Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Uncle Sam is Watching’ files: Lots of concern and talk in the last couple of days over the Washington Post’s leaked government story on PRISM. The TL;dr version is that PRISM was/is an NSA operation that routes American’s private information to the NSA where it can be analyzed in the interest of national […]

OpenDaylight got started in April of this year as a multi-stakeholder open source group run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The initial group of members included Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Nuage Networks, PLUMgrid, Red Hat, and VMware. Now, after […]

Joe Brockmeier, PMC Member Apache CloudStack, explained to Datamation that CloudStack’s release cycle is a time-based approach, as opposed to being strictly feature driven. Among the new features in the CloudStack 4.1 release is Region Support, which is similar to a capability currently offered by Amazon AWS. “This is about making CloudStack more flexible for […]

The Apple Mac OS X 10.8.4 update and once again, security is a big focus in the update, with patches for over 55 vulnerabilities. One of the largest buckets of fixes is found in the open source OpenSSL packages for OS X, with at least 12 vulnerabilities being fixed. Among the OpenSSL fixes is one […]

The VRTX combines up to 4 compute nodes in a single box. Those nodes can be Dell M620 or M520 blades powered by the Intel E5 processor family. Brian Payne, Executive Director of Dell Server Solutions, explained to ServerWatch that the VRTX will also be able to support future Intel-based blades as they come out. […]

Cisco is also expanding its switching portfolio this week with the new Catalyst 2960-X series. Over the years, the vendor has shipped over 14 million Catalyst 2960 series switches, encompassing over 420 million ports. “The 2960 is very targeted at the midmarket,” Inbar Lasser-Raab, senior director of marketing for enterprise networking at Cisco, told InternetNews.com.”The […]

Intel this week announced the Xeon E3 1200 v3 product family built on the Haswell architecture. Haswell offers the promise of improved power utilization as well as graphics performance. According to Intel, the new Xeon E3 Haswell chips are up to 18 percent more energy efficient and have 38 percent better graphics performance than prior […]

From the ‘Open Source BeagleBoard for Hackers’ files: The annual Black Hat USA security conference is coming up at the end of July and the hype around big attacks has already started. One of the early hyped talks is about hacking Apple power chargers to infect IOS (iPad,iPhone) devices. “In this presentation, we demonstrate how […]

In late December of 2012, security firm FireEye discovered a zero-day attack that affected Microsoft IE. Microsoft fixed the issue in an out-of-band MS13-008 emergency patch that was issued in January. In May of 2013, FireEye found yet another zero-day attack going after IE8. Microsoft provided a patch for the second zero-day discovery as part […]

Code-named Australis, the new UI is likely to debut as part of Firefox 25, due out in October of his year. The Australis overhaul will be the biggest UI change since Firefox 4, which became generally available in March of 2011. After Firefox 4, Mozilla changed its release approach, from having only one or two […]

The WF-500 is the on-premises version of Palo Alto’s WildFire cloud-based security service. The basic idea behind WildFire is that it is a service that examines unknown network payloads for potential malicious behavior. WildFire first debuted as a cloud-only service in November 2012 and is now being brought on-premises with the WF-500. “With everything that […]

From the ‘Open to Code’ files: There are a lot of different metrics to validate the health of an open source project. In my opinion, one of the most critical is the number of different code authors. The open source OpenStack cloud platform this week has crossed a key threshold in that regard, now boasting […]