Sean Michael Kerner

Mozilla is now considering a new addition to its revenue-generating activities by adding sponsored content to users’ new tab page. Currently whenever a Firefox user opens a new tab, the tab is populated with tiles, which are thumbnail screenshots of the user’s most frequently visited sites. A new effort called Directory Tiles will enhance that […]

The war of words about what’s wrong with Bitcoin is rising to new heights this week as questions about potential issues with the Bitcoin protocol and security take center stage. On Feb. 7, Bitcoin exchange site Mt. Gox reported that it was experiencing delays and would be restricting all withdrawals. On Feb. 10, Mt. Gox […]

One of the largest distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) ever seen hit the Internet Feb. 11, cloud security vendor CloudFlare reported. The target was a CloudFlare customer, and the attack appears to have been just shy of 400G bps, Matthew Prince, the company’s CEO, told eWEEK. “We’re still gathering data from all our upstream providers to […]

Microsoft has issued its monthly Patch Tuesday update for February, and unlike Microsoft’s January update, this one has at least one big surprise in it. Before every Patch Tuesday event, Microsoft issues an advance notification to give administrators and users a sneak peek at what is coming. For the February Patch Tuesday advance notification, Microsoft […]

Mozilla Debuts New Australis Interface for Firefox 29 Aurora Browsers by Sean Michael Kerner Firefox Aurora Is Early Release Software Although early adopters and the curious are likely to want to try out the new Firefox Australis interface, it’s important to remember that it’s still alpha software developed by an open community. More Contoured Tabs […]

Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)—a key requirement for organizations that process and handle electronic payments—is low but improving, according to the findings of a new study from Verizon. Although just 11.1 percent of the companies surveyed were fully compliant with all the requirements of the PCI DSS 2.0 standard […]

Linux Foundation Branches Out: 10 Efforts Beyond Linux by Sean Michael Kerner OpenMAMA Is Helping the Financial Industry The OpenMAMA project is an effort that got started in 2011 as a way to provide an open-source implementation of the Middleware Agnostic Messaging API (MAMA) used by financial services firms. FOSSBazaar Is Helping Adoption of Open-Source […]

Although Bitcoin is decentralized from a technology perspective, time has shown that the cryptocurrency is susceptible to the same types of market fluctuations that would affect any commodity. The creation of Bitcoin—and the act of moving and transferring it—are highly distributed processes, yet there are a few lynchpins that look much like a central authority. […]

Microsoft is set to release its second major patch update of the year on Feb. 11, and it doesn’t look to be a heavy load. The advance notification indicates that there will be five security bulletins released on Microsoft’s February Patch Tuesday, with only two of them rated as critical. For the first Patch Tuesday […]

Seven Surprising Trends from HP’s Security Risk Report by Sean Michael Kerner Total Number of Disclosures Grew in 2013 The volume of vulnerabilities reported by HP’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) increased in 2013 from 2012, though still did not reach the high point achieved in 2011. ZDI Bought More IE Flaws Than Any Other Product […]

Security firm Imperva is acquiring a pair of companies it is very familiar with: Incapsula and Skyfence. Incapsula is a cloud-based security platform spun off from Imperva, and Skyfence, which recently emerged from stealth mode with a behavior-based cloud application security offering, was founded by former Imperva employees. Imperva is paying approximately $60 million for […]

The open-source Docker virtualization container project released its 0.8 release this week, for the first time providing native support for Mac OS X users. Docker is an open-source effort that takes a different approach to application virtualization than virtualization hypervisors like VMware’s ESX, Microsoft’ Hyper-V or the open-source Xen or Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) projects. […]