Sean Michael Kerner

Tis the season to be…fearful? Naah, that can’t be right. That is, unless you listen to all the pronouncements of doom and gloom from the countless numbers of security trend reports that come out this time of year. Security vendors love to remind the naïve masses of their insecurity, which is not necessarily a bad […]

QuickTime users can breathe a collective sigh of relief. After weeks of being at risk from an unpatched security vulnerability, Apple yesterday addressed the hole in its media-playing software. Among the trio of vulnerabilities fixed in the QuickTime 7.3.1 release is a flaw first publicly reported nearly a month ago, involving Real Time Streaming Protocol […]

IT administrators are increasingly burdened with the need to meet an ever expanding array of compliance requirements. At the heart of many of those compliance requirements is the critical need to understand user identity and access rights. It’s a need that IBM is claiming to meet with its new Tivoli Identity Manager version 5 (TIM). […]

Sun Microsystems is hoping to win over converts to its new NetBeans 6.0 IDE , which came out today. Since its inception, NetBeans has been all about the Java language. But this time, it’s a different release. NetBeans 6.0 is extending Sun’s IDE to other languages,including C/C++ , JavaScript and Ruby . There’s more, too. […]

You could drive a truck through some of the defects that can creep into the software development process. Among the most difficult to detect is something called a Race Condition. When a Race Condition exists, shared data is accessed by multiple concurrent threads without proper data access protection which could lead to data loss, corruption […]

Ruby on Rails 2.0 (RoR) is the first major release of the popular dynamic language framework in 18 months. At its heart is a fundamental decision in how the framework will work with Web Services. Instead of SOAP (Service Oriented Architecture Protocol) support in RoR, the open source framework has instead decided to focus on […]

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product. On Monday, Red Hat officially released JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS), based on the Exadel product as a 100 percent open source IDE . The new Eclipse based […]

By its own admission, networking giant Alcatel-Lucent has not been seen in the marketplace as a security player. It’s a perception the networking/hardware provider is now trying to change. With the release of a new Web Services gateway and network access control (NAC) partnership, Alcatel-Lucent is beefing up its security offerings as part of its […]

The problem with doing application vulnerability testing in a live production environment is just that — it’s a live production environment, and if you break something, it could cause a lot of harm. Yet there is a real need for live production server testing, since new attack vectors and vulnerabilities emerge on an almost-daily basis. […]

UPDATED: U.S. telecom giant Verizon is coming under fire for allegedly violating the open source GNU General Public License (GPL). The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) yesterday filed a lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Verizon on behalf of open source software developer BusyBox. The suit alleges […]

With over 100,000 hosted open source projects, SourceForge.net for years has been the biggest resource for those looking for open source code. Thanks to a new effort, the site’s developers now can look to expand their financial resources, too. The new SourceForge.net Marketplace made its debut today, enabling registered open source projects to offer paid […]

It’s one thing for a vendor to claim that Linux is ready for the embedded development market. It’s quite another to have a multi-year study involving hundreds of projects and over 1,300 developers report it. Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) has revealed in a new report how effective embedded Linux has been for developers to develop […]