Sean Michael Kerner

The United States market for Linux support got more crowded Tuesday after French Linux vendor Mandrakesoft announced a partner program and a new line of Linux servers for the SMB (small to medium business) market in the U.S. The Mandrakelinux Solution Provider Program offers both technical and marketing support for U.S.-based partners. Mandrake said it […]

Chief information officers are expecting an average increase in their 2005 budgets of about 2.5 percent, according to a recent survey by research firm Gartner . Gartner’s Executive Programs Group (EXP) also revealed that security sits at the top of both business and technology priorities for CIOs. Gartner’s survey polled 1,300 CIOs in 30 countries, […]

Another worm has emerged in the wild, preying on the generosity of those trying to donate to the Tsunami relief effort. Multiple security firms, including McAfee, TrendMicro, Sophos and Symantec, today are reporting the discovery of the worm. McAfee and Symantec call it W32.Zar.A@mm, Trend Micro calls it WORM_ZAR.A and Sophos calls it W32/VBSun-A. The […]

Buried inside the vast majority of security advisories and patches issued by vendors and the security community is a standardized naming convention called CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). A new tool from security vendor PredatorWatch aims to take advantage of the CVE “dictionary” in order to provide a greater level of security than either a […]

In results released this week, interactive marketing firm DoubleClick reported that clicks, conversions and ROI for search advertisers gained in December. The statistics come from the final installment of DoubleClick’s Holiday 2004 Shopping Report with data derived from campaigns conducted by DoubleClick’s Performics search engine marketing (SEM) division. The average client conversion rates (the number […]

Linux creator Linus Torvalds had a few things to say this week about the way potential security issues are disclosed to fellow open sourcers. And it wasn’t all good. His comments came as part of a mailing list discussion among kernel developers about creating a security contact point for people to use when potential kernel […]

Linux vendors Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Mandrakesoft, Debian and Gentoo have issued advisories and patches this week for a number of different vulnerabilities that have hit them. Red Hat issued updates for its libtiff package, which includes a function library for manipulating TIFF image files. Security research firm iDefense had reported an integer overflow bug that […]

RSS service provider Feedburner’s informal study on RSS Aggregator market statistics is providing an early benchmark for measuring the nascent sector. But Feedburner said don’t overlook its caveats; another blogging executive cautioned that the stats only count one type of aggregator. Feedburner, an RSS/Atom service for publishers that provides statistics as well as affiliate links […]

Developing .NET-enabled applications for SAP’s Netweaver just got easier with a new developer kit released by Microsoft and SAP. The Portal Development Kit for Microsoft .NET (PDK for .NET) is actually an add-on to Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003 application and enables development for SAP’s Enterprise portal, which is part of SAP NetWeaver. With the […]

Synchronizing contacts between your cell phone and your PC is easy when you’ve got the right tools. Thanks to cell phone vendor Motorola, BVRP Software’s Mobile PhoneTools application is now being shipped to Vodafone customers in Japan. Using BVRP’s Mobile PhoneTools application that is bundled on Motorola phones, cell phone users can transfer and synchronize […]

Building on an existing two-year strategic product relationship, Microsoft and Siemens AG today announced a global development and sales agreement for real-time collaboration solutions. The companies said the alliance promises to deliver a thorough product lineup of “enterprise-grade, presence-enhanced calling, video and Web conferencing, and collaboration solutions.” The agreement will align the sales and market […]

Anti-Virus and security vendor Panda Labs is reporting the discovery of a threat that takes advantage of Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM) . According to the company’s warning, one of two Trojans, Trj/WmvDownloader.A or Trj/WmvDownloader.B, could be placed inside of Windows Media format (.wmv) video files by malicious users. It executes when the user opens […]