Sean Michael Kerner

What’s next for Linux? Industry observers will be looking for answers to that question this week at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon conference in Boston, where a wide range of participants, contributors and stakeholders in the Linux ecosystem will be gathering to discuss a broad range of topics. The first keynote of the event is being […]

Open source browser vendor Mozilla is readying an ambitious new release of its Firefox Web browser. The third beta of Firefox 4, set to debut sometime this month, is expected to include more stability, features and performance improvements over earlier versions. Among the areas that Mozilla is focusing on with Firefox 4 are a number […]

There is an ongoing debate in the IT security community about whether or not it makes sense for software and hardware vendors to pay researchers for finding vulnerabilities. For some vendors like Mozilla and HP (NYSE:HPQ), rewarding researchers is a part of their security model. On the other hand, Microsoft has steadfastly kept to a […]

LAS VEGAS — Not every speaker at the Black Hat security conference wears a black hat. Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of Whitehat Security, is using the show as the venue to disclose an unresolved issued in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser versions 6 and 7. In an interview with InternetNews.com at Black Hat ahead of […]

LAS VEGAS — Barracuda Networks is out this week with new research attempting to quantify how much malicious activity occurs on Twitter. Barracuda defines the Twitter “crime rate” as the percentage of accounts created per month that are eventually suspended by the company. Barracuda presented its research here at the BSides event, down the Strip […]

LAS VEGAS — Security exploits are made public throughout the year, but no week is more prolific in generating details of vulnerabilities, exploits and potential threats than the week of the Black Hat USA security conference here in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino. For many in the business of IT security, hardware, […]

Facebook connects its 500 million users using an array of open source software to enable social networking as well as data intelligence. Facebook’s open source Web serving infrastructure has a lot more than just the traditional LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack behind it. During a keynote session at the OSCON open source conference, David Recordon, the senior […]

The basic premise behind the Agile software development methodology is to release early and often to increase incremental innovation. It’s an approach that Google is now set to fully embrace with open arms for its Chrome Web browser. Though new stable updates of Chrome were already coming more often than every other major browser, Google […]

Mozilla is out this week with its largest patch update yet for the Firefox 3.6 browser, closing the door on 14 reported security vulnerabilities, eight of which Mozilla rates as critical issues. The new Firefox 3.6.7 release comes just ahead of the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Last year, Mozilla rushed out […]

Safer surfing through virtualization? That’s the thinking behind a new offering by Dell’s Kace systems management division, which today unveiled a free, secure browser based on wrapping Mozilla’s Firefox in a virtualization shell. The Dell Kace Secure Browser works by using virtualization to isolate the browser from the underlying operating system in an attempt to […]

Seven weeks after Mozilla first announced Firefox Home for the iPhone, the open source browser maker has made good on its pledge to deliver a Firefox-synchronization app for the iTunes App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users. The free Firefox Home app isn’t a browser; instead, it’s intended to enable Apple mobile device […]

Mozilla is out this week with the first public beta for its next-generation open source Firefox 4 Web browser. With the latest browser update, Mozilla is adding a host of features to drive performance and support HTML5, offline storage and add-ons, while also improving the user interface over the current Firefox 3.6 release. Though the […]