stop them. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday morning that hundreds of films, including "blockbusters from Walt Disney Co. and Sony Corp.'s Columbia and Tristar studios," are available on the world's largest video-sharing Web site. This is nothing new — YouTube has battled allegations of copyright infringement...

YouTube has moved swiftly in the past year to produce more original content to keep regular viewers coming back to its site, rather than simply stopping by to see the latest viral cat video. Now, the Financial Times reports that the paid model could go into effect as soon as this week, with as many as 50 subscription channels starting as low as $1.99 a month. The New York Times reported that channels could include those for children's programming, entertainment, music and other topic areas.

YouTube has taken the wrapping off a new Web site design that's focused more on sharing and getting access to content from channel partners of the online streaming site. The new site has a central panel that connects to your social networks such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook and MySpace. It also has a new, gray color scheme that builds off of its "Cosmic Panda" layout that's supposed to be cleaner and simpler. The new interface is easier to navigate, with three columns that lay content out in a more orderly fashion, with...

Two boys are fighting in a Calvert County middle school. A crowd of students laugh and jeer until a teacher arrives to break it up. Later discipline is meted out. But the fight is not nearly over. A video goes up on YouTube — 32 seconds of personal humiliation for the boy who is taking most of the punches. He has often been bullied in middle school, according to his family, and now is shown being hit in the head and side and placed in a headlock. There is no apparent serious injury, and the clip is posted as...

Netflix, Hulu, Apple: Who's got what you want to watch tonight? That question became more complicated Thursday as online-video viewers got another suitor: The Google-owned video site YouTube said it will ask consumers to pay a monthly subscription for some of the videos on its site. With the announcement of its new service, Google is throwing its hat into a crowded market of video providers all trying to answer consumers' demands to give them want to see, when they want to see it. Americans are increasingly watching video through...

Financial Policy Treasury to sell more GM stock The Treasury Department said Monday it will begin another round of sales of the General Motors stock it acquired during the government's bailout of the auto sector. GM last month said it would make it easier for Treasury to sell its remaining 241.7 million shares, or nearly 18 percent, of common stock of the No. 1 U.S. automaker. It also will bring GM a step closer to eliminating the stigma of government ownership.

YouTube has moved swiftly in the past year to produce more original content to keep regular viewers coming back to its site, rather than simply stopping by to see the latest viral cat video. Now, the Financial Times reports that the paid model could go into effect as soon as this week, with as many as 50 subscription channels starting as low as $1.99 a month. The New York Times reported that channels could include those for children's programming, entertainment, music and other topic areas.

Newlyweds and avid runners Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky were standing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon when the bombs exploded. They each lost a leg, and Kensky's right foot was badly hurt. Their families said in a statement that the event shook many people's faith in humanity but that the outpouring of support that followed restored their own. Friends quickly set up a Web page that has raised more than $600,000 from 10,900 donations for Downes and Kensky. Others uploaded ...

MOSCOW — In a few months, starting last August, the YouTube account in the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev took on an increasingly puritanical religious tone. It moved from secular militancy to Islamist certainty. It seemed to mirror the wars in the Caucasus, which shifted from a separatist conflict in Chechnya in the 1990s to a jihadist campaign that continues to this day in neighboring Dagestan . Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old ethnic Chechen believed to have been one of the Boston Marathon...

Julia Stiles recently pulled the plug. No more cable television in her home. The New York-based actress has come to the conclusion that all the TV she wants to watch is readily available online. "This is the wave of the future, the way that people watch shows more and more," Stiles says, "on their devices and on the computer. " Her new approach as a viewer coincides with her professional conversion to TV on the Web. More than a year ago, Stiles was approached to play the title role in a...

"YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly," says the site . The site first went down at around 9:30 California time. Or possibly earlier, we're sorting through the Twitter barrage ¿ "is down" is a trending topic right now. Most companies plan maintenance for short periods in the middle of the night, so our guess is this is maintenance of the unplanned sort. 2+ hours and counting isn't a trivial amount of downtime. We've asked Google for a statement on when it might be back up, and what caused the outage.

Google is releasing an update to YouTube for Google TV over the next few days, aiming to make it easier to navigate the video service on its connected sets. On Saturday, the company promised that it would release "big announcements" about Google TV on Monday. Oddly enough, the company posted the notice on its Facebook page before publishing the post about YouTube on its blog. The new service will also have a big focus on channels , making it easier for users to navigate between related videos and find...

Google said Tuesday it would bring its ultra-fast Internet service to a second U.S. city, ramping up a fledgling fiber-optic business that is sending tremors through the telecom industry. Minutes after Google announced it was expanding to Austin, AT&T pledged it would bring similar technology to the Texas capital, which has about 820,000 residents. Google's broadband project is being closely watched because it offers Web speeds of up to one gigabit, or 1 billion bits of information, per second.

The new month has already brought a lot of major tech news: Google announced Saturday that it's closing YouTube and launching a scent search engine; meanwhile, Twitter is launching a two-tiered service that will require users to pay $5 if they want vowels included in their messages. In other words, it's April Fool's Day, and major tech companies are following tradition and pulling some big pranks. Going back to its roots as "Twttr" — the original name of the service — the micro-blogging site ...