Sean Michael Kerner

Informatica this week snatched up privately-held data quality software vendor Similarity Systems in an all cash deal for approximately $55 million. Dublin, Ireland-based Similarity Systems’ data quality software enables cleansing, matching, monitoring and data profiling capabilities. Informatica officials said they will integrate Similarity’s data quality software into the Informatica PowerCenter enterprise data integration software. “Data […]

The father of Linux and copyright holder of the Linux name is not in favor of the GPL 3. Linus Torvalds has publicly posted his thoughts to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) about the update to the GPL license, under which the Linux kernel itself is licensed. His opposition to the new license may […]

After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape. Mozilla’s Usenet public newsgroups have been moved from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially ends Mozilla’s public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active use. “It should be no […]

Update your antivirus program and hunker down. A major virus outbreak may well be just around the corner if it isn’t here already. A virus referred to as “Blackworm” by some security vendors has apparently already infected more then 2 million systems. At least that’s what the virus’s own counter Web site is posting. The […]

We’ve all seen those incessant pop up ads that claim that our PCs are infected with spyware and we need to purchase product “X” to clean our machine. What happens if that product doesn’t work and in fact is a fraud itself? Microsoft is taking legal action against one such company alleging that Secure Computer […]

American Express won’t be without it: a Sun subscription for Java, that is. Sun Microsystems announced today that American Express (AMEX) has decided that it won’t leave home without Sun support for Java Enterprise System (ES). In so doing AMEX, joins over 1 million customers that Sun claims are now paying for subscriptions to the […]

Members of the Free and Open Source Community and its associated ecosystem are giving the thumbs up to the first draft of the new GPL 3 license. Barely a week old, GPL 3 is a draft intended to solicit discussion and comment. While IBM and Novell think that it’s still a bit early to tell, […]

How fast is fast enough? Novell’s SUSE Linux is getting a boost up to real-time speed thanks to a new partnership with Concurrent. Concurrent Real-Time Extensions Powered By SUSE Linux is an optimized version of SUSE Linux that provides guaranteed interrupt response times of fewer than 30 microseconds. The new product will be jointly sold […]

One of the most popular and ubiquitous rich media plug-ins for any browser on almost any platform is the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash player. Thanks to efforts of the Free Software Foundation, a Free Software Flash player called GNU Gnash is now in active development. The development is apparently occurring without the help or support […]

IT users, you are the weakest link. Goodbye. IBM is warning in a new report that, though widespread virus outbreaks are on the decline, on the whole online attacks are expected to rise in 2006. The culprit? Highly targeted attacks that rely on naïve users to help perpetrate cybercrimes. According to IBM’s 2005 Global Business […]

IBM is open sourcing its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) in a bid to foster wider participation and create a new open standard. UIMA is an IBM developed framework that has been in development and use since at least 2004. It is currently part of a number of IBM products including WebSphere OmniFind Edition. Marc […]

If you’ve had some form of computer security incident in the past year, you’re part of the majority. According to the FBI’s just released 2005 Computer Crime Survey, 87 percent of respondents reported some form of computer security incident in the past year. To add insult to injury, the study found that respondents encountered nearly […]