...With every new platform in internet communications comes new ways of doing the same old thing. This is such an example...

Apparently a drug trafficker (who specializes in cocaine) decided that the best way to communicate with his family was to use YouTube. I can understand that. A good friend of mine once put up videos of his daughter starting to pull herself up on YouTube and sent friends and family the links. Makes sense - you're far away, and you can publish a video from your phone, right?

Well, the drug trafficker didn't do anything so warm and fuzzy. He sent his brother a death threat using YouTube. Apparently he was a little miffed that his brother told the US Customs and Immigration Department that he was bragging about pulling one over on the government. And instead of sending the threat to the brother, he sent it to his brother's son (his nephew) via a hotmail account.

It wasn't a mistake. The video was allegedly filled with images of people dying via gunfire and the fun personal message to the nephew to remind his father to watch that video before making phone calls. And another assassination video was accompanied with the message to not f*** with him, else *they* would f*** with him.

Heartwarming, isn't it? I just feel chills it moves me so.

It gets better folks. The mom of these two is living with the trafficker and has said she'll disown the son who is cooperating with the law should he continue ratting his brother out. Sounds like they're frontrunners for family of the year.

This isn't anything new on YouTube though. Apparently various drug cartels and "mafias" out of Mexico have been posting terror videos to each other for months now. They're depicting violent acts (or the resulting corpses of such acts) and praising the various cartels. YouTube administrators are apparently pulling the videos as quickly as they can, but they're probably also busy with the Viacom copyright lawsuit, so there's only so much they can do.

Besides, the cartel videos aren't copyrighted, so they'd probably fall lower in the food chain for being removed. *sigh*

It is truly a sad day in the world when something that was developed for fun turns into something much more sinister. Oh sure, I knew eventually someone would put porn or fake snuff films on YouTube, just to get the hits or be on the most popular lists...

...I never thought a real snuff film would make it there. Naive me.