Viacom and Judge Louis L. Stanton Rob YouTube Users of Privacy

On Thursday July 3rd, U.S. District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton forced YouTube to give Viacom -- which owns shows like "The Daily Show", and "The Colbert Report" -- records that show what videos you and I have been watching.

Here in this video , I explain that the implications are dangerous and could help, for example, the Chinese Government find and kill Tibetan protesters. In this, a private company could purchase the data from Viacom and then resell it to the Chinese Government.

The Chinese Government could use the IP address information to find the general location of Tibetan protesters, go to their areas, and kill them. That's a possible scenario.

I considered the court's "restriction" on use of the material by Viacom. But that's the problem: the block is on how the data is used -- there's no specific prohibition of the sale of the information.

The reason for all of these actions, if you've not followed the story is that Viacom has sued YouTube for allegations of copywrite infringement. Viacom lost on the majority of motions, but the one that's sticking asks for YouTube to essentially share records of what videos you and I have been watching, and that includes IP adresses.

I can't see the need for the data. Viacom claims that they wish to learn if audience views to a Viacom show on YouTube are greater than that for amateur shows like LonelyGirl15. They don't need all of that information to see that LonelyGirl15 has a larger audience traffic than "The Colbert Report" on YouTube.

You can complain about this decision. In the video, and here, I give the contact information for Judge Stanton and his Law Clerk, Samson Enzer.

The contact info is this: Phone number for Judge Stanton: 212-805-0252 and the fax is 212-805-0359. Mr. Enzer is on Linkedin and Facebook. You can contact him directly from this blog post.

On CNN, Jennifer Donahue Blasts Hillary Clinton For Playing "Race Card" On Obama; Clinton Advisor David Gergen Can't Stand Truth

Jennifer Donahue, who's a political pundit and Senior Advisor for Political Affairs at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, gets my award for a major act of courage.

Thursday night, on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Jennifer Donahue blasted the Hillary Clinton campaign for using the race card against Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Race. She was on the show with Cooper, Clinton Advisor and Political Consultant David Gergen, and CNN contributor Jeffrey Toobin. Whereas Toobin and Gergen were circumspect in their way of addressing the matter, Donahue was right on.

This seemed to rankle Gergen.

Gergen tried to hide his anger at the mere mention of race and Clinton campaign strategy, but he's angry because deep down he knows they've taken a path of trying to "Willie Horton" Barack Obama. Look, Gergen's a Clinton Advisor -- something Anderson Cooper didn't mention -- and this is the second time in as many weeks he's tried to protect or soften a person's attack of a Clinton campaign tactic, beit Carl Bernstein who claimed the Clinton's were being desperate, or now.

Gergen's openly using the CNN platform to help Hillary Clinton's campaign for president. Thus, he's fair game to be denounced.

The simple fact is that with the Clinton Campaign having both volunteers and paid campaign staffers who worked to launch a race-based smear campaign against Obama, starting with planting the idea that he's Muslim -- a total lie -- they have indeed played the "race card" and Gergen knows it.

For Gergen to argue otherwise is in itself advancing a lie. For CNN to allow Gergen to do this without revealing that he's a Clinton operative is just aiding and abetting the advance of the same lie.

I noticed that no one bothered to claim that Hillary Clinton was playing the "sex card" when she said the "boys were ganging up" on her.

Geez. David, you should know -- indeed, you do know -- that people make some views of others based on racial stereotypes and that the Clintons have been playing to those stereotypes.

To the woodshed with Gergen! His assertions to the contrary are an outrage! Thankfully, the main stream media, like the Washington Post , is picking up on this terrible approach.

Someone Help ESPN Redesign The ESPN 360 Website

According to Valleywag, ESPN's ESPN 360 website is getting a makeover, adding live streaming video of certain sports events. Frankly, I still don't think ESPN really gets new media.

Given its presence in sports, one would expect a state-of-the-art approach, as well as the realization that they can do better than just sticking videos on a page.

Oh well. It's obvious ESPN's not located in the SF Bay Area.

Yahoo!'s Appointment of Jerry Yang As CEO No Surprise To Me - My Idea!

This week, Yahoo! announced it was hiring -- or re-hiring -- co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO. The move comes as no surprise to me because I suggested it to a newly-minted Yahoo finance executive I was sitting next to on a Monday April 30th 2007 5 PM EST flight bound from New York City, where I was for the NFL Draft, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he and I both live.

The conversation started because we were talking about the web and "Web 2.0". In the process of the talk, we both revealed our occupations. He was only with Yahoo for about three months to that point and had just come from a meeting regarding the then-new acquisition of Ad Bright, the online ad company, in New York. I said that one reason Google was way ahead of Yahoo! was that there were two recognizable founders at the center -- Larry Page and Sergi Brin. By contrast, Yahoo's founders were no where to be seen. I said the best way to recapture some attention and institutional memory was to bring back Jerry Yang.

After the conversation, the man said little. He was working on a massive Excel spreadsheet that explained Yahoo's ad inventory and revenue estimates. OK, I absorbed a lot of information. Hey, it was in my face, what could I do?

Yahoo's website is an enormous system containing over 100 million pages and several billion impressions. I was really surprised at just how large the site system and the company as a result, had become. And it may be the very reason for the problems it faces -- it's so big both in site and company structure that it's lost it's identity.

Can Jerry Yang bring Yahoo! back? Perhaps. But I think the first move should be to simplify what's there. Yahoo's all over the place and it's hard to see it in a coherent fashion. Google's website design provides a key, as it's many services are neatly separated and grouped so one does not get lost. This isn't true for Yahoo!'s site at all.

Yahoo! needs to find a new design formula that's easy and timeless and scaleable -- and stick with it.