Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Sync This‘ files: Mozilla continues to make improvements to its Firefox Sync technology with each incremental release. The new Firefox Sync 1.6.1 update is no exception, and improves on the synchronization experience. Among the improvements that Mozilla’s release notes detail for Firefox 1.6.1 are a pile of bug fix and performance improvements. Somewhat […]

For better or for worse, the technology industry can sometimes be a highly litigious place, where corporate legal challenges often arise. Perhaps the most common area of dispute in the tech industry concerns allegations of patent infringement and other intellectual property transgressions, though those are hardly the only challenges. Throughout 2010, multiple vendors faced legal […]

The past year was a busy one for mergers and acquisitions in the tech world. While all technology companies continuously evaluate whether to build or acquire new technology assets, many decided to buy their way into new markets in 2010. Top Deals Announced in 2010 CenturyLink acquires Qwest. Value: $22 billion. The biggest deal by […]

From the ‘ 🙂 ‘ files: The open source pidgin instant messenger client, is out with a new update fixing at least one security issue as well as an interesting emoticon/smiley issue. Pidgin 2.7.9 has a security fix for what the changelog refers to as, “a crash when receiving short packets related to P2Pv2. (CVE […]

The past year was one of the busiest in recent memory for browser developers, with multiple releases and innovations from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera. At the heart of current browser technology race is the emerging HTML5 standard, which updates the decade-old HTML 4 standard that underpins all modern […]

From the ‘Nothing to See Here, Move Along‘ files: As a regular user of the open source Mozilla Firefox addons.mozilla.org site for browser extensions, I was somewhat alarmed to see a report that user password and registration information may have been publicly leaked. As it turns out, the risk is minimal, but it could have […]

When developers look back on 2010, they may be forgiven if their eyes glaze over and the events of the past year seem to blur. After all, five major languages saw major releases, while each gravitated toward cloud-based environments. Within the Java community, there was the schism that emerged in the vote over the specifications […]

At one of the busiest times of the year, the popular VoIP services provider Skype suffered a major outage, with customers around the world unable to connect from Dec. 22 through Christmas Eve. Now, Skype has gotten itself back online, and is attributing the outage to a supernode failure, rather than malicious activity on the […]

From the ‘+1‘ files: The open source Pligg project has been around now for five years and is celebrating with a new release. The Pligg 1.1.3 release provides security and bug fixes as well as a new Karma-based voting method to complement the existing digg and reddit styles of voting. I like to think of […]

The networking arena in 2010 was anything but quiet. Far from it! The year saw the IEEE finally approve the 40 GbE and 100 GbE standards after years of debate. On the security front, domain providers began increasingly deploying DNSSEC to fix a crucial security vulnerability in the Internet’s naming architecture. On the competitive front, […]

There were key Linux advances on several fronts in 2010, including four major kernel releases, multiple enterprise Linux updates and some large vendor shifts. Linux Planet recaps the year in Linux including some big areas of controversy such as the omission of Android from the mainline Linux kernel. The past year was also very busy […]

From the ‘Hypervisor that Rocks‘ files: Among the many technologies that Oracle acquired from Sun is the VirtualBox virtualization technology. This week Oracle officially release VirtualBox 4.0, improving performance, usability and scalability. And guess what? The core product remains licensed under the GPLv2  – but wait there is a catch. Starting with this new VirtualBox […]