Sean Michael Kerner

About

Sean Michael Kerner is an Internet consultant, strategist, and writer for several leading IT business web sites.

Open-Source PHP Gets Updates for Stability, Security

The open-source PHP language is one of the most widely deployed technologies on the Web today, powering millions of Websites (including eWEEK). This past week, two important updates were issued for PHP, providing both security and bug fixes. Like many things in the open-source world (and technology in general), there isn’t just one version of […]

Inside the Syrian Electronic Army Washington Post Attack

The Washington Post reported Thursday, Aug. 15 that it had been the victim of an attack by a group known as the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). The intrusion involved both a phishing attack against a staff writer’s Twitter account as well as some Washington Post page redirections by way of an exploit of the Outbrain […]

Hybrid Cloud Approach Preferred in the Enterprise: Rackspace

The concept of the cloud was born with Amazon’s public cloud, though a new study shows that enterprises in both the U.S. and the U.K. increasingly are interested in a hybrid cloud approach, melding both private and public components. Sixty percent of respondents see a hybrid cloud solution as the right approach for cloud deployment, […]

VMware’s Love-Hate Relationship With OpenStack

VMware, perhaps more-so than any other vendor on the planet, is responsible for helping enterprises move to more agile and efficient virtualized server infrastructure. Simply put, VMware is the vendor to beat in the enterprise virtualized server space. When it comes to the cloud though, VMware’s dominance is not a foregone conclusion, with Amazon and […]

Linux Users Have Luxury of Choosing From Diverse Desktop Options

Linux Users Have Luxury of Choosing from Diverse Desktop Options By Sean Michael Kerner GNOME Shell Runs on Multiple Linux Distributions The GNOME 3 project has multiple desktop environment options, with the cornerstone default option being the GNOME Shell. GNOME Shell runs on multiple Linux distributions, including Fedora 19 (shown here), and provides an Activities […]

PCI-DSS 3.0 Security Compliance Gets Stronger

For anyone taking electronic payments, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) is a critical must-have compliance component in order to do business. Currently the standard is at the PCI-DSS 2.0 level. The new 3.0 standard is now in development, bringing with it policy and procedural changes that will impact the security of the […]

Was ‘The New York Times’ Hacked?

On the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 14, my Twitter feed was overflowing with people noting that the venerable Gray Lady, The New York Times, was offline. Within minutes, the rampant speculation was that The Times had been hacked, which in my initial opinion, wasn’t all that far-fetched. After all, The Times itself admitted in January, […]

Where Is Linux Used in the Enterprise?

The open-source Linux operating system is widely deployed across modern enterprises, and a new study sponsored by enterprise vendor SUSE Linux aims to reveal precisely what workloads Linux is running. The SUSE study asked 167 IT professionals about their usage of Linux in general. Across the survey base, 83 percent indicated that they currently have […]

Open-Source Adobe Brackets Web Development Comes to Linux

When it comes to Web development, Adobe’s Dreamweaver (originally from Macromedia) is a well-known and widely deployed tool. Like most of Adobe’s commercial tools, it doesn’t run on Linux. While historically Adobe’s tools haven’t been widely available for Linux users, a new era seems to be starting. Adobe is now building out a number of […]

Scroogled Redux: Google, Gmail, Privacy and You

Tens of millions of users around the world rely on Google’s Gmail service as their email provider, but a recent legal filing from the search giant just might be enough to sway a few of them to choose a different solution. Google is currently going through the motions in the judicial system to defend itself […]