Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Out of the Toy Story box‘ files: Over the weekend, Debian 6 – aka – Squeeze, was officially release after two years of development. Hurray. Normally when a new distro comes out the first thing that I write about is all the ‘new’ Linux features. With Squeeze the most notable new feature isn’t […]

You can’t say that the transition to IPv6 has exactly snuck up on Internet players, but nevertheless, may firms have delayed migrating their Web properties, a sluggishness that’s due in part to concerns about the cost. But cost or not, the transition is happening. And this week the final blocks of free IPv4 addresses were […]

With this week’s release of Chrome 9, Google has offered the first significant update of its browser this year. Chrome 9, which has been in beta since the beginning of the year, offers several new features, as well as a security update that addresses nine vulnerabilities, two of which Google said were of high impact. […]

OpenStack, originally a joint venture of NASA and Rackspace, is gaining momentum. The project is out with its latest release this week, dubbed Bexar, drawing new support from Cisco and Ubuntu Linux, building on the original contributions of some 35 technology vendors. Additionally, the new Bexar offering includes preliminary support for a technology called Glance, […]

In a sense, this week marked the end of an era for the Internet. The last five blocks of Internet addresses available under the IPv4 protocol were allocated in a ceremony on Thursday in Miami, a major milestone that will hasten the advent of a new chapter in the Internet’s evolution. “It marks far more […]

Puppet is getting ready to compete with the big boys. Puppet Labs, the lead commercial sponsor of the open source project, has unveiled an enterprise version of the system management offering, in the process taking aim at leading vendors in the space like HP, IBM and BMC. Even though Puppet Enterprise has some of the […]

From the ‘Wanted Alive‘ files: The PWN2OWN hacking competition has been rewarding security researchers for finding flaws in web browsers for years, but never like this. For the 2011 iteration of the contest, Google is upping the ante by offering $20,000 to the security researcher that can successfully demonstrate a security flaw in Google Chrome. […]

Ubuntu counts computing giant Dell as a fan. In the past, Dell has tapped Ubuntu Linux to power some of its desktop PCs, but now the technology will find a home in Dell’s server business. Specifically, Dell is incorporating the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) technology in its PowerEdge C2100 and PowerEdge C6100 servers. “It is […]

From the ‘Good Ideas Gone Bad‘ files: Back in 2007, Mozilla launched the Prism effort to create web applications that could run on the desktop. Essentially Prism offered users a way to run a browser loaded to a specific web application. After a couple of years of active development, Prism development stalled in February of […]

As the smartphone grows into an increasingly central computing platform, the rate of mobile data consumption is experiencing tremendous growth. According to networking giant Cisco, worldwide mobile data usage spiked 159 percent last year, and is only going to continue its climb, posing new challenges for network providers. “The challenge on mobile data is that […]

Earlier today, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) announced that it had been allocated two /8 address blocks from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA ). Those two blocks, 39/8 and 106/8, were the last unallocated blocks in the IANA free pool of IPv4 addresses available to Regional Internet Registries (RIR). With the allocation, […]

From the ‘Paying for Free Software Support‘ files: Trying to come up with a list of the top ten open source projects is never an easy task – which is why I was interested in a new list put out today by OpenLogic. The OpenLogic list is ranked by which open source projects, their customers […]