Sean Michael Kerner

Amidst all the buzz, hoopla and actual launch of Google’s IM product, Microsoft has quietly updated its own IM client. Redmond launched MSN Messenger 7.5 yesterday, an incremental update to version 7.0 which came out at the beginning of April. Unlike version 7.0 though, Messenger 7.5 only supports Windows XP users. The new release boasts […]

The Asianux 2.0 Linux distribution hit the streets of China and Korea today, signaling the further rise of the joint Linux development effort against competing Linux distributors such as Novell , Red Hat and Sun Wah Linux. Asianux is the joint effort of companies in China, Korea and Japan with the backing of government and […]

The founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center says any company in the U.S. using “Linux” as part of a name should sublicense the mark. Eben Moglen, who is also general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and a law professor at Columbia University, was commenting on the recent issue of whether Linux companies […]

Google’s much anticipated open standards-based IM client has launched, but apparently without support for interconnecting with other users on non-Google, open-source Jabber servers. The beta version of the IM service, called Google Talk, uses the Jabber XMPP protocol, which is supposed to allow for easy interoperability between other Jabber XMPP servers and users. In fact, […]

The first whispers of a Google IM client emerged about a year ago. According to a number of reports, Google is now set to actually release its IM client called Google Talk sometime this week, likely tomorrow. Last year, the industry was jabbering about Google’s potential IM client. The general theory was that the client […]

UPDATED: Should companies be paying a license fee for the use of the Linux trademark? Red Hat , the number one Linux distributor, said it does not. Novell , the number two Linux distro, has a license but wouldn’t publicly comment on whether it pays for it. Five years after Linus Torvalds and his supporters […]

Cisco Systems has finished ahead of five other enterprise router makers in a new study released today. In the study, Infonetics Research sought insight from 180 companies about how they evaluate and select routers and vendors. Besides Cisco, users rated 3Com , Adtran , Enterasys , Juniper and Nortel . The overall ranking was based […]

Zero-day exploits are among the most traumatic events on the IT security landscape because they come without warning and by definition have no fix. With the specter of such an exploit budding on Friday by a French security firm claiming that it found such an exploit in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Microsoft quickly issued an advisory […]

The Apache Software Foundation is now incubating a web services broker/ Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) project called Synapse. The new effort aims to provide an open source implementation that will challenge existing commercial implementations that are based on proprietary protocols. According to the Synapse proposal submitted to the Apache Software Foundation,”Synapse will be a robust, […]

With its booming economy and massive population, China is set to become a global powerhouse in the IT world. Linux is likely to play a significant role in China’s computing present and future, with numerous players both foreign (Novell, Red Hat) and local (Red Flag, Asianux) grabbing for a piece of the pie. The current […]

Apple users have one less reason to feel smug about security in comparison to their Windows peers today. Over 40 different vulnerabilities ranging in severity from local privilege escalation to highly critical system exploit code that could allow a hacker to arbitrarily execute code and gain full system control were revealed as part of Apple’s monthly security update. The cavalcade […]

The already crowded social networking space added another player today with the launch of Imeem. The service aims to stand out with privacy features, a strong open source foundation, integrated IM, blogging, file- and photo-sharing features. Imeem takes its name from the concept of the “meme,” a thought or an idea that takes on a […]