Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘I got Linux in my Bimmer‘ files: Thanks to a new joint effort between Intel and Wind River, you may soon be running Linux in your car. The effort will run under the auspices of the Intel led Moblin.org effort   and will deal specifically with the in-vehicle infotainment marketplace. The idea is to […]

There is a report on the Washington Post that confirms that Zend (the lead commercial sponsor behind PHP) is laying off some of its workforce. The article speculates that the reason is due to Zend wanting to be cash flow positive in order to be a more attractive acquisition target. Which begs the question – […]

Nearly two and a half years ago, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a multi-year grant to help improve open source code quality. It appears that the DHS investment has paid off. According to a report from code analysis vendor Coverity, the DHS sponsored effort has helped to reduce the defect density in […]

Online collaboration tools are no longer the domain of just proprietary closed source vendors. Open Source startup Dimdim is now out with its Eagle release taking aim at being a fully open source unified communications and collaboration platform. The Eagle release officially known as Dimdim Open Source Community Edition Version 3.5 is licensed under the […]

From the ‘are we there yet?’ files: Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a solid browser, in fact I’ve been using it as my everyday browser (on Linux) for weeks without issue. That said there is always room for improvement and that’s what the new Firefox 3 RC 1 (release candidate) which is now available claims […]

From the ‘look ma I just discovered Link Spam‘ files: I see a good number of bogus security announcements and pronouncements in any given day. Today I got one forwarded to me from a number of peers about an AOL hack ‘discovered’ by Roger Thompson, Chief Research Officer of AVG Technologies. The PR pitch that […]

The SSL certificate business is a good one for VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) — so good that the company claim to have deployed 1 million active SSL certificates. VeriSign’s 1 million SSL certificate milestone comes as the need for SSL security continues to grow. SSL certificates are a key part of Internet security infrastructure and provide […]

OpenSSH is one of the most common mechanisms in use for providing secure remote access to servers. A flaw in a key part of how Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu secure OpenSSH has put potentially millions of servers at risk from a brute force attack. The attack could have major implications for the Internet. The […]

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu lead sponsor Canonical has an ‘interesting’ idea. In a blog post where he talks about the Ubuntu release cycle moving forward, he poses the surreal ideal of having synchronized Linux distribution releases across multiple Linux vendors.  If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian […]

From the ‘may require some assembly‘ files: The first ‘public’ release of Moonlight – which is the Novell led open source effort to replicate Microsoft’s Silverlight on Linux – is now available, (though I’m not quite sure that it’s production quality yet). You see the first public Moonlight build doesn’t include media codecs by default. […]

John Newton, the chairman and CTO at open source document management firm Alfresco, is no stranger to Enterprise Content Management (ECM). You might even say he helped put the term on the IT map when he co-founded Documentum, the document management company that EMC later bought. But that was then. Now, he’s all about Alfresco’s […]

In Science Fiction, a forcefield is a common way to provide security. Can that same concept be used to protect computer users? That’s what network security vendor Check Point is pitching with its ZoneAlarm ForceField product. The ZoneAlarm ForceField could represent an innovative approach to desktop security as users seek ways to complement their existing […]