Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘TOR to the Rescue‘ files: Websites and online service track what you and I do — that’s how some of them make their money. Is it a privacy violation? Maybe. In an effort to help protect user privacy, Mozilla is now launching a – Do Not Track – effort which has the potentially […]

From the ‘Time to Update‘ files: VLC is among the most popular open source video players. According to the VideoLAN project, the 1.1.5 release has had 58 million downloads. Now it’s time for those 58 million downloaders to update to VLC 1.1.6, for some security, bug and stability fixes. The security issue stems for a […]

For more on cloud computing and the enterprise, visit Internet.com’s new cloud computing site. In a surprise development, the Mozilla Skywriter project is no more. But the proposed Web editor for the cloud still has life as the plan is to integrate the code into the Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor (ACE). Skywriter, a Mozilla Labs project, […]

Widgets may be fun and convenient vessels for spreading content and ads on the Web, but there’s a sinister side to them, according to Neil Daswani, the CTO and co-founder of Dasient. Daswani took his message to the Black Hat security conference in Washington this week, where he delivered a presentation outlining the vulnerabilities of […]

From the ‘Big Iron Engine‘ files: Google is updating its dev-channel version of the Chrome browser this week with an updated JavaScript engine and a long list of bug fixes. Chrome 10.0.642.2 is an update for Windows, Linux and Mac and includes the new V8 version 3.0.7.0 JavaScript engine. The new version of V8 includes […]

From the ‘Dumb Ideas’ files: HTML5 (yeah with its new logo), could be the last ‘version’ of HTML. Ian Hickson, one of the key authors of the HTML5 specification noted that starting with HTML5, “..the technology is not versioned and instead we just have a living document that defines the technology as it evolves.” In […]

The latest news from EnterpriseDB this week is the release of Postgres Plus Standard Server version 9, updating the company’s commercially supported version of the open source PostgreSQL database. The open source community version of PostgreSQL 9 debuted in September 2010, adding new database replication and scalability features. The company had other news as well, […]

Networking giant Cisco offered some hopeful news on the cybersecurity front on Thursday with the release of its annual report detailing trends in online threats. The firm concluded that the overall threat level was lower in 2010 than the previous year. It also found that the overall volume of spam declined, thanks in large part […]

For more on cloud computing and the enterprise, visit Internet.com’s new cloud computing site. A new release of the OpenStack platform is nearing release and it could dramatically expand the availability and scalability of the open source cloud platform. The new release will remove a storage limitation that previous versions had and it will also […]

The mysterious Stuxnet worm has emerged as one of the more feared and high-profile security vulnerabilities on the scene these days. The worm made headlines when word spread that the worm had hit Iran’s nuclear systems, though Stuxnet’s origins remain obscure. So just how much of a threat is it? Tom Parker, Securicon’s director of […]

Oracle’s release this week of the first Critical Patch Update (CPU) for 2011 fixes 66 vulnerabilities across its software portfolio. The largest category of patched software is Oracle’s Sun Products suite with 23 fixes. The January CPU also marks the seventh anniversary of the CPU program at Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). Last year the CPU program […]

From the ‘Unlocking Linux‘ files: The first release candidate for the upcoming Linux 2.6.38 kernel is now out and it could further improve Linux performance. With 2.6.37, the Big Kernel Lock (BKL) was removed, but apparently there is at least one more big global lock that needed to come out. In 2.6.38 there is a […]