Sean Michael Kerner

Dropbox is a widely used cloud-based storage platform that is now the target of security researcher scrutiny, as user data privacy is being called into question. A pair of researchers at the USENIX security conference in August released a white paper in which they describe methods for attacking Dropbox and obtaining user data. While the […]

Every day, we all use passwords to access our email, our servers, our systems—our digital lives. They are often the only thing that stands between our (limited) privacy and anyone/anywhere getting access to our digital selves. This week, I’ve seen two very different and interesting developments in the world of passwords. SecurityCoverage Inc. is now […]

The open-source Apache Traffic Server is hitting a major milestone with the release of a new version and a new road map for future development. The Apache Traffic Server was originally donated to the Apache Software Foundation by Yahoo and is a caching proxy server that can speed up the delivery of Web server content. […]

The open-source LibreOffice office productivity suite—a widely deployed application on Linux operating systems with development led by The Document Foundation—is gaining new backing today with the launch of commercial support from Collabora Productivity. SUSE Linux has been one of the key contributors to LibreOffice since its inception in September 2010. LibreOffice got its start as […]

The fourth major milestone release in 2013 of the open-source Linux kernel is now out, providing users with improved performance and new capabilities, including support for the Lustre filesystem. Among the big new items included in the Linux 3.11 kernel is the initial support for the Lustre filesystem. Lustre is a widely deployed high-performance computing […]

Thanks to support vendor Emerge Open, the Kubuntu Linux distribution now has its own commercial support for those users and enterprises that need or want it. Kubuntu is the KDE desktop version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution that is commercially supported by Canonical. The primary Ubuntu Linux distribution is based on the GNOME Linux desktop. […]

Apache Software Foundation: 10 Projects That Are Making a Difference by Sean Michael Kerner Apache HTTP Continues to Dominate the Web Apache’s claim to fame has long been that it is the No. 1 HTTP Web server. As of August 2013, Apache HTTP powers 46.96 percent of the Web. A Simple Configuration File Is at […]

The open-source Python programming language has continued to steadily improve its code quality in recent years and now surpasses that of its open-source and proprietary peers, according to a study published by development testing vendor Coverity. “The Coverity platform is part of the Python build system,” Zack Samocha, senior director of product management at Coverity, […]

Tech vendors live and die, not on the strength of their technologies alone, but rather on the strength of their loyal user bases. Helping to lead the charge for virtualization vendor VMware is the independent VMware User Group (VMUG) with more than 80,000 members. VMUG had a strong presence at the VMworld event this week […]

In the world of computer security hackers, few are as well-known as Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick’s activities in the mid-1990s led to his arrest by the FBI and subsequent imprisonment. Today he works as a security consultant with his own firm, Mitnick Security Consulting. In a video interview with eWEEK, Mitnick discusses what his firm does […]