Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘how to turn billions into millions‘ files: In the year 2000, Nortel Networks acquired Alteon for $7.8 billion. Today, Nortel – in bankruptcy protection in Canada and the US – completed its sell off of Alteon to networking vendor Radware for (get this) $18 million. The Radware deal was first announced in February […]

With just hours to go before the widespread Conficker worm is expected to activate, researchers say they’re relying on new efforts to help mitigate the risk and detect the worm itself. And not a moment too soon. The worm, which is also known as Downadup, Kido, Confick and the April Fool’s Day worm, is creating […]

Collaboration and social media are popular IT buzzwords, and according to Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), they’re a way that businesses can save money as well. Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior took the stage today at the VoiceCon conference for a keynote in which she detailed how Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) uses collaboration tools and social media technologies like […]

From the ‘tonight we dine on Linux‘ files: Red Hat’s Fedora community Linux distribution is out today with its first beta for the Fedora 11 –codenamed Leonidas – release. At the top of the feature list for this new distro is something that all users will notice, namely faster boot times — specifically a claim […]

Novell is making it easier for a Microsoft .NET developer to deploy their applications on Linux, whether they develop their applications on Windows or on Linux, with the release of Mono 2.4. Mono is a .NET on Linux implementation and the new version, released Monday, promises greater compatibility and better performance for deploying .NET apps […]

From the ‘now what?‘ files: After a brief but very media-hyped period, Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent dispute – apparently in a way that is not incompatible with the open source GPL license. Though the two parties have settled their dispute, the overall dispute over Linux patents is far from being settled in […]

From the ‘now we know‘ files: Last August, Red Hat’s Fedora project announced that its servers had been compromised — now 6 months later (after an exhaustive investigation), Red Hat has revealed exactly what happened. According to Red Hat Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields, the compromise did not come by way of any vulnerable software […]

From the ‘Is China spying on you?’ files: A massive global spying network, dubbed GhostNet, was uncovered this weekend by researchers at my alma mater ,The University of Toronto. The network was allegedly run by the government of China, and was discovered first by an examination of the Tibetan Dalai Lama’s website by the researchers, […]

From the ‘good luck and fare thee well‘ files: JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey is leaving Red Hat. Labourey had been at JBoss for the past eight years, nearly three of which were under Red Hat’s ownership. Labourey’s departure comes over two years after JBoss founder Marc Fleury left Red Hat in 2007. Times are good […]

In the beginning (1995), Java was created by Sun Microsystems. Then Sun saw that Java was bigger than just Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and opened up the process of building Java with the Java Community Process (JCP) in 1998. Yet now with rumors of IBM acquiring Sun swirling, the Java community could undergo its most significant […]

From the ‘high priority fire drill’ files: Mozilla is scrambling to rush out Firefox 3.0.8 by March 30th (or sooner) **UPDATED** Mozilla put out the 3.0.8 update late Friday March 27 ** to fix for a critical bug issue. The issue  has to deal with a flaw that can be exploited after an XSLT triggered […]

The Internet is at crossroads. The current IPv4 address space is nearing exhaustion, while the next-generation IPv6 addressing system dramatically expands the available address space. Yet, to date, it hasn’t been widely deployed. And despite the impending IPv4 exhaustion, the Internet Society (ISOC) has published a study in which it reported that there are no […]