Youtube

Days before iOS 6 lands on iPhones without the familiar pre-installed YouTube app, Google has released a new version with some significant upgrades. (Grab the app here.)

Google is trying to clean up the Web, one comment at a time. Earlier this week it introduced a new feature designed to drain the online cesspool better known as YouTube comments.

YouTube has long been the repository of anonymous, illiterate, hateful, and just plain brain-dead comments since its inception. Now Google is trying to gently urge people to post videos and comments using their real names -- more specifically, their Google+ identities -- in the quaint notion that if people are held accountable by name, they might possibly act a little less like jerks. Maybe.

YouTube can turn anyone with a camera into an eyewitness reporter, but that can be a problem when the subjects of the video need to stay anonymous.

To address this issue, YouTube has added a face blurring option to the site's built-in photo editor. When users apply the option, YouTube tries to detect and blur all faces automatically. The option appears under “Additional Features” in YouTube's Video Enhancements tool.

YouTube must filter content uploaded by users, a German court ruled Friday.

YouTube was taken to court for copyright infringement in uploaded videos by German music royalty collecting society GEMA, which said that the Google-owned video site isn't doing enough to block copyright-protected music videos.

Megaupload's US attorney, Ira Rothken, has a succinct description of the US government case against his client: "wrong on the facts and wrong on the law."

The week has been a busy one for Rothken, a San Francisco Internet law attorney who has previously represented sites like isoHunt and video game studios like Pandemic. When I call, he's eating crab cakes and waiting for yet another meeting to start, but he has plenty of time to attack the government's handling of the Megaupload case.

Microsoft's YouTube channel appears to have been hacked by someone who has removed all the software giant's videos and is soliciting subscribers for sponsorships.

The background on the channel has been changed to one that includes the title "Predator Cinema," and a message has been posted that says: "I DID NOTHING WRONG I SIMPLY SIGNED INTO MY ACCOUNT THAT I MADE IN 2006 :/"