Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Nifty But Who Will Use It?‘ files: The upcoming Firefox 3.6 release will include a number of interesting new features. One of them is support for machine orientation information. What’s that? Think iPhone with its ability to detect which direction the device is held in and if it’s moving (for gameplay and for […]

From the ‘DNS Is Fault-Tolerant’ files: The entire .se (Sweden) Top Level Domain was knocked offline for a few hours today (EDT), due to an error in DNS configuration. It’s an astounding revelation  and one that shouldn’t technically be able to occur in my opinion. Time and again, smart people remind me that DNS is […]

No, the sky isn’t falling yet, but for those watching the rapidly dwindling IP address space, it will soon: IPv4 address space is almost completely exhausted and IPv6 has yet to become widely adopted on a global scale. To help address the issue, networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is now rolling out new IPv6 services […]

At the dawn of the Internet age the domain registry and registrar were one and the same. The registry managed the domain space and also sold domains as a registrar to anyone that wanted one. It’s a practice that disappeared in 1998 with the creation of ICANN and the break-up of the integrated Network Solutions […]

From the ‘Employee Pricing‘ files: The unfortunate experience that I have sometimes encountered when attempting to purchase a ‘new’ computer pre-installed with Linux, is that it can sometimes be more expensive than Windows (either just because, or due to the fact that Windows is already pre-installed). A new effort from the Linux Foundation could change […]

From the ‘Browser Beta‘ files: Next week will be a big week of Mozilla with two releases. One showing the present, the other – the future. Firefox 3.5.4 is now available for beta testers and it fixes a number of stability issues as well as an as-yet unreported number of security vulnerabilities. Mozilla’s practice (and […]

From the ‘Bad PR’ files: Open source can be a double edged source for those that aren’t careful to strictly adhere to the licensing terms. Case in point is networking vendor Netgear. Last week Netgear announced its RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router, calling it an open source Linux platform. The problem is that according to critics, […]

From the ‘Source Based Distro’ files: Gentoo Linux is celebrating 10 years as a project this week with a special Gentoo Linux 10.0 LiveDVD.  The 10 year mark is a big milestone for what I personally view as, a very unique and interesting Linux distribution. Instead of being binary based (like nearly every other distro), […]

The promise of Cisco’s unified computing system (UCS) is its ability to tie servers, LANs and SANs together by way of virtualization. But while the system provides a degree of network consolidation, it also has the ability to generate more virtual server traffic than traditional network interfaces are typically designed to handle. To that end, […]

From the ‘PDFs Containing More Than Words‘ files: Adobe issued a security advisory on Thursday warning of a currently unpatched (0-day) vulnerability in its PDF technologies, Adobe Reader and Acrobat. A patch is currently targeted for October 13th, meaning millions of users around the world are now at risk for at least four days. To […]

What is the Dark Web? According to Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), it’s a part of the Internet landscape that enterprises security solutions have not defended against to date. The concept of URL filtering to protect enterprises and users from malicious sites and content is not a new one. Cisco’s view is that traditional URL filtering techniques […]