Sean Michael Kerner

After nearly 14 years of life, the Netscape browser will soon be taken off life support. AOL which acquired Netscape in a stellar $4.2 billion deal in 1998 quietly announced the browser’s demise — scheduled for Feb. 1 — in a blog posting. “AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room […]

In 1949, George Orwell published his masterpiece novel 1984. Even if they haven’t read it, most people remember the book’s key takeaway: Big Brother is watching. Fast forward to 2008 and Big Brother really is watching. The vehicle that makes Big Brother’s omniscience possible is the network. The network: that mass of boxes, interface cards, […]

Every so often Microsoft will announce somewhere that one of its technologies is set to be standards compliant. The latest announcement came this week with Microsoft announcing on a blog that its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser would meet the ACID2 (define) standards test for W3C compliance on Web page development. Give me a break. […]

Software licensed under the GPL open source license is considered to be Free Software but that doesn’t mean it’s free as in beer and that developers don’t have rights. As four cases in point in 2007, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed legal suits against four different defendants for alleged copyright infringement of […]

2007 is a year that will long be remembered in the open source and Linux communities. It was a year in which the twin underpinnings of what makes open source successful and what could serve to destroy it made the headlines. On the pro side, Linux made major technology advances this year and a key […]

Sprint is gearing up for deploying the next generation IPv6 (define) Internet protocol with new IPv6 services. The effort by the national carrier is being driven by a June 2008 US federal government mandate for IPv6. Whether or not the government agencies will actually be running IPv6 by June of 2008 is an issue that is […]

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has settled its second GPL infringement case, this time with networking vendor Xterasys over charges that the company wasn’t complying with terms of the open source license agreement. The suit was filed nearly a month ago and leaves the SFLC with a score 2 settled cases and two still […]

QuickTime users can breathe a collective sigh of relief. After weeks of being at risk from an unpatched security vulnerability, Apple yesterday addressed the hole in its media-playing software. Among the trio of vulnerabilities fixed in the QuickTime 7.3.1 release is a flaw first publicly reported nearly a month ago, involving Real Time Streaming Protocol […]

Tis the season to be…fearful? Naah, that can’t be right. That is, unless you listen to all the pronouncements of doom and gloom from the countless numbers of security trend reports that come out this time of year. Security vendors love to remind the naïve masses of their insecurity, which is not necessarily a bad […]

IT administrators are increasingly burdened with the need to meet an ever expanding array of compliance requirements. At the heart of many of those compliance requirements is the critical need to understand user identity and access rights, it’s a need that IBM is claiming to meet with its new Tivoli Identity Manager version 5 (TIM). […]