Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘network is the platform‘ files: I wrote a story earlier this week about Cisco’s new hosted email security offering. Buried in that story was an interesting new Linux development that I want to call attention to: Cisco is building a (Linux powered) hosted email service. This is new and it will change the […]

Drupal, the popular, open source, content management system (CMS) so far has grown mostly by way of its community roots. But Tom Erickson, the newly appointed CEO at Drupal’s lead commercial sponsor, Acquia, believes that the commercial enterprise can grow the community, too. That could further compound the success that Drupal has already seen, having […]

From the ‘if it’s broke fix it‘ files: According to a new report from Security vendor Secunia on vulnerabilities in 2008, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser topped the list at 115 reported issues. In comparison, Apple Safari had 32, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) had 31 and Opera had 30. Simply counting vulnerabilities alone – does not […]

From the ‘what’s in a name‘ files: Novell’s openSUSE community manager Joe Brockmeier just announced that that codename for the upcoming openSUSE 11.2 release is Fichte. Fichte was a famous German philosopher and idealist.  Linux distro naming is something that has become more interesting in recent years, thanks in no small part to the wacky […]

While rivals are pushing the latest editions of their own browsers, Mozilla is getting its own house in order with an update to its open source Firefox Web browser that locks down at least five vulnerabilities, three of which it warned are critical. The Firefox 3.0.7 update also fixes a number non-security bugs that had […]

Nokia might be best known as a global mobile phone giant, but it’s also making waves in the open source software business, too. The company’s Qt Software division this week released the latest edition of its open source application framework, Qt version 4.5, with improvements that will expand cross-platform capabilities and increase performance. Nokia’s also […]

From the ‘you can get satisfaction‘ files: There are some devs out there that don’t like PHP, then there are those that do.A new survey from Evans Data of over 500 developers, asked questions in 12 different categories to see which dynamic languages they like best. The study asked about Ruby, Python, Perl, Java script, […]

From the ‘it’s comic book wednesday‘ files: As every geek knows, Wednesday is comic book day (the day that every comic book store in America gets new issues from Diamond, the only comic book distributor left..). This week though, we’ve got a new free online entry from a most unusual publisher, networking vendor Cisco with […]

Cisco is aiming to bridge its datacenters and its on-site enterprise solutions with a new initiative that will see it delivering its IronPort unit’s e-mail security as both a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering and a hybrid model that merges cloud computing with an on-site presence. The new initiative points to efforts by Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) to […]

From the ‘whatever happened to..’ files: The Linux Foundation has acquired the Linux.com domain from SourceForge. Financial details of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time. I spoke with Jim Zemlin Executive Director of the Linux Foundation (and all around super Linux promoter Dude) today about the transaction and what it means […]

From the ‘today we’re all square‘ files: Look at the calendar. Notice anything interesting? It’s the third day of the third month of 09. The square root of 9 is, yup 3 (remember grade 5 math?). So Happy Square Root Day! This is something that doesn’t happen all that often. The next Square Root day […]

Two years after it launched Extended Validation SSL (EV-SSL), more than 11,300 valid certificates have been sold, with around 8,000 of them sold by VeriSign, developer of the certificates. Of course, considering that VeriSign has over one million standard SSL certificates total, EV-SSL still has a ways to go until it is dominant. SSL certificates […]