Sean Michael Kerner

WASHINGTON, DC. You never know what kind of vulnerabilities you’ll see at Black Hat. I’m sitting in a session now where security researcher Chuck Willis of security research firm Mandiant has just demonstrated a live cross site request forgery attack on popular video site Netflix. According to Willis the issue was first reported to Netflix […]

Five months after being first announced, Mozilla is now announcing the official formation of Mozilla Messaging. Back in September of 2007, Mozilla anecdotally referred to the new mail spin off effort as MailCo but now they’ve given it a name,,hurray. The new announcement follows what was another ‘new’ Mozilla Thunderbird announcement just last month when […]

Chip vendor AMD wants to help developers produce applications that are faster than ever before. To do that AMD has open sourced its AMD Performance Library (APL) as the Framewave open source project. AMD claims that it has been working on APL (now Framewave) for almost three years and that over 3200 performance routine optimizations […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The name “Black Hat” for years has been synonymous with shadowy hacker activities. Many also know that the term refers to the popular annual security conference of the same name, long held in Sin City itself — Las Vegas. This week, however, the Black Hats aren’t flocking to Vegas. Instead, they’re meeting […]

Yes, I was quick to jump on the SCO gets $100 million lifeline story. And yes there is always more story to tell. As we reported last week, embattled, bankrupt Unix vendor SCO may yet live to fight another day thanks to $100 million in financing that it may be getting from SNCP.  A Memorandum […]

Open source storage startup Cleversafe is moving into the second stage of its evolution, with new hardware appliances built on top of its core open source dispersed storage network technology. The new products provide access, storage and management capabilities in hardware appliances with full commercial support. Cleversafe’s DSN uses a mathematical formula known as the […]

From the who do you want to be like files… One of the greatest things about being a technology journalist is the opportunity to interview business leaders that are actually really interesting. One such leader is Red Hat’s new CEO Jim Whitehurst who I interviewed over on the main InternetNews.com site. Whitehurst is a real […]

Barely out of bankruptcy itself Silicon Graphics (SGI) acquired troubled high-performance computing vendor Linux Networx (LNXI). SGI is acquiring LNXI for 390,000 shares. SGI’s shares closed at $17.91 at the end of trading on Feb 15. As part of the acquisition, SGI is acquiring Linux Networx technology as well as patents that cover cluster optimization, […]

Red Hat is out this week with a series of initiatives to further expand and develop its JBoss middleware platform. On the commercially available product side there is the JBoss SOA platform and on the community side there are three separate projects including Black Tie (for BEA Tuxedo migration), RHQ (a management effort for middleware […]

Novell is moving farther into the collaboration market by acquiring SiteScape, an open source player in team workspaces — and a partner in an existing joint offering. As a result of the acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, Novell plans to integrate SiteScape’s technology into its core collaboration wares, which compete against IBM’s Lotus […]

UNBELIEVABLE. Like everyone else, I figured SCO was gone, done for, KAPUT.   But that’s not the case. They’re BAAAACK! Today they got $100 million in financing from a group called Stephen Norris Capital Partners (“SNCP”) and get this … “partners from the Middle East” Who are these partners? We don’t know. But hey with crude […]

Embattled Unix vendor SCO may get a new lease on life, thanks to a $100 million infusion aimed at helping it emerge from bankruptcy and pursue its controversial legal claims. The financing comes from Stephen Norris Capital Partners (SNCP), which will take a controlling interest in SCO as part of the deal. “Not only will […]