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Google's purchase of YouTube always seemed questionable to some observers: it looked as if Google were buying itself a whole new source of copyright lawsuits. One of the benefits of that purchase came through on July 2, when a U.S. District Court ordered Google to hand over its complete set of YouTube traffic logs, containing information about every video viewed on the service. See Groklaw for the full text of the order. If this order stands (and it appears that Google will not appeal it), millions of users worldwide will have their viewing data handed over to a litigious entertainment industry company. There's a couple of important implications to draw from this turn of events, so LWN will venture a little far afield and take a look.

The Postal project includes three programs aimed at benchmarking mail server performance. The main program, postal, sends email messages to a specified list of destination addresses at a specified rate. Postal can let you see how fast your system can process incoming email and thus can help you measure improvements to your mail server when you are making software and hardware changes. For example, you can use postal to tell you whether switching to a different IMAP server will allow you to deliver more messages per second on the same hardware.

In an effort to shine more light on the traditional"dark art" of software development, Borland Software on Monday announced Borland Management Solutions. The three-pronged product leverages Borland's Open Application Lifecycle Management framework, and is designed to enable users to better orchestrate, measure, predict and improve software delivery.

This how-to describes how to install and configure Dansguardian with multi-group filtering, Squid with NTLM auth, ipmasq, and dnsmasq to provide a full internet gateway solution for small to medium sized networks. This how-to requires two NICs in order to perform firewalling and transparent proxying.

Computing is on the verge of a major paradigm shift with the modern rise in prominence of virtualisation. Fuelled by big corporates interested in the consolidation and energy saving potentials, improvements in virtualisation have hit the point where Linux could be a casualty.

In the first installment of this tutorial series we configured Ubuntu to share with Windows and set your Computer Name and Workgroup values. In Part II, we discovered the nitty gritty of the network connection details in Ubuntu. Finally, we'll figure out exactly how to share the files on your Ubuntu machine, both quick and easy, and with access controls.

There's no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo. But if you want a distro that teaches you the basics of Linux as you set it up; is well documented, lightweight, and zippy; and has a dependency-resolving packaging system, you need Arch Linux.

It is recommended that a resizing procedure be tested before performing it on a filesystem that contains critical data. It is also strongly recommended that data backups are created and verified before resizing filesystems. To assist the reader in becoming familiar with the resizing procedure, the rest of this article describes a scenario in which un-partitioned disk space is used to test logical volume and ext3 filesystem resizing.

Linus Torvalds - the creator of Linus and its current maintainer - is by all account a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) yesterday, where he offered his opinion on security research and specifically the OpenBSD operating system (which is security centric). It's soo rude that it's 'funny' - that is if you're not an OpenBSD developer or have a particular affection for monkeys.'

Miguel de Icaza has criticized plans for the next GNU Gnome cross-platform environment that risks damaging the Linux desktop ISV ecosystem by focusing on the Mac. De Icaza, leading the Mono and Moonlight cross-platform .NET projects at Novell, has warned a "new crop" of developers pushing plans for Gtk+ 3 risk "throwing away years of work" on Gtk+. They're also failing to recognize the value of having an ISV ecosystem working to put Gnome on Linux. Gtk+ is the tool set for building the Gnome graphical user interface, with version three the next planned major update.

Response to some criticism of the past two posts, mostly regurgitated from my interactions on other sites, and a little line of code.

A Datamation editorial by Matt Hartley argues that Linux purists should quit complaining about closed-source code and get on with their lives. Boycotts against vendors such as nVidia that refuse to disclose source code for their drivers will only make software companies think twice about supporting Linux, he maintains.

Linux and UNIX-like operating systems in general are regarded as being more secure for the common user, in contrast with operating systems that have "Windows" as part of their name. Why is that? When entering a dispute on the subject with a Windows user, the most common argument he tries to feed me is that Windows is more widespread, and therefore, more vulnerable. Apart from amusing myths like "Linux is only for servers" or "does it have a word processor?", the issue of Linux desktop security is still seriously misunderstood.

OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent "squatters and phishers" from snapping them up. He's keeping them safe so you can have a chance to use them. However, to some people, based on Johnson's past practices, it's not clear how OpenDomain.org differs from other organizations that buy up domain names in the hopes of future gains.

The reasons for the user revolt against KDE 4, which we reported on yesterday, are still being sorted out. They appear to be a complex mixture that includes the assumptions that KDE used in its planning, the rush by distributions to include a release that was not ready for general use, and sensationalism in free software blogs and journalism. One reason that has yet to be discussed is one of the potentially most significant -- the apparent shift in the FOSS user base. Judging from the quickness and thoroughness with which KDE 4 was rejected, the audience for free software seems to have shifted from a small group of knowledgeable users that treasures innovation to a larger one that values convention and familiarity and is actively suspicious of change.

Judge Kimball rules in SCO v. Novell! Here it is [PDF] at last! I haven't read it yet myself, just quickly skimmed it enough to see that SCO owes Novell some money ($2,547,817 plus interest probably -- SCO can oppose -- from the Sun agreement) and it had no right to enter into the Sun agreement, but it did have the right to enter into the Microsoft and other SCOsource agreements. Requests for attorneys fees are separate, and that part comes next. Then appeals. I know you want to see it immediately, so let's read it together, and after it's clear, I'll come back and explain some more.

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page. KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The Ramlog project lets you keep your system logs in RAM while your machine is running and copies them to disk when you shut down. If you are running a laptop or mobile device with syslog enabled, Ramlog might help you increase your battery life or the life of the flash drive on your mobile device. As a side effect of using Ramlog, you will be less likely to be caught out by a daemon that suddenly starts sending a message to syslog every 30 seconds and saps your battery keeping the hard disk spinning.

Like it or not, OpenOffice has to be able to read Microsoft Office files. With import support for Microsoft's new .docx format added in OpenOffice 3, currently in beta, how well does it work?

A master carpenter would neither drive a finishing nail with a sledgehammer nor trim a tabletop with a chain saw. Such a craftsperson needs tools that are small, versatile and cheap. One such tool -- for writers and anybody who needs to kick out anything from a short memo or letter to a full-length report -- is AbiWord.