Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Open Source Sync‘ files: Mozilla this week released the first beta for its browser data synchronization service, Weave 1.0. I’ve been tracking Weave for nearly two years now and it sure has been a long and winding road for this interesting project to get close to it’s 1.0 release. At its core, Weave […]

Fedora 12 desktopClick to enlarge. Fedora 12, codenamed “Constantine,” made its debut this week, aimed at providing users with a long list of improvements for both servers, desktops and netbooks. While the latest installment of the Red Hat-sponsored community Linux distribution offers many new features, at the top of the list for users including Fedora’s project leader, […]

From the ‘Not a Hoax‘ files: SSL is of critical importance to all web users as the most commonly used method for securing websites. There is now a new publicly posted exploit technique available for SSL that takes advantage of a renegotiation flaw with TLS . As a proof of concept, security researcher Anil Kurmas […]

From the ‘Beefy Penguin’ files: The latest Top 500 Supercomputer list is now out (see my colleague Andy Patrizio’s story on InternetNews.com), with the top rig doubling its performance to 1.75 petaflops. Of particular interest to me is the fact that while multi-core CPU’s are the hardware components enabling the fastest computers, it is Linux […]

In September of 2008, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, announced his latest venture, the World Wide Web Foundation. Today, just over a year later, the organization is officially starting its operations. The Web Foundation’s aims to go beyond the standards that Berners-Lee’s W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) develops to work on social […]

There are more than 93.5 million registered .com and .net domains, making those two Top Level Domains (TLDs) the most popular on the Internet today. VeriSign, the company that oversees those domains, today announced plans to make them among the most secure on the Web with support of DNSSEC (DNS security extensions). The issue of […]

From the ‘Kroner, Corona‘ files: Over the last several weeks, Cisco executives have publicly said on a number of occasions that their offer $3 billion for Tandberg was a fair and that they’d walk if they didn’t get it. To me it looked like a high-stakes game of chicken as Tandberg shareholders held out for […]

From the ‘Future of Browsing‘ files: I’ve been a fan of Mozilla’s open source Jetpack since it publicly launched this past May. Like millions of other people, I use browser add-ons, and like millions of people I suffer with their numerous shortcomings. Jetpack represents a new way to do add-ons, they’re easier to develop and […]

As 2009 begins to wind down, so too does the final chapters in the asset sell-off of bankrupt telecom networking vendor Nortel. Today Nortel announced that it had officially completed the sale of its wireless CDMA and LTE assets for $1.13 billion to Swedish wireless vendor Ericsson. The deal gives Ericsson control over a large […]

Virtualization has been a big push this year for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT). It’s also a big area of focus for the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux 12 release, which is due out next week. The Fedora Linux distribution has been including virtualization technologies beginning with the Fedora Core 5 release in 2006 and […]

From the ‘Shared Security Risk‘ files: Yesterday morning I blogged about the Safari 4.0.4 update commenting that WebKit is used by both Apple and Google for their respective browsers. I also wondered if Google’s Chrome was vulnerable to the same WebKit issue that Apple patched. Turns out I was right. Late Thursday, Google released Chrome […]

From the ‘More Google Goodness‘ files: Google is trying to speed up web pages with a new open source application layer protocol called SPDY (pronounced speedy). Regular HTTP connections suffer from protocol overhead and latency — which is why after all there is big business in WAN optimization from vendors like Citrix, Cisco, Juniper, Blue […]