Sean Michael Kerner

While much of the focus at Oracle’s OpenWorld event this week is on the company’s namesake proprietary database, Oracle is also making waves with its open source MySQL database too. Oracle is now out with a Development Milestone Release (DMR) for MySQL 5.7, offering the promise of dramatically improved scalability, among other enhancements. Tomas Ulin, […]

In the kickoff keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference Sunday night, CEO Larry Ellison announced his company’s latest foray into the world of in-memory databases. “When you put data in memory you do that to make the system go faster,” Ellison said. “So now the results are instantaneous, at the speed of thought, with answers […]

The Fedora Project was officially born Sept. 22, 2003, and Red Hat Linux officially drew its last breath in 2004 as a supported offering. Fedora has been the only free non-enterprise Linux release from Red Hat ever since. From a commercial standpoint, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is Red Hat’s flagship platform and in many respects, […]

Providing a preview of what’s to come, Mozilla developers are now out with development versions of the next two releases of the open-source Firefox Web browser. Firefox 25 is now in Mozilla’s beta channel and follows Mozilla’s release of Firefox 24 last week. On the desktop side of Firefox 25, bug fixes top the list […]

VIDEO: One of the most infamous hackers of all time talks about Website security and what users should do to protect themselves. In the world of computer security hackers, few are as well-known as Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick’s activities in the mid-1990s led to his arrest by the FBI and subsequent imprisonment. Today he works as […]

By acquiring Enterasys, Extreme expects to accelerate innovation faster than it could have on it own. Extreme aims to include innovations found in the Enterasys network operating system into Extreme’s Linux-based ExtremeXOS operating system. That effort will take approximately two years. “Since its first release in 2004, ExtremeXOS has been developed with a Linux abstraction […]

Microsoft is once again facing user backlash over a failed patch update cycle. The first Tuesday of every month is known as Patch Tuesday at Microsoft, and this past Tuesday (Sept. 10), Microsoft issued 13 security bulletins fixing 47 different security issues. One of those security bulletins (MS13-068) included a fix for Microsoft Outlook, but […]

Linux vendor Canonical improves its systems management solution with hyperscale server capabilities. Canonical is updating its Landscape Ubuntu server management solution today, providing enterprises with the ability to manage both x86- and ARM-based hyperscale server environments. Landscape, a closed-source offering from Canonical, is available as both a hosted service as well as an on-site dedicated […]

Linux vendor Red Hat aims to balance the need for enterprise stability and an updated software release with new software collections. Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat is now providing its users with an optional way to run newer versions of software applications on its stable operating system platform. The new Red Hat Software Collections and […]

The widely deployed blogging platform is being updated for security and bug fixes. The open-source WordPress blogging platform is being updated to version 3.6.1 to fix a trio of security vulnerabilities. WordPress is a widely deployed platform for blogging and is also suitable for general content management system usage. Currently there are more than 70 […]

VIDEO: Adobe Chief Security Officer Brad Arkin explains how his company went from dealing with zero-day flaws on a regular basis to making security a core principle of the entire company’s development efforts. There was a time when Adobe Systems’ products, particularly its Flash and PDF Reader applications were constantly attacked and exploited with a […]

This week, Apple’s announcement of the new iPhone 5S with an integrated biometric fingerprint reader for device access has got a lot of attention. Instead of requiring users to type a password to get access to their devices, the fingerprint reader, dubbed “Touch ID” is the password. I’ve been using biometric devices for authentication for […]