SteveStreeting.com

A couple of random thoughts for a slow Sunday…

You know, despite being universally reviled, spam actually has a purpose - and that is to prove that my email is working. My spam defenses are pretty good and sift out the vast majority of junk, but I still get the odd unfiltered mail every day and in a way, it’s comforting. It’s like a little heartbeat telling me that my email is indeed still online, and I will therefore be getting any important mail on time. In the last 12 hours I didn’t get any, and I was actually a little suspicious, and proceeded to test my mail (which was still fine). Funny how you come to rely on such things.

Secondly, I had noticed that YouTube was starting to shut me out of a lot of videos in recent days. It seems they’ve signed partner agreements with a bunch of media companies, and as of now most of the ‘top hits’ for things like music videos I look up have a little red triangle in the top left, meaning ‘partner video’. Yesterday when I was looking these up on Windows / Firefox, without exception these videos came up with an error saying ‘this video is not available in your country’ or similar - so I had to locate unofficial videos for the post I made yesterday. Oddly today (and I’m on the Mac now) I seem to be able to get to these videos - I’m guessing they perform these filters by IP though so my platform shouldn’t make a difference; maybe they’ve changed it in the last 24 hours and allowed the UK to see these videos? Anyone know what’s going on? I see this as one of the inevitable downsides as sites like YouTube start to make money.