Sean Michael Kerner

Adobe has been keeping to a regular patch release cycle for its products, but this week that cycle was interrupted. On Tuesday, Feb. 4, Adobe issued an out-of-band security update to fix a zero-day flaw in its Adobe Flash player running on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Adobe warned in its advisory that the […]

Mageia 4 Linux Desktop Distro Delivers Improved Performance, Features by Sean Michael Kerner Mageia Offers Multiple Linux Desktop Choices The default desktop choice for Mageia 4 is the KDE open-source desktop although users may also select Gnome. Mageia Welcome Screen Provides an On-Ramp for Novices The Mageia welcome screen is a new feature in Mageia […]

Mozilla today released Firefox 27, giving users of the open-source browser new security features and improved performance. There are 13 security advisories attached to the Firefox 27 release, four of them ranked as being critical. As is common in nearly all Firefox release updates, one of the critical updates is for a group of vulnerabilities […]

Many applications are misconfigured and most mobile apps don’t use encryption properly, according to Hewlett-Packard’s 2013 Cyber Risk report released Feb. 3. HP’s research shows that 46 percent of mobile apps don’t use encryption properly, Jacob West, CTO of Enterprise Security Products at HP, said. “That’s a really shocking number because there is such attention […]

The recent data breach at retailer Target—which left 70 million Americans and their personal information at risk—is receiving Congress’ attention this week in a number of hearings on data security. One of the participants in those hearings is Bob Russo, general manager of the Payment Council Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), which oversees the […]

LibreOffice 4.2 Office Suite Boasts New Features, Performance Boost By Sean Michael Kerner LibreOffice Isn’t Just for Linux While LibreOffice is widely deployed on Linux systems, there are both Windows and Mac OS X installers, enabling users of proprietary operating systems to benefit from a freely available office suite. LibreOffice Start Screen Gets a New […]

During a panel session at the Open Compute Summit Jan. 29 in San Jose, Calif., celebrated Internet browser pioneer turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explained why he’s bullish on the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Andreessen’s enthusiasm is about the technology itself as well as the hardware that will need to support it. New Bitcoins are created by […]

The annual Pwn2Own browser-hacking competition has risen to mythical status over the years, with tall tales of security researchers exploiting within minutes browser technologies thought to be secure. For their efforts, researchers have been awarded cash and prizes by the event’s sponsor, Hewlett-Packard’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). HP has now released the rules for the […]

Yahoo announced late on Jan. 30 that its widely used consumer mail service was attacked recently. “Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts,” Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of Platforms and Personalization Products at Yahoo, wrote in a Tumblr blog post. “Upon discovery, we took immediate action to […]

FreeBSD Open-Source OS Comes to the PC-BSD Desktop By Sean Michael Kerner KDE 4.10 Is the Default Desktop PC-BSD’s installation media includes the open-source KDE 4.10 desktop as the default choice. KDE 4.10 had its first public release in February 2013 and is the stable branch KDE development. Encryption Is Built-In As part of the […]

Details continue to emerge about the root cause of the security breach at U.S. retailer Target that exposed the personal information of 70 million people during the 2013 holiday season. According to a Wall Street Journal report this week, the Target attackers were able to gain access to the retailer’s system by way of stolen […]

Yesterday, I wrote about the ignominious story of how Twitter user Naoki Hiroshima lost his @N Twitter account. The story involved somewhat questionable actions from vendors PayPal and GoDaddy, and the story is still evolving. After the media coverage here on eWEEK and elsewhere, both PayPal and GoDaddy issued public statements on Wednesday, Jan. 29, […]