Sean Michael Kerner

Using Mozilla Firefox’s built-in Password Manager to keep track of your browser’s passwords? It makes site logins faster but it also could help malicious sites steal your passwords. The bug, which has been known to Mozilla for at least 10 days, remains unpatched and exploits as well as a proof of concept exist in the […]

The Asterisk IP-PBX has been turning the stodgy telecom market on its head since its 1.0 release in 2004. Yet the Asterisk project on its own and its lead corporate sponsor Digium are part of a wider community of Asterisk-based PBX solutions. One of the most popular Asterisk-based open source PBX solutions is Trixbox, which […]

Oracle database users take heed: December may be a tough month. A security researcher is warning of a week of Oracle database bugs. The revelation comes after Oracle’s recent quarterly patch cycle for its namesake database. It typically yields double-digits’ worth of fixes for security flaws. For example, Oracle released an update at the end […]

Though many have thought otherwise, Novell’s recent deal with Microsoft is not an admission that Linux infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property. At least that’s the message Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian is pitching in an open letter. Microsoft agrees and disagrees. Hovsepian argues in the letter that the prime motivation for signing the agreement on Nov. […]

There are a lot of great new programs and innovations expected in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The Novell-led Mono project isn’t one of them. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. It recently hit version 1.2 offering the promise of improved Windows-to-Linux .NET portability. It is included in Linux distributions beyond […]

In an interesting twist of irony, Oracle, which is taking aim at Linux leader Red Hat for being too expensive, is being undercut with an open source challenge to its namesake database. VoIP vendor Vonage Networks is deploying EnterpriseDB, which is built on top of the open source PostgreSQL database as an alternative to Oracle. […]

AJAX  is an online-only technology, right? Not necessarily. Zimbra, a company known for its AJAX-powered online collaboration suite, has figured out a way to bring AJAX offline. It may not be part of Zimbra’s next update. But it is coming, soon. AJAX is a browser-reliant technology that utilizes Javascript and XML   elements, which then […]

Is the time for NAC now or later? An Infonetics Research study suggests the security protocol’s time has arrived. NAC (Network Access Control) is already deployed across half of all large enterprises in North America, Infonetics’ study concluded. The study said 50 percent of North American large enterprises have NAC deployments. By 2008, Infonetics expects […]

UPDATED: Heat? What heat? Red Hat  may be facing new competition for Linux support from Oracle and a Microsoft/Novell partnership, but the number one Linux distributor is throwing some heat of its own. Red Hat just released Beta 2 of its highly anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) flagship product. It’s expected to be […]

Coding as competitive sport? You bet, complete with a famous ESPN anchor and $200,000 in prizes. It’s called the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge and the finals are being webcast live Friday thanks to sponsor AOL. TopCoder is a major league for programming competitions, with the Collegiate Challenge being one of its biggest events. The Collegiate Challenge […]

Windows applications continue to be key targets for hackers, according to the latest Top 20 list of Internet security vulnerabilities from The SANS Institute. The number one spot on the information security training and certification group’s list belongs to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. However, the report also highlighted zero-day vulnerabilities and attacks that go beyond Internet […]

Back at the start of this year, IBM decided to open source its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and put the project on the SourceForge.net open source software repository. Ten months later, IBM is saying goodbye to all that. It is now taking the UIMA project, which is a framework for for building search and […]