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5 Minute Posts About Something Cool Episode 6

Well, it is that time again to take another five minutes to write about cool things that have happened recently. Today’s issue was brought to my attention by an email from Change.org regarding a petition I almost forgot I had signed…

5MinutePostsMany of you may remember back in June when this article on TorrentFreak grabbed the attention of the connected world. It should come as no surprise to all of us that as long as we have corrupt lobbyists, we will have oppressive laws and pressure on companies like YouTube; and as long as we have oppressive laws and pressure on companies like YouTube, the functionality of these sites, their capabilities, and sites around them will continue to be reduced (the sluggish nightmare that is HTML5 is just one of many other examples of this).

YouTube-mp3.org has always been one of the world’s best services for quickly converting any YouTube video into a high quality downloadable .mp3 file. They did the job quickly, without downloading flaky software, and for free. When “GoogleTube” saw that this was not only helpful, but also being used by a lot of people, they knew they had to shut it down according to their new common policy of making the internet a slower and more annoying place. As can be expected by netizens who dislike Google’s new policy, a petition was started on Change.org to allow third party recording tools to be used with YouTube.

Now even though Change.org has some rather sketchy content on their homepage, it can still be a useful tool to both stop pointless petitions and bring to light this very important issue of Google breaking YouTube-mp3.org. On the 19th of this month, I received this encouraging email from Phil, the guy who started it all:

 

change email

 

Even beyond that, great progress has been made and on this. According to the official petition page, they reached their initial goal of 1 Million signatures on July 21st. There’s been no word from Phil on if he’s gone to visit Google yet to deliver the signatures, but we do look forward to any more updates that he may have to add. If you’re interested in keeping YouTube MP3 alive (and even if you’re not), be sure to head on over to Change.org and sign in to be part of one of the largest Change.org petitions ever against YouTube.

.:Albert Bunn

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