Sean Michael Kerner

SAN FRANCISCO — The fight for free culture will be more difficult than the fight for free software, said Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons and Professor of Law at Stanford. Lessig took the podium at LinuxWorld here for the opening keynote with an impassioned plea to the audience about free culture and the […]

No one vendor will rule the Linux virtualization roost. VMware, Xen, IBM and Red Hat are collaborating on a “para-virtualization” interface for the Linux kernel that would enable multiple hypervisors. Jack Lo, senior director of R&D at VMware, said the effort is about making an operating system more virtualization-aware. “People generally refer to that as […]

For years, pundits have proclaimed that the Linux Desktop is coming, and yet it was still lacking in some of the critical collaboration apps that enterprises rely on. Some have argued that without key collaboration applications that can interface with Microsoft’s Exchange, enterprises won’t adopt Linux. That’s going to change this year. Collaboration applications, old […]

LAS VEGAS — Microsoft spent a whole day here at the Black Hat conference extolling the security enhancements in its upcoming Vista operating system. Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher with security firm Coseinc, spent a day picking it apart. Then again, what else would you expect from a session at a hacker convention titled: “Subverting […]

LAS VEGAS — Think cyber criminals are unorganized? Think again. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (ICC) is at the nexus of the fight on Internet crime. It’s at the receiving end of those that have been violated as it fights the fight against organized cyber crime. Dan Larkin, ICC unit chief, kicked off the […]

Wind River is taking a page from its competitor’s playbook. The company is incorporating real-time patches into its latest Wind River Linux releases a la MontaVista Linux. Today, Wind River is releasing its fourth Linux release since 2004, with new 1.3 versions of the Wind River General Purpose Platform, Platform for Consumer Devices and Platform […]

Metro Ethernet is not just a North American or European phenomenon. Asia’s got it, too, and it’s hitting big. According to a recent report from Yankee Group, the Asia-Pacific region is worth $675 million in Metro Ethernet revenues, second only to Europe. Within Asia, China is expected to be the fastest-developing market for Metro Ethernet […]

Nine months after it acquired Funk Software for $122 million, Juniper Networks (Quote, Chart) is rolling out network access control (NAC) security products based on Funk’s technology. Memo to Cisco and Microsoft. Your competition in the NAC sector is heating up. Funk Software’s two flagship products are the Odyssey Access Client (OAC) and Steel-Belted Radius (SBR). OAC […]

Oracle’s July Critical Patch Update (CPU) is now out with fixes for a whopping 65 bugs. Security firm Secunia rated the aggregate of the vulnerabilities “highly critical.” The July patch haul is a significant increase over the 36 flaws that Oracle’s last quarterly update in April repaired. But it is fewer than the 82 flaws […]

Cisco Systems is hoping to increase its lead in the Network Admission Control space (NAC) with the rollout of its NAC 4.0 appliance. The new technology comes as other vendors, both complementary and competitive, strengthen their own network control initiatives. NAC is a network-based approach to authenticating and enabling access to users and services across […]