Serving up a healthy dose of proof positive that you should, perhaps, obtain your news from somewhere other than random uploads on a video sharing website is a number of uploads that look like this:
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These are videos claiming to show various “miracle escapes” from the destruction wrought by the Earthquake and Tsunami. While this is a nice human interest angle (and actual news sites are currently full of “Miracle escape” articles, which is clearly a big hook for readers) the only actual human interest is that of the video uploader wanting to make some money. Both Blogspot sites listed (latestupdatedailynews(dot)blogspot(dot)com and jhonsryo(dot)blogspot(dot)com) take the end-user to wonderfully inappropriate survey questions, complete with smiley face.
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The other two sites – lossifnotsee(dot)com and flashvideonews(dot)com – both launch installer prompts for Hotbar, along with a few pieces of pre-ticked software including ShopperReports and Blinkx Beat.
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Not quite the “Miracle Stories” I was expecting. As with most Youtube scam clips, you’ll know something is not quite right whenever you see one of those “We can’t play the video here due to copyright reasons, visit our website instead”. Don’t bother.
Christopher Boyd