NEW YORK — Big Media took its first big swing at YouTube Tuesday as Viacom Inc., the owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and other cable networks filed a $1-billion copyright lawsuit against the video-sharing site and corporate owner Google Inc.

The lawsuit marks a sharp escalation of long-simmering tensions between Viacom and YouTube and represents the biggest confrontation to date between a major media company and the hugely popular site, which Google bought in November for $1.76-billion.

Good grief! YouTube is getting sued left and right these days!

Source: Globe & Mail

It seems Dell has decided to look a little deeper into Linux as an operating system option. They’ve set up a survey to help determine how they should prioritize their resources. The six questions range in topic from; “What you’d use your new Dell with factory installed linux for?” to, “Which distribution would you want to use?” The distribution choice list is pretty short but there is an “Other” option so you can add Slackware or Arch or even Mepis if you so desire.
The survey will be open March 13-March 23.

From the Dell Site: Update: We’re overwhelmed by your responses, and we know the survey server is overloaded too. We’re working on it, and the survey will remain open until March 23, so you’ll have plenty of time to make your vote count.

Good, let’s keep that server hoppin! Get over there and fill out your survey!!

Source: Dell Linux Survey

When using the terminal, there are a lot of tricks and shortcuts that can make using the terminal much more efficient and pleasurable. I’ll list here some of the key ones that I use.

history

Often in a terminal, you end up repeating the same commands from time to time. There is a program that records each command you type into a terminal called history. However, typing history and then searching for a command is slow and tedious, and the antithesis of what this howto is about. For searching through recent commands, you can use the up arrow. This will cycle through previous commands in order, one at a time. However, this can get tedious if you’re looking for something you typed a while ago. There are better ways of doing this. ctrl+r will allow you to interactively search through history as you type in commands. Pressing ctrl+r at an empty command prompt will give you a prompt that looks like this:

* (reverse-i-search)`’:

You can then type in part of a previous command and commands from history that match what you’ve typed will start to appear on the command line. So if I’m at the ctrl+r prompt and type up I get:

* (reverse-i-search)`up’: cd .superkaramba/lwp/

If I keep typing and add d, then the recalled command changes to:

* (reverse-i-search)`upd’: sudo aptitude update

This will find the most recent command that matches the characters as you type them.

The other way to search history for a command is with the grep command. So if you want to find all commands where you’ve used install, then you would type:
# $ history | grep install

20 sudo aptitude install slmodem
69 configure –prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install
70 ./configure –prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install
74 sudo aptitude install openoffice.org-common
107 sudo aptitude install basket
112 ./configure –prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install
342 sudo aptitude install caca
412 sudo aptitude install spamassassin
428 sudo aptitude install eric
488 sudo aptitude install avidemux
498 sudo aptitude install libmozjs-dev
505 history | grep install

The quick way to repeat a comand you find in your history is to use the “!” plus the needed commands corresponding number. For example simply typing in !412 will do: sudo aptitude install spamassassin again.

This can be useful where ctrl+r is not calling up the command line you want because a more recent command matches what you are typing into ctrl+r, and you can’t get to the previous command you want.

tab completion
Tab completion allows you to quickly type in filenames and directory paths on the commandline. When on the command line, you can type the first part of a filename or another directory in the current directory, and then press the tab key, and the rest of the filename will be completed for you. There are a few caveats:
* If there is more than one file or directory that matches what you’ve typed, tab completion will display all of the files that match what you’ve typed.
* If you use kubuntu, tab completion is context sensitive. So if you start typing tar -zxpf fil and press tab expecting it to complete filename.tar.bz2, tab completion will fail, as a tar.bz2 file is not compatible with the -z argument, which expects a .tar.gz file. This can be annoying for files that do not have an extension, or the correct extension.

Source: everyday linux howtos

GENEVA (Reuters) – The Internet’s key site identity system is in mounting danger from new techniques that could cause havoc by turning it into a free-for-all market, the World Intellectual Property Organization WIPO warned on Monday.

And the
United Nations’ agency said the latest trends in registering top-level domain names (TLDs) — like www.reuters.com — could undermine dispute procedures under which patent holders can pursue “cybersquatters.”

“Domain names used to be primarily specific identifiers of businesses and other Internet users, but many names nowadays are mere commodities for speculative gain,” senior WIPO official Francis Gurry told a news conference.

Gurry, who runs the agency’s own site-name dispute system, said the growth of computer-driven practices, like automatic mass harvesting of expired TLDs and “domain-name tasting,” risks turning the system “into a mostly speculative market.”

Source: Yahoo News

Mozilla Corp. is still wrestling with adding a security feature to Firefox that its browser rival, Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 7, uses on Windows Vista to keep malware from hijacking computers. In Vista, IE7 uses a technique Microsoft calls Protected Mode — another name for “low rights” — that blocks disk access to all but a temporary-files folder. The idea is that if an exploit — a drive-by download, for instance — attacks IE7 through a browser vulnerability, it can’t install code on the PC’s drive.

Source: Mozilla wrestles with Firefox 3.0 security moves

OpenID is an open decentralized digital identity system that has been gaining traction in recent months. It implements a solution to some everyday headaches such as single-sign-on, but it does not address related issues like privacy, trust, spam…

Source: Introduction to OpenID