Sean Michael Kerner

Most people turn off the lights in their home or office when they’re not in use. Do they do the same for Internet access equipment? Network equipment vendors would tell you probably not. Now, a new industry effort is afoot to make networking equipment and specifically Ethernet technology itself more intelligent and less energy intensive […]

From the ‘and she really is so nice” files: Mozilla’s Chief Security Officer Window Snyder announced today that she is leaving her post at Mozilla by the end of the year. I’ve had the good fortune of speaking with Window many times by phone and met her several times as well. Her grasp of the […]

Opponents of open source often use the specter of potential patent infringement charges to protect their proprietary turf. Questions over patent validity in software are never easy to answer, but it’s one that a new effort called Linux Defenders from the Open Invention Network (OIN) is trying help solve. Linux Defender includes facilities for peer-to-peer […]

From the “Mozilla does email? really?” files: At long last, Mozilla Messaging has put out the first Beta release for the Thunderbird 3 open source email client. Lots of new stuff here that users will notice. According to Mozilla among the new features are a tab interface for mail, improved message reader view, better address […]

Microsoft users are getting an early present from the software giant this December — that is, if you consider the biggest security fix list of the year to be a gift. The company today released its Patch Tuesday fixes for December, and it’s a large one, with eight different security bulletins addressing 28 vulnerabilities. The […]

Open source business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft has closed a new round of financing — thanks to backers that now include Linux vendor Red Hat, InternetNews.com has learned. The round marks the first time that Red Hat has invested in Jaspersoft, a company with which it also partners as part of its Red Hat Exchange […]

From the “who do you want to be today” files: Google is continuing its rapid development of its Chrome browser with the dev-channel release of Chrome version 0.4.154.33. Again this is mostly a bug fix, though two of the bugs are really interesting. Bug #6482 fixes an issue with composing mail and switching folders in […]

From the “good things come to those who wait” files: Mozilla developers have released Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 – nearly a month after it was expected. There are a number of reasons why this milestone release was delayed but in a nutshell from my third-party point of view, it’s all about making sure a release […]

Ten days after first being officially released as generally available (GA), software, Sun Microsystems is now claiming its open source MySQL 5.1 database server is being well received. It’s a claim that stands in contrast to the initial claim of MySQL founder Monty Widenius who last week published a long diatribe discussing the multiple failures […]

Remember when a network was just a set of dumb pipes for delivering content? Those days are now long since passed, thanks to the dramatic changes that the networking landscape has undergone, with the increasing use of video and other streaming media and a proliferation of new fixed and mobile devices. As a result, networking […]

From the “automatic updates are fun” files: Google has updated its dev channel version of the Chrome browser to version 0.4.154.31. This is mostly a stability and bug fix release with no functionality updates according to Google Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson. BUT, if you look closely at the release notes,  there is an important […]

In case you needed further proof of China’s breakneck pace of growth, VeriSign is reporting that the .cn Top Level Domain (TLD) has now become the second biggest TLD, surpassing Germany’s .de. The stats are part of VeriSign’s ongoing look at how some TLD registrations are performing. For the third quarter of this year, growth […]