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Sourcing material from the mecca of viral video has always been a bit iffy -- who knows which rabid Beyonce fan will bite back when you slice and dice their  Single Ladies  tribute video. However, YouTube's recent addition of the Creative Commons licensing option just made it a whole lot easier to make mashups without stepping on anyone's stiletto-sporting toes. Users are now given the option to choose between YouTube's standard license or the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which, when selected, automatically adds the video to a library of similarly appointed videos, now available for your cutting and captioning pleasure. An attribution is placed beneath any video sourcing material from the Creative Commons library. Among the more professional outfits adding their videos to the CC pool are  Al Jazeera  and  C-SPAN  -- who's ready to see Mittens the Kitten and Sarah Palin battle it out over tax cuts? You can now access the Creative Commons li...

Remember Firesheep? Well, the cookie snatching Firefox extension now has a more portable cousin called FaceNiff. This Android app listens in on WiFi networks (even ones encrypted with WEP, WPA, or WPA2) and lets you hop on to the accounts of anyone sharing the wireless connection with you. Right now it works with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Nasza-Klasa (a Polish Facebook clone), but developer Bartosz Ponurkiewicz promises more are coming. You'll need to be rooted to run FaceNiff -- luckily, we had such a device laying around and gave the tap-to-hack app a try. Within 30 seconds it identified the Facebook account we had open on our laptop and had us posting updates from the phone. At least with Firesheep you had to sit down and open up a laptop, now you can hijack Twitter profiles as you stroll by Starbucks and it'll just look like you're sending a text message (but you wouldn't do that... would you?). One more image and a video are after the break. FaceNiff

NVIDIA and YouTube made a rather caveat-heavy announcement today that promises to bring stereoscopic 3D YouTube videos to NVIDIA 3D Vision PCs and notebooks, running Firefox 4. If you're rocking an NVIDIA GeForce GPU-equipped machine, sporting driver release 275 or later, a 3D Vision monitor, notebook, projector, or DLP HDTV, and Firefox 4 with streaming HTML5, you've got access to all the 3D goodness YouTube has to offer -- given you're not trying to access content via a standard YouTube channel, as the outfit's HTML5 support is still limited. And don't forget, you'll need your active shutter 3D glasses handy, too. So, if you fit all of the aforementioned criteria, check out the demo video after break (and make sure to hit the HTML5 function under options) -- otherwise, feel free to go on using the old cyan and red method for viewing YouTube in 3D. Full PR after the break. NVIDIA

One of the world's most (in)famous names has picked a side in the browser battles -- last night saw the debut of a new Google Chrome commercial, starring Lady Gaga and her "little monsters." Spanning a minute and a half of Gaga and her fans singing and gyrating their way through her latest single, the ad is intended to illustrate the power of the web and its creative new modes of interaction. To be fair, said interaction is mostly Lady Gaga saying "jump" and a crowd of YouTubers doing it without bothering to ask how high, but hey, the result is fun to watch. You just need to disable your sense of shame for all humanity and click past the break. googlechrome (YouTube)

If you were glued to your computer during the live broadcast of theGoogle I/O keynote yesterday morning, you might have noticed a new feature accompanying an otherwise recognizable YouTube video. The online video provider used this morning's conference kickoff as the springboard for its live captioning feature, which brings human input to the transcription process. According to Google's Naomi Black, a team of stenographers banged out translations during this morning's keynote. The resulting captions were then displayed on the conference floor and delivered by an "open source gadget" to the I/O YouTube channel. This new feature apparently prevents the inaccuracies experienced using Google's automatic captioning function, which, if you'll recall, provided us with at least a couple hearty chuckles when we took it for a spin. The code behind the new live captions will be available to YouTube's partners and competitors on Google Code. You can check outtomo...

Google just announced movie rentals in the Android Market at its I/O conference. Chris from the Android services team just hit the stage at Moscone and demonstrated renting movies on the Android Market from your phone, tablet or PC with a single click. "Pinning" mirrors the experience with apps and books, you can select it on your PC and download to the device in the background for offline viewing. Movies are live in the market right now, support on all Android 2.2 or higher devices is expected "in a couple of weeks" and tablets will get support bundled with their upgrade to Android 3.1. On the PC, it ties back to the recently expanded YouTube rental service with the same restrictions (30 days to watch, 24 hour window once you start watching) and pricing, making that per-movie VOD price a bit easier to swallow with its cross-platform support and we even spied a few HD selections for $4.99. Keep an eye on the liveblog for more information. Android Market movie rent...

Remember those 3,000 movies from Universal, Sony and Warner Bros. that were added to YouTube yesterday? Turns out, that same library is also being pushed to Google's newly announced Movies service. We learned as much during the outfit's executive Q&A session following the keynote this morning, and furthermore anything purchased / rented via Google Movies will be available to consume via YouTube,  and vice-versa . Not a bad gesture!

In the midst of a blog post welcoming us to "the future of video" head of YouTube Salar Kamangar confirms that starting today it will add around 3,000 new movie titles for rental in the US, along with reviews and behind the scenes extras.  More details are promised to come in another post  later today, but right now the video page appears to have the same list of flicks we've seen before so the question ofwhich studios will bite is still up in the air. The rest of the post also mentions the YouTube Next program to push new original content on the site with "much more to come" -- consider the week of Google I/Ounderway. Update : Additional details have been posted on the YouTube Blog and are also after the break -- NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. are the new studios YouTube is partnering with to add the 3,000 new and catalog releases, doubling the amount previously available. The pricing is $2.99/$3.99 for movies viewable via ...

You can do quite a lot with a sufficiently large catalog of semi-popular footage, but original content is king, and today the Wall Street Journal is reporting that YouTube will sink $100 million into original programming. The idea, according to the usual anonymous sources, is that Google will reshape the home of Keyboard Cat into a television network of sorts -- with channels for different topics -- and a good number of them featuring "several hours of professionally produced original programming a week." That sounds like a drop in the bucket compared to the raft of footage that YouTube's amateurs put out, of course, and it wouldn't be the first time we've seen Google invest in original work, but we'd be lying if we said we wouldn't enjoy kicking back with even a smidgen of the pulse-pounding possibilities that some 4096-pixel-wide footage could offer. YouTube is reportedly attracting talent right now, say the WSJ 's spooks, and intends to eas...