First Aid Kit where are you ?

Okay I eat my words. I once told a guy who was rabbiting on about privacy and snooping hi-tech which you wouldn't dream of. To make sure he stuck an Elastoplast or some sticky tape over his PC video and mike because the government could laser in and watch his every movement and listen to his every word. I was of course kidding and winding him up because he'd been rabbiting on about the government can do this the government can do that, rip this up, don't do this and that, yadda yadda yadda.

So anyway. Today when I opened my blog I happened to notice none of the YouTube video's came up. Not to worry I thinks to myself, it's happened a few times already and they must be doing what they do. I dunno, maybe they are like cleaning the stream or whatever it's called, I'm no techy so don't ask me, it's just my vid's aren't coming up so be patient I tells myself.

Then, I goes on to another site and I got a "505" stream error code and now I'm starting to think I've bought a heap of junk as a computer. No, that can't be it because it's a Dell and I paid a lot of money for it. I mean an awful lot of money which could have bought half a dozen laptops and given me similar peace of mind I guess but I was flush at the time and thought what the heck. Anyway, I digress. What I wanted to tell you about was this 'spying' stuff.

As I was rolling back the pages I happened to notice this scroll thing coming along the bottom on my web page ( quite normal ), which said "trying to contact s.ytimg.com".....WTF is that I thought? As I'm a curious guy. So anyhow, I took this down and stuck it in my browser and searched to find out and low and behold I'm greeted with a "Stop YouTube (s.ytimg.com) Video Camera Spying" web page from some guy called Keith who seems to know what he's talking about a lot more than I do when it comes to techy stuff. ( I know nothing so that's easy ).

Here's the LINK, and here's what he says:-

Stop YouTube (s.ytimg.com) Video Camera Spying
25 July, 2008 - 16:05 — Keith

Did you know that your camera enabled computer can spy on you? Did you know that by watching that video or playing that cute game you may be allowing a site to watch you? Did you know that YouTube (via s.ytimg.com) seems to be one such site?

Learn how stop this here.

Background

A few weeks ago I posted an article on cookies from an odd site (s.ytimg.com) turning up on pages that were normally OK. It turned out to be a YouTube helper, and that the cookies were needed (at the time anyway) to help play the flash video correctly.

What was odd was that a couple of commenters noted that they had seen a warning about the s.ytimg.com attempting to access their camera and microphones, which is more than a little disturbing.

Believe it or not this is real, and is actually a feature of the Flash Player, although it can be turned off (as another commenter noted).

Quite why anyone thought that this wold be a good thing to add into a browser component is beyond me; browsers should browse, they should not attempt to do video conferencing. That is what Skype is for.

How to Turn Camera & Microphone Access Off - For a site (like s.ytimg.com)

Turning off microphone and camera access is actually an easy four step process, as follows:

Step 1

Point your browser at a flash video on a site you are concerned about (such as YouTube) and right click on the video's timeline bar. As shown in the picture below:

And so on and so forth on his help page, again HERE.

Now I have to eat my words and I also have to have a rethink about what I've written on my blog so far about not believing in conspiracies. BOO! It's like we're under attack here and now I'll either have to stick an Elastoplast on my video or a bag over my head so "they" can't recognise me. But if I do that, I'll not be able to write anymore blogs. First Aid Kit where are you ?...And thanks 'Keith', whoever you are but I trust you don't work for LiveLeak and are not winding ME up.

Incidentally, YouTube are a right ball ache when they do this stream cleaning stuff !