Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Konichi-wa?‘ files: Normally, you’d think that when the ‘boss’ is away, that the ’employees’ will slack-off. But the exact opposite is what happens with Linux kernel developers. Linux founder and maintainer of kernel development, Linus Torvalds was out of the country for a bit, but instead of a break, he got a deluge. […]

From the ‘Why Firefox is Better for Developers‘ files: One of the most popular (if not THE most popular) Firefox extensions for web developers is Firebug. With Firebug, developers get a powerful web inspector and dev tool that for many (myself included) is now a critical part of their browser and dev experience. Firebug 1.6 […]

Both InfiniBand vendors have been chasing the Ethernet market, but the acquisition won’t be duplicative. So reasons Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman, who told reporters that his company’s purchase of Voltaire is “all about accelerating our growth and furthering the depth and breadth of our end-to-end connectivity products for both InfiniBand and Ethernet.” Mellanox is shelling […]

Novell has answered one of the most pressing questions following its announcement that it would sell itself to Attachmate, and hand over nearly 900 patents to a technology coalition led by Microsoft. What, then, did that mean for Unix? Novell has now confirmed that it will hold onto its Unix intellectual property, promising that there […]

A new browser app is heading to the iPhone. Lunascape, a Japanese browser firm that combines the rending engines of Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple, is rolling out a scaled-down version of its flagship product to Apple’s popular smartphone. It’s called iLunascape Lite, but in accordance with Apple’s rules, the browser Lunascape is offering in the […]

In the world of Internet governance, the partition between registrars and registries has been a structural separation on a par with church and state. But that’s set to come to an end, thanks to a recent vote by the board of ICANN. Many domain-name players had warned against the move, arguing that it would invite […]

Everyone knows that Adobe’s PDF document format is a favorite target for hackers. Adobe admits as much with its frequent patches for new vulnerabilities, as well as its new sandboxing technology. But isolating individual processes might not be enough to secure PDFs, according to Invincea. The software vendor has developed a technology it’s calling Document […]

Afilias, the Internet company that operates the .org domain, is ramping up its bid to secure critical Internet infrastructure at a fundamental level. The firm is accelerating an initiative dubbed Project Safeguard, which aims to spread DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across its portfolio of top-level domains, or TLDs. To date, Afilias has deployed DNSSEC across […]

From the ‘Linux Patents? What Patents?‘ files: Not everyone is happy about Attachmate’s bid to acquire Novell for $2.2 billion. In fact, the deal has now attracted at least two (and likely many more to come) legal ‘investigations’ which could ultimately result in class action law suits. One of the investigations is being led by […]

Novell’s run as an independent company appears to be all but over. The firm has agreed to terms with Attachmate, a privately held enterprise software vendor, to sell for $2.2 billion. Through the sale, which is expected to close in the first quarter of next year, Novell will also divest certain intellectual property for $450 […]

From the ‘Secure Open Source IM‘ files: A new pidgin open source instant messaging client is now out. The most noticable thing that regular Pidgin users (like myself) will notice is that MSN access has now beef fixed! An issue popped up four days ago which kept Pidgin users disconnected from their MSN friends.  Pidging […]

Oracle is asking the Java community for approval of its two latest releases, Java SE 7 and 8, twin offerings that come as an effort to split the JDK 7 into two separate releases. The latest Java Specification Requests (JSR) “have been a long time coming,” Oracle admits, but it expects results from the voting […]