Sean Michael Kerner

Testing has always been a critical part of IT and certainly has become a fundamental component of Linux adoption. One of the most critical core pieces of Linux testing got a significant upgrade this week, courtesy of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), with version 3.0.1 of the Scalable Test Platform (STP). Written in Perl […]

Depending on who you ask today, broadband usage is either slowing or it is still growing and has hit a critical mass of more than 50 percent of users. A Nielsen/NetRatings study released today announced that, for the first time in its surveys, home broadband usage soared from 38 percent last July to 51 percent […]

According to online advertising firm DoubleClick , online shopping is growing, but plenty of shoppers are abandoning their goods in their virtual carts, never to return again. DoubleClick’s second quarter 2004 E-commerce Site Trend Report illustrates that on a year-over-year basis, carting frequency has risen from 8.3 percent to 9.4 percent. But merely putting an […]

The European Union (EU) has delayed by two weeks its review decision about the proposed Microsoft and Time Warner joint venture to control DRM play Content Guard. The decision had originally been expected to be made today. Back in April, Microsoft and Time Warner announced their intentions with ContentGuard. Microsoft, which already had a stake […]

In a security advisory issued today, iDefense announced the discovery of yet another Concurrent Versions System (CVS) flaw. According to the security research firm’s advisory, the “Undocumented Flag Information Disclosure Vulnerability” allows for the remote exploitation of an information disclosure vulnerability in CVS that “allows attackers to glean information.” In their analysis, the successful execution […]

The Yahoo-backed DomainKeys e-mail authentication initiative this week got a boost from Sendmail, one of the most widely used Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) technologies. According to the results of a benchmarking performance study conducted by Sendmail Inc., the use of the DomainKeys only marginally impacted e-mail server performance and offers a “tenfold performance increase over […]

The world’s most populous country is set to become another center of gravity for the Linux universe. Members of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) — home to Linux founder Linus Torvalds — announced on Wednesday the establishment of its first office in China in the city of Beijing. The goal is use the office as […]

The Mozilla Foundation, Novell and IBM announced today the formation of a project to implement the W3C’s XForms 1.0 recommendation, which is part of the consortium’s XHTML2 specification. XForms 1.0 is intended to allow for the separation of presentation from XML-driven results. It also allows for increased accessibility that will bring Web transactions in line […]

Real Network’s Helix DRM (Digital Rights Management) software has received another vote of approval, this time a critical one from the FCC. This all comes in the same week that company released the much anticipated final Helix 1.0 media player client. Helix DRM technology now has FCC approval for secure playback and storage of digital […]

Thin computing on Linux got a significant boost this week with a pair of separate releases. Wyse Technology, one of the world’s leading thin-client vendors, announced its newest Linux thin client. And just yesterday, the Linux Terminal Server Project, the “granddaddy” of all Linux thin-client open source projects, released LTSP 4.1. Thin-client computing provides server-based […]

UPDATED: In a week that has seen the Linux patent issue grab a lot of attention, Munich, Germany, has decided to temporarily halt its plan to migrate 13,000 of its desktops to Linux. This move comes coincidentally just one day after Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) released its Linux patent review results. And not to […]

In a series of announcements at LinuxWorld today, Novell firmly planted its Linux feet in the soil. Starting off the company’s Linux onslaught is Novell SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 (SLES). This release is the first enterprise grade Linux distribution to include the 2.6 Linux kernel, which offers performance and scalability improvements for enterprise users, […]