Sean Michael Kerner

If price and performance are the top two considerations when it comes to evaluating new IT products and services, security isn’t far behind. Given the evolving nature of new security threats, IT buyers have to be sure anything new they plan to add to the enterprise has a good security track record or has been […]

Just because a piece of code is released under the GNU General Public License doesn’t mean that users can do whatever they want with it. Quite the opposite, actually, as a number of big-name companies have discovered — with Westinghouse becoming the most recent. Indeed, the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Software Freedom Law Center […]

The browser wars are in full swing. Market leader Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is pushing to regain momentum as it readies Internet Explorer 9, while Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) continue to update Chrome and Safari respectively. Another key player, Mozilla, developer of the popular Firefox browser, isn’t sitting still either. As eSecurity Planet […]

Managing and monitoring Web application performance has always been a key concern for enterprises, and with many moving more of their core datacenter apps into a more virtualized environment, the task becomes increasingly complex. Meanwhile, SpringSource’s Hyperic had appealed to many looking for an open source solution for managing their Java apps. And with SpringSource’s […]

How do you know if your systems are safe? One method security professionals use for testing are penetration tools. Metasploit is one such popular penetration tool that started as an open source project, but also now has a commercial version. As eSecurity Planet reports, there’s a new version of Metasploit in the works that sports […]

From the ‘Too Soon?‘ files: The ability to fork an application is one of the great strengths of open source software. If a project isn’t going in a direction that users/developer want – then a fork provides an option. Illumos – a new project that is aiming to build open source components of Oracle’s openSolaris […]

From the ‘Linux Fundamentals‘ files: There has been some ‘debate’ that has bubbled to the surface again recently about Ubuntu vs. Red Hat on the issue of who contributes what to Linux. Red Hat leads the Linux world with its contributions to the core Linux kernel and it also leads with its contributions to the […]

As security threats proliferate, enterprises are constantly evaluating new solutions, safeguards and research that might help them shore up their defenses and minimize the risk and impact of any cyber attacks. One of those potentially useful resources is TippingPoint. Enterprise Networking Planet reports on how HP (NYSE: HPQ) is leveraging work being done at TippingPoint […]

It’s not exactly a fork. But it is a new community-driven effort to develop open source versions of many widely used OpenSolaris technologies, including the ZFS filesystem and the libc library. Illumos comes in response to widespread uncertainty throughout the OpenSolaris community about Oracle’s plans for the operating system since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. […]

In the ongoing cat-and-mouse game of securing IT software and hardware, vendors are sharply split on the wisdom of paying third-party researchers to bring vulnerabilities to their attention. For some, like Mozilla and HP, paying those fees is just part of doing business. For others, the practice is strictly off limits. Everyone seems to agree […]

From the “Hostile Wi-Fi Networks‘ files: It never ceases to amaze me how so much can be done with so little. Case in point is the Aruba Networks provided Wi-Fi network at the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. I’ve got a more detailed story already published on the setup of the network […]

The new Linux 2.6.35 kernel owes much to Google. Thanks to contributions from the search heavyweight and open source advocate, the new kernel comes with a pair of features that aim to spread the load of incoming network traffic. The 2.6.35 release is also the first kernel in which Linux creator Linus Torvalds is actively […]