Sean Michael Kerner

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. […]

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 […]