Administrators of the Raymondville school system said they will review the district's cell phone policy after a report of an assault on a middle school student that was recorded with a cell phone and then displayed on YouTube.

It was at least the second time this year students from the school district uploaded violent videos to YouTube, said school board president John Solis. Early this year, a Raymondville High School student used a video to solicit someone to beat another student.

The father of a 13-year-old girl whose recent video-recorded beating was uploaded to the video-sharing Web site said he may press assault charges against the other students he blames for injuring his daughter.

Regino Garcia said Friday he is dissatisfied with the response of school administrators who he believes did not adequately punish those involved in the beating.

If this video wasn't recorded (and posted to YouTube), would there be evidence of the beating? How many eyewitnesses would have stepped forward?

If there is one thing good about a surveillance society, it's that those wronging others are more likely to be caught.

An interesting side-effect of YouTube's recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser's cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append "&fmt=18":

http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=ID&t=SIGNATURE&fmt=18

ID is the video's identification value, SIGNATURE is a value that prevents you from downloading the file just by knowing the ID. You could create this URL by looking at the source code of a YouTube page, but it's much easier to automatically generate it.

The Rational Response Squad have lost their YouTube account, which is the account that we've been posting videos with ever since we lost ours. Apparently "Creation Science Evangelism Ministries" had been submitting false DMCA copyright requests and after RRS came to their defense, they were banned. For all of the details about this issue visit the homepage of http://rationalresponders.com.

Though looking through the RRS website, I can't really say I'm compelled to take them too seriously:

Those who know me well know I am generally not cocky, but after all that I have accomplished over the last 5 days, I can state with accuracy that those who claim I am the man, are in fact accurate. I am unable to discuss the conditions in which we have been returned to youtube (for now). So don't expect an answer there.