Sean Michael Kerner

Millennia ago, the blind poet Homer described the first Trojan Horse, which led to the downfall of the ancient city of Troy. In modern times, the digital Trojan Horse may be becoming as potent as its predecessor — with Microsoft reporting a 300 percent increase in Trojan infections in the second half of 2007. The […]

Every year Google somehow finds a way to up its contributions to the open source community and 2008 looks to be no different. For Google Summer of Code (SoC) 2008, Google is paying for 1,125 student developers, which is an increase from the 900 students the program took in 2007. Those students will work with […]

From the ‘I can virtualize faster than you‘ files: Red Hat has been partnering with chip vendors AMD and Intel for a long time. Every so often though Red Hat will announce something specific with one vendor (or the other) — that’s the case with the announcement today on a speed/functionality announcement with AMD’s processors […]

Much of the network access control (NAC) hype over the last few years has involved network defense. For Mauricio Sanchez, chief security architect, ProCurve Networking by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), NAC can be used as an offensive tool as well. The HP ProCurve offensive playbook for NAC comes as HP embraces Microsoft’s NAP technology with the […]

From the ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know‘ files: SugarCRM the open source customer relationship management (CRM) software platform provider announced today a very large reseller agreement with one of the world’s largest telecom providers — BT (formerly known as British Telecom). BT will offer its customers SugarCRM’s commerical offerings of Sugar […]

Yes Cross Site Scripting (XSS) errors are all over the place. And YES they can affect very prominent web sites. The discussion forum area on Barackobama.com is allegedly the victim of a XSS exploit that redirected comments from Obama’s site to….HillaryClinton.com. A hacker going by the alias of ‘Mox’ has claimed responsibility for the exploit. Mox […]

WAN optimization and acceleration vendor Blue Coat is acquiring competitor Packeteer for $268 million, a deal that could signal more consolidation to come in the networking sector. At stake is a piece of the growing WAN optimization market which Infonetics predicts will be worth $1.2 billion by 2010. The combined Packeteer Blue Coat offering will […]

From the ‘you gotta read the fine print‘ files: I track Ubuntu development reasonably closely, which is why I was surprised to see a release this AM titled,” Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition Released.” After all, according to the publicly available info I had on Friday, the release was set for an April 24th release. […]

A year and a half after first announcing their landmark interoperability and patent protection deal, Novell and Microsoft are now targeting China. In their release (which they sent out late Sunday night) the two partners called the new push, “an incremental investment in their relationship.” Essentially what they’re doing is providing a focussed effort to […]

For the last two years Vyatta has been offering a Linux based alternative to proprietary routing technology. Today Vyatta is upping the ante with a new release, Vyatta Community Edition 4 (VC4). The new version scales up the Linux network operating system to 10GbE and adds new functionally that complements its scale upstream. Vyatta isn’t […]

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has released its Software Update version 2.1 as the company refreshes its new Safari 3.1 browser to fix four vulnerabilities. Two of the issues are specific to Safari running on Windows. In one of the patched issues, Apple notes in its advisory that a maliciously crafted Web site may control the contents […]

First the good news. Fedora 9 Preview is now out — woohoo! The bad news? Well since Fedora 9 Preview is out a little late, Red Hat has now pushed back the official release date of Fedora 9 by two weeks. The original release date for Fedora 9 was set for April 29th, the new […]