Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘dynamic languages’ files: According to a new study from Evans Data, Ruby use is on the rise in North America. On a year over year basis, Ruby usage has increased by 40 percent so far in 2009. But, even with the big increase, Ruby is still far from being pervasive. Evans’ study found […]

From the ‘making browsers safe‘ files: Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaws are growing and Mozilla is now coming up with another attempt to try and stop them. It’s a new approach called Content Security Policy and its goal is to prevent XSS. Firefox 3.x has been patched before for XSS and Firefox 3 itself was […]

Nortel Networks is set to soon be no more. The embattled telecom equipment provider announced late Friday that it had entered into a preliminary agreement to sell its wireless assets to Nokia Siemens Networks for $650 million. Nortel has been in bankruptcy protection since January. With the announcement of the wireless sale, expected to close […]

From the ‘Linux Inside‘ files: There has been a lot of media coverage in recent weeks about the Palm Pre smart phone. One of its key attributes is the webOS operating system that could potentially help save Palm from oblivion. Palm has posted many of the open source applications that are part of webOS — […]

Increasingly in the modern world, everything is being connected to a network. Even parking meters that were once just purely mechanical devices are now connected. For IT security researchers, anything that is connected to a network is a potential target for research – even the lowly parking meter. Security researcher Joe Grand has taken a […]

In tough economic times, everyone is looking for a way to increase their business. For online businesses, one possible route could be by way of upgrading their SSL certificates to EV-SSL (Extended Validation), according to VeriSign. The company is reporting growing sales of its EV-SSL certificates as well as increased sales for its customers that […]

From the ‘did the web really win?‘ files: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about HTML 5 and its video component. It’s a game changing element that is also competitive against the current pervasive web video technology — Adobe Flash. But what does Adobe think about HTML 5? During Adobe’s second quarter fiscal 2009 investor […]

The idea of the “cloud” is all about offering distributed computing resources. Yet simply offering resources is not enough — there is a real need for management and control, too. Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT) spin-off Zimory, which officially launched in January, is now adding new capabilities to its open source powered cloud service aimed at […]

From the ‘sign here please‘ files: Google Chrome 3.0.189.0 dev-channel is now out, bringing with it a major change to the way Extensions are packaged. Extensions (known as Add-Ons to Mozilla Firefox users) are still not part of the regular Chrome experience but with the new dev-channel release they are getting a step closer. But […]

From the ‘naming games‘ files: Some vendors keep their software in Beta for a long period of time —  even calling services used by millions Beta (Gmail is still a Beta). Mozilla however is now taking its Firefox 3.5 browser out of beta with the first official Release Candidate (RC 1). Though, if you happen […]

Comcast is making a move to IPv6, making IPv6 transit services available to its wholesale customers. This a significant development because in less than two years, the IPv4 address space will be exhausted, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be any more Internet addresses. IPv4 has a 32-bit address size, allowing for only 4.3 billion […]

From the ‘free as in freedom‘ files: As my colleague Michelle Menga is reporting, Amazon is now making new source code available for its Amazon Kindle. Basically what it represents is, Amazon’s responsibility to make the GPL licenced source code that is used in the Kindle available to others. That’s part of the GPL license […]