Simon Willison’s Weblog

YouTube Enables Deep Linking Within Videos. Add #t=1m45s to the end of a YouTube URL to jump to that spot. I’d be a lot more impressed by this if visiting a YouTube link in the UK didn’t use IP geo targetting to redirect me to uk.youtube.com, losing the fragment identifier and hence the #t specifier in the process.

# 26th October 2008, 8:28 am / broken, fragments, geoip, urls, youtube

Popular Websites Vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks. Ed Felten and Bill Zeller announce four CSRF holes, in ING Direct, YouTube, MetaFilter and the New York Times. The ING Direct hole allowed transfer of funds out of a user’s bank accounts! The first three were fixed before publication; the New York Times hole still exists (despite being reported a year ago), and allows you to silently steal e-mail addresses by CSRFing the “E-mail this” feature.

# 29th September 2008, 1:08 pm / bill-zeller, csrf, ed-felten, ingdirect, metafilter, new-york-times, security, youtube

Wario Land: Shake It—Amazing footage! Some virals really do deserve linking to.

# 26th September 2008, 4:46 pm / ad, flash, viral, wario, wii, youtube

YouTube Playlist: DjangoCon 2008 Sessions. YouTube’s tag and search indexes appear to lag behind the main site by quite a while; this appears to be the definitive index page for videos of talks at DjangoCon.

# 16th September 2008, 4:50 am / django, djangocon08, python, youtube

YouTube: djangocon tag. Google have started posting videos of presentations at DjangoCon on YouTube.

# 16th September 2008, 2:43 am / django, djangocon, google, python, youtube

“THIS IS NOT MLM!!!”—An Appreciation. Merlin Mann explains his fascination with the “cash gifting” pyramid scams that keep cropping up on YouTube.

# 3rd August 2008, 3:14 pm / cashgifting, merlinmann, mlm, pyramidschemes, youtube

Musical hackery. Indescribably clever musical video game creation, where images from classic games spell out their own theme tunes. The smartest thing I’ve seen on YouTube, well, ever.

# 22nd November 2007, 5:03 pm / games, genius, hack, music, youtube

Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Windows 386 rap.

# 13th September 2007, 10:10 am / funny, microsoft, msdos, windows, youtube

H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone.

# 21st August 2007, 8:28 am / adobe, appletv, flash, h264, iphone, microsoft, silverlight, video, youtube

YouTube Scalability Talk. Kyle Cordes’ notes on a Google Tech Talk on scaling YouTube by Cuong Do.

# 14th July 2007, 10:26 pm / cuongdo, google, googletechtalk, kylecordes, scaling, youtube

Lego Millenium Falcon Stop Motion. This introduced me to a whole world of YouTube Star Wars lego stop motion videos.

# 3rd July 2007, 11:03 pm / animation, lego, milleniumfalcon, starwars, stopmotion, youtube

Top XSS exploits by PageRank. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook all feature.

# 29th May 2007, 10:07 pm / facebook, google, msn, pagerank, security, xss, yahoo, youtube

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. Absolutely worth watching—don’t be put off by the title.

# 5th February 2007, 11:05 pm / web2, youtube