Technology

No, itnot just you. As of Tuesday evening Pacific Time, YouTube was down for many users. The outage appears to have begun some time between 6 and 7 p.m., making this a pretty long outage for such a major site.

The company is well aware of the issue and tweeting its updates. The account began responding to tweets reporting the outage about an hour ago and has painstakingly replied to many, many reports from users since.

YouTube doesn&t experience downtime very often, making Tuesdayoutage pretty notable. We&ve reached out to YouTube about the cause of the outage and will update this story when we learn more.

Many doubted The Civil Media Company‘s ambitious plan to sell $8 million worth of its cryptocurrency, called CVL.

The skeptics, as it turns out, were right. Civilinitial coin offering, meant to fund the companyeffort to create a new economy for journalism using the blockchain, failed to attract sufficient interest. The company announced today that it would provide refunds to all CVL token buyers by October 29.

Civilgoal was to sell 34 million CVL tokens for between $8 million and $24 million. The sale began on September 18 and concluded yesterday. Ultimately,1,012 buyers purchased $1,435,491 worth of CVL tokens. A spokesperson for Civil told TechCrunch an additional 1,738 buyers successfully registered for the sale, but never completed their transaction.

Civil isn&t giving up. The company says &a new, much simpler token sale is in the works,& details of which will be shared soon. Once those new tokens are distributed, Civil will launch three new features: a blockchain-publishing plugin for WordPress, a community governance application called The Civil Registry and a developer tool for non-blockchain developers to build apps on Civil.

ConsenSys, a blockchain venture studio that invested $5 million in Civil last fall, has agreed to purchase $3.5 million worth of those new tokens. The purchase is not an equity; all capital from the token sale is committed to the Civil Foundation, an independent nonprofit initially funded by Civil that funds grants to the newsrooms in Civilnetwork.

In a blog post today, Civil chief executive officer Matthew Iles wrote that the token sale failure was a disappointment but not a shock. Days prior, he&d authored a separate post where he admitted things weren&t looking good.

&This isn&t how we saw this going,& Iles wrote. &The numbers will show clearly enough that we are not where we wanted to be at this point in the sale when we started out. But one thing we want to say at the top is that until the clock strikes midnight on Monday, we are still working nonstop on the goal of making our soft cap of $8 million.&

A recent Wall Street Journal report claimed Civil had reached out to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dow Jones and Axios, among others, but failed to incite interest in its token.

Separate from its token sale, Civil has inked strategic partnerships withmedia companies like the Associated Press and Forbes,both of which confirmed to TechCrunch today that the failed token sale doesn&t impact their partnerships with Civil.

Forbes becamethe first major media brand to test Civiltechnology whenit announced earlier this month that it would experiment with publishing content to the Civil platform.As for the AP, it granted the newsrooms in Civilnetwork licenses to its content.

Civil, of course, isn&t the only blockchain startup targeting journalism. Nwzer, Userfeeds, Factmata and Po.et, which was founded by Jarrod Dicker, a former vice president at The Washington Post, are all trying their hand at bringing the new technology to the content industry.

Which, if any, will actually find success in the complicated space, is the question.

Google has announcedchanges to the licensing model for its Android mobile operating system in Europe, including introducing a fee for licensing some of its own brand apps, saying itdoing so to comply with a major European antitrust ruling this summer.

In July the regionantitrust regulators hit Google with a recordbreaking $5BN fine for violations pertaining to Android, finding the companyhad abused the dominance of the platform by requiring manufacturers pre-install other Google apps in order to license its popular Play app store.

Regulators also found Google had made payments to manufacturers and mobile network operators in exchange for exclusively pre-installing Google Search on their devices, and used Play store licensing to preventmanufacturers from selling devices based on Android forks.

Google disputes the Commissionfindings, and last weekfiled its appeal — a legal process that could take years. But in the meanwhile itmaking changes to how it licenses Android in Europe to avoid the risk of additional penalties heaped on top of the antitrust fine.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, Googlesenior vice president of platforms - ecosystems, revealed the new licensing options in ablog post published today.

Under updated &compatibility agreements&, he writes that mobile device makers will be able to build and sell Android devices intended for the European Economic Area (EEA) both with and without Google mobile apps preloaded — something Googlesame ‘compatibility& contracts restricted them from doing before, when it was strictly either/or (either you made Android forks, or you made Android devices with Google apps — not both).

&Going forward, Android partners wishing to distribute Google apps may also build non-compatible, or forked, smartphones and tablets for the European Economic Area (EEA),& confirms Lockheimer.

However the company is also changing how it licenses the full Android bundle — which previously required OEMs to load devices with the Google mobile application suite, Google Search and the Chrome browser in order to be able to offer the popular Play Store — by introducing fees for OEMs wanting to pre-load a subset of those same apps under &a new paid licensing agreement for smartphones and tablets shipped into the EEA&.

Though Google stresses there will be no charge for using the Android platform itself. (So a pure fork without any Google services preloaded still wouldn&t require a fee.)

Google also appears to be splitting out Google Search and Chrome from the rest of the Google apps in its mobile suite (which traditionally means stuff like YouTube, the Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps, although Lockheimerblog post does not make it clear which exact apps hetalking about) — letting OEMs selectively unbundle some Google apps, albeit potentially for a fee, depending on the apps in question.

&[D]evice manufacturers will be able to license the Google mobile application suite separately from the Google Search App or the Chrome browser,& is what Lockheimer unilluminatingly writes.

Perhaps Google wants future unbundled Android forks to still be able to have Google Search or Chrome, even if they don&t have the Play store, but itreally not at all clear which configurations of Google apps will be permitted under the new licensing terms, and which won&t.

&Since the pre-installation of Google Search and Chrome together with our other apps helped us fund the development and free distribution of Android, we will introduce a new paid licensing agreement for smartphones and tablets shipped into the EEA. Android will remain free and open source,& Lockheimer adds, without specifying what the fees will be either.

&We&ll also offer new commercial agreements to partners for the non-exclusive pre-installation and placement of Google Search and Chrome. As before, competing apps may be pre-installed alongside ours,& he continues to complete his trio of poorly explained licensing changes.

We&ve asked Google to clarify the various permitted and not permitted app configurations,as well as which apps will require a fee (and which won&t), and how much the fees will be, and will update this post with any response.

The devil in all those details should become clear soon though, as Google says the new licensing options will come into effect on October 29 for all new (Android based) smartphones and tablets launched in the EEA.