Sean Michael Kerner

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) finished up its fiscal 2009 year on a strong note, though overall it proved a challenging year — with the networking vendor facing the rigors of the global recession, new competitive challenges and rumors that it was putting itself up for sale. As it turns out, those rumors are false, the company […]

From the ‘Mission Accomplished?’ files: For more than a year now I’ve heard lots of people in the Internet industry proclaiming DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) as the long-term solution to DNS cache poisoning vulnerabilities. That may not necessarily be the case. A new vulnerability is now out that attacks DNS servers  WITH DNSSSEC installed. In […]

From the ‘Sync‘ files: Mozilla is out this week with beta 2 of its Weave 1.0 Firefox add-on for user data synchronization. Weave is a really interesting open source technology that synchronizes bookmarks, tabs, passwords and browser history across Firefox browsers. The beta 2 release follows the beta 1 release by a week, which to […]

From the ‘Browser Wars‘ files: Opera today released version 10.10 of its namesake Opera web browser. The key new feature in it is something called Opera Unite, which is essentially a built-in web server. Opera Unite has been in beta since June and I personally was not keen on the idea when it was announced.  […]

From the ‘Doesn’t Make Any Sense To Me‘ files: Cisco is out with a report today that makes what I consider to be a totally outrageous claim. According to the study of 502 U.S based IT decision makers, 53 percent reported that less half their employees were currently set up to work remotely. At this […]

From the ‘It’s Not Just an OS‘ files: Google’s Chrome, that’s Chrome the browser, not the OS (which is really just the browser with a Linux shim) has been updated to version 4.0.249.4 for its dev-channel release. And no, that’s not the same build in that was in the public milestone Chromium OS last week. […]

At the core of the Internet’s infrastructure are optical networking and carrier Ethernet technologies that provide bandwidth and connectivity. One of the leaders in the space has been Nortel Networks, but that is soon to change. Nortel today announced that carrier networking vendor Ciena (NASDAQ: CIEN) has won the auction to acquire its optical and […]

From the ‘Faster‘ files: A big emerging trend in enterprise IT this year has been the move to the Cloud, for almost everything. One particular area where I’m seeing a strong use of a hybrid cloud/on-premise model is for security and one of the chief proponents of that model is enterprise IT vendor Blue Coat […]

From the ‘Most Hyped OS Ever‘ files: For an operating system that is basically just a browser, Google’s Chrome OS has got a lot of attention over the last 36 hours. Looking under the hood of the actual code as part of the Chromium OS project (no need to do a full download just check […]

Over the course of the last year, a number of new innovations have occurred in the world of malware. New command-and-controls mechanisms emerged, new attack vectors appeared and platforms beyond Windows have increasingly become targets. During a Black Hat Webcast event late Thursday, Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of security vendor Webroot, explained how some new attacks […]

From the ‘Yum/Apt-Get Update‘ files: The first update to PHP 5.3 is now available providing 5 security fixes in addition a long list of bug fixes to the popular open source dynamic language. PHP 5.3 was released at the end of June, so the 5.3.1 point update has been in the works for five months […]