Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘not so good old days‘ files: It was 10 years ago today that the Melissa worm changed the IT security landscape. Melissa was the first big virus that went viral and it affected many people personally — including me. Things today in 2009 are quite different, but still it’s interesting to reminisce a […]

Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst has good reason to be optimistic. In his first full year as CEO of the Linux vendor, Whitehurst, a former Delta Airlines executive, has managed to pilot Red Hat into growth territory despite the overall turbulence in the global economy. While the wider economy is in a slowdown, Linux vendor […]

From the ‘that’s not good‘ files: As many as 100,000 routers are allegedly infected with a new worm that turns home routers into drones for a botnet. DroneBL which is a botnet attack monitoring service claims the new Psyb0t worms targets OpenWRT and DD-WRT based firmware (which run on MIPS processors). OpenWRT is open source […]

Just because Microsoft Windows itself is a proprietary, closed-source operating system doesn’t mean that the software giant isn’t open to open source. Increasingly, it’s just the opposite. As the economic downturn drags on, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is feeling more pressure to figure out ways that Windows can play nicely with open source applications, which are […]

Tuz (left) is the 2.6.29 kernel’s temporary replacement for Tux (right). The first new Linux kernel of 2009 is now out, sporting the early stages of the next generation of Linux filesystems — and a new, temporary mascot, to boot. The 2.6.29 kernel follows the 2.6.28 kernel by three months and also introduces improved wireless […]

Novell today is rolling out the newest edition of its flagship enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11. The new releases are the first major updates since the SLES and SLED 10 releases in July of 2006. Novell’s new Linux includes a host of feature improvements including […]

The open source Eclipse Foundation has its eye on making its integrated development environment (IDE) ready for the future, with new projects designed to better adapt to cloud-based architectures and to stake a claim in runtime frameworks. The projects, set to be unveiled during the foundation’s annual EclipseCon developer conference this week, include the debut […]

From the “I told you so” files: Earlier this month, I wrote about HP’s new Flash security tool — that tool, now officially called SWFscan (just as I predicted) is out. But there is one surprise, the tool is free. SWFscan is a tool that decompiles flash code and looks for vulnerabilities.HP security researcher Prajakta […]

From the ‘friends in high places‘ files: TomTom is adding a little more muscle to its patent fight against Microsoft. The navigation vendor today announced that it has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as a licensee. TomTom is in a back and forth patent battle with Microsoft — with at least four patents specifically […]