Sean Michael Kerner

The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is one of the chief bodies responsible for the shape of the Web as it stands today, developing key standards that impact almost every facet of the online world. And now, it has a new leader. Jeffrey Jaffe, formerly of Novell, is taking over the W3C’s vacant top […]

Call it database counterculture. In response to the conventional SQL-based relational database has arisen a growing movement of NoSQL databases. One such offering, CouchDB, promises a more “organic” representation of data in documents, rather than the SQL methid, where information is ported into rows and columns. Thanks to some commercial support, CouchDB, a project run […]

(ISC)2, a non-profit security professional organization, delivered some encouraging news for IT workers this week, predicting that most enterprise companies will hire security specialists in 2010 to keep pace with surging malware and cyber attacks on their organizations. Although the overall economy struggled through another year of bloodletting, more than 53 percent of the 2,980 […]

What does the new year hold in store for Ubuntu? Well, it’s already ushered in a new chief executive at the vendor’s lead sponsor, and she’s setting her sights on the mass consumer market. In an interview, Canonical CEO Jane Silber talks about taking Ubuntu Linux into the mainstream. And that means taking on Microsoft. […]

From the ‘Legal Linux‘ files: Microsoft has a bone to pick with Linux and open source software. Since at least 2007, Microsoft has been stating that open source software somehow infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property. Remember SCO? They kind of alleged the same thing (though SCO is of the opinion that they own Unix) and […]

IT administrators looking for a cloud-based, open source product to weed out malicious code for Windows desktop environments may just be in luck. eSecurity Planet takes a closer look at the latest cloud-based, security product birthed from the open source ClamAV project and what benefits enterprises could derive from it. While leading antivirus vendors such […]

It’s an exciting and complex time for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution: Canonical, Ubuntu’s lead commercial sponsor, has a new CEO, Jane Silber. The distro is set to release its next long-term support (LTS) edition, Lucid Lynx — a key edition for the enterprise market. And then there’s Ubuntu’s sweeping brand overhaul to manage. Clearly, […]

From the ‘Plugin Improvement‘ files: One of the big things that Google Chrome introduced is the idea of out of process plugins. It’s something that has now (finally!) landed in Mozilla — albeit in the Alpha 2 release of Firefox 3.7 (officially called Mozilla Developer Preview 3.7 Alpha 2). When I visited Mozilla Toronto back […]

From the ‘Time to Sell‘ files: Novell is now in play. The company received what they call an “unsolicited proposal from Elliott Associates, L.P. to acquire the Company for $5.75 per share in cash,” which values the company at just under $2 billion. In layman terms it basically means Novell is for sale and could […]

The annual RSA show always brings a slew of new products and other announcements from firms working to shore up IT systems. IBM got in on the fun this year in a big way, rolling out an ambitious suite of security offerings aimed at protecting enterprises from the application code level through deployment. eSecurity Planet […]

Opera’s betting that speed counts in the browser game. The Norwegian software shop has upped the ante in the browser wars, releasing version 10.5 of its namesake offering, which it boasts is now the fastest product on the market. At the same time, Opera remains a fringe player in the browser sector, as the latest […]

From the ‘Babel fish‘ files: Google is out this week with a new beta version of its Chrome browser (just for Windows now) that includes a new translation feature. As a user of Google Chrome 5.x dev-channel I’ve seen the translation feature before, but now that it has hit beta even more users will get […]