Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘developers, developers, developers‘ files: Red Hat is expanding its software development portfolio today with the official release of JBoss Developer Studio 2 – Portfolio Edition. It’s an interesting release that packages together an Eclipse based dev tool with JBoss’ Enterprise Application, Portal, SOA and Data Services Platforms. The JBoss Developer Studio tool itself […]

At the backbone of all Internet traffic are the carrier networks, with their own networking protocols like MPLS , BGP and Carrier Ethernet. While carrier networks have faced threats like denial-of-service attacks in the past, they’ve generally been seen as relatively protected. As a result, security researchers typically have not focused on rooting out weaknesses […]

For the last two and a half years, Oracle has been selling its own supported version of Linux based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But the company claims it’s not a fork. That’s an important distinction for Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), which makes billions from its products running on Linux, and is a very active […]

From the ‘stand up and fight‘ files: I’m not a lawyer (and I don’t pretend to be one either), but it seems to me that a very common legal tactic in patent battles is that counter suing is the way things are done. GPS vendor TomTom, this week filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft […]

Data and personal content exists in many different silos across the Internet, amd getting them all into a single interface and sharing them is no easy task. One potential solution to the problem is set to be demonstrated next week by open source software vendor Open-Xchange with an approach that uses semantic microformats as a […]

Pure Digital Technologies’ Flip MinoHDSource: Cisco Cisco is continuing to move aggressively into the consumer space by acquiring Pure Digital Technologies — maker of the popular Flip Video cameras — in an all-stock deal valued at $590 million. The deal marks the latest sign by Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) that it’s still placing a high priority on […]

From the ‘I’m glad these are the good guys” files: Apple Safari was hacked in under 2 minutes yesterday by way of a zero day exploit that has yet to be patched (or released into the wild). IE8 and Firefox were also taken down by zero day exploits. It was all part of the fun […]

From the ‘Twitter knows all’ files: Cisco CEO John Chambers recently announced that Cisco would have some staff reductions, but apparently they are still doing some hiring — or at least trying too until Twitter interfered. A prospective Cisco hire (@theconnor who has now protected his updates, but Twitter search is still there..) tweeted: Cisco […]

From the ‘I still don’t have one‘ files: There was a time when having an IT certification was the key to getting a job — that time may be here again. Back in 1999, when many of my colleagues were out getting MCSE’s and CNEs (remember those?), Red Hat launched its Red Hat Certified Engineer […]

Every day, hackers around the world try and find exploits in Web browsers and mobile platforms. Today, however, at least some will be helping the industry. That’s the thinking behind the third annual PWN2OWN contest, which kicks off today at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. There, security researchers will be looking for vulnerabilities […]

From the ‘beware the web’ files: With RSA coming, it’s that time of year again when security trend reports start popping up. Today, application security vendor Cenzic published their Q3-Q4 trends report which has some interesting findings. Overall the number of vulnerabilities continues to rise led by web based vulnerabilities — and oh yeah, Microsoft’s IE […]

From the ‘wouldn’t that be something‘ files: IBM is reportedly in talks to acquire Sun for a whopping $6.5 billion. At this early stage, its not known whether this is a fact or just a rumor. But just for the sake of argument, let’s consider what a powerhouse IBM Sun would be. In my opinion, […]