Sean Michael Kerner

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aren’t only not going away, they’re getting more sophisticated. At this week’s Black Hat security conference, researchers from Trustwave – SpiderLabs are detailing a new DoS attack that targets higher levels of the networking stack than the earlier DoS attacks. “The main paradigm shift has to do with focusing away […]

From the ‘Small Footprint‘ files: The Xfce open source desktop is out with its first major update in two years this week. Xfce 4.8 brings the low-resource desktop into the modern era and provides usability improvements across the board. “Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop […]

From the ‘Nice Logo, But Where’s the Final Spec?‘ files: A logo is a critical element of a brand. Now the W3C is attempting to brand the emerging HTML5 web standard with a new logo. Looks decent enough to me, and considering that HTML 4 and XHTML (transitional or otherwise) never had any such ‘brands’, […]

Whamcloud doesn’t call it a fork, but rather a vehicle to bring clarity to the community. Whamcloud, a venture-backed startup that counts among its ranks alumni of Oracle and Sun, is hard at work building a community distribution of Lustre, a parallel filesystem often used in high-performance computing deployments. “Since April of 2010 there has […]

Since Apache introduced its open source Cassandra NoSQL database, scalability has been one of the primary selling points. Now, with the new release of Cassandra 0.7, Apache is doubling down on that promise, offering large row support for as many as 2 billion columns per row. The Cassandra NoSQL database, pioneered by Facebook developers, has […]

From the ‘Are We There Yet?‘ files: Mozilla today officially released Firefox 4 Beta 9 and it’s a big improvement over previous betas and a parsec beyond the Firefox 3.6.x experience. At this stage, after months of development, Mozilla developers are clearly nearing the end of this development marathon. If this had been Google, the […]

What isn’t going to the cloud these days? Perhaps it only follows then that Web development, the assembly of applications that run in the cloud, should itself find a home in the cloud. In that spirit the Eclipse Foundation offers Orion, a new code base, accessible through a browser, that looks to match “the idioms […]

IPv4 addressing space is not long for this world. The pool of available addresses is nearly depleted. And yet, the transition to IPv6 has been sluggish. But later this year, in an effort to promote the viability of the new addressing system, the Internet Society is planning to host World IPv6 Day. “What will happen […]

From the ‘Free Software =$$‘ files: Since 1997 private investors have bet on open source related vendors and technologies. How much has been invested in the last 13 years? According to an analysis by The 451 Group, over $4 billion had been invested in 543 deals spread across 216 open source related vendors. That doesn’t […]

In the conventional enterprise network environment, routers are purchased, and then placed within the corporate LAN or VPN, where they are managed internally. But oh, how pre-cloud a model that is. Meraki, a vendor that has made its bones in the Wi-Fi realm, is pursuing a different approach. Meraki’s new MX50 and MX70 routers are […]

Sometimes the wisdom of the crowds comes in the form of free advice. Other times, it comes at a premium. Google launched its bug bounty program last year, offering security researchers financial compensation for bringing new security vulnerabilities to its attention. Now, the firm has issued an update to its Chrome browser and operating system […]

From the ‘Incremental Open Source Update‘ files: Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL). After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn’t a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren’t in […]