Articles by Jack M. Germain

It could only be a matter of time before someone found a formula for taking the immediacy of YouTube and the entrepreneurship of eBay and wrapping them around an original Internet mainstay -- the conversation of the Bulletin Board System (BBS). That time has arrived with the debut of BigThink.com BigThink, the brainchild of cofounder Peter Hopkins,...

Kace announced Monday what it called the first virtual systems management appliances to run natively within the VMware infrastructure The Virtual Kbox appliances offer users a software product that runs on the user's existing computer hardware. Earlier versions of the Kbox appliance required the installation of separate hardware to deploy and manag...

PostPath on Wednesday announced the release of PostPath Email Server 3.1, which offers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) an alternative to Microsoft Exchange Email Server 3.1 is interoperable with the Exchange ecosystem as well as BlackBerry and ActiveSync devices. PostPath's e-mail and collaboration server provides enterprises an alternativ...

In January, network security tools startup Packet Analytics launched Net/FSE, or Network Forensic Search Engine. Net/FSE is the first commercial search engine for enterprise network data to focus on security incident response by harnessing the analysis of NetFlow data. It is designed to exploit the forensic potential of NetFlow data to dig deep into network alerts...

In order to turn bigger profits from their armies of compromised computers, hackers this year will use a new tactic in targeting master boot records with viruses that plant rootkits on computers' hard drives, security experts warn. These infections activate during the boot sequence before the operating system starts The MX Logic Threat Center has i...

The 2008 presidential primaries capture the lion's share of election season media exposure, but an equally critical campaign is running quietly in the background The controversial decision to implement various types of electronic voting machines in place of paper ballots is garnering little public attention, while many states hastily implement flaw...

Managers of enterprise networks are becoming more aware of the importance of IT risk management issues even though they still cling to four so-called myths that give a false sense of security, according to Symantec The security vendor on Wednesday released its IT Risk Management Report Volume II, which looks beyond last year's study of how the IT i...

Black Duck Software announced today the availability of Black Duck Code Center software to help manufacturers accelerate software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code. Code Center manages software component selection, project approval and license tracking designed to maximize benefits to organizations from their reuse of open source and other third-party software components...

HP announced Thursday a three-part software governance initiative to help companies address the legal, financial and security demands associated with using free and open source software (FOSS) The company is donating its intellectual property for monitoring open source products to a new open source community. It is also founding a new organization ...

McAfee announced Monday a security suite that provides enterprise users with host data loss prevention, device management and endpoint encryption to ensure compliance and limit exposure to fines McAfee Total Protection for Data, a solution for data loss and data leakage protection, has full visibility and control of confidential data with scalabili...

The growth of e-commerce and the continuing expansion of outsourcing and the remote workforce are fueling a new approach to paying for services. Internet-focused companies are replacing traditional online payment transactions with prepaid debit cards Payoneer is a startup firm that is pushing this concept of prepaid debit cards to leverage more Web...

Many companies are running software on their Web servers that contains open source code with known vulnerabilities, a security firm has found Software risk management solutions firm Palamida has expanded its Vulnerability Reporting Solution detection capabilities to include 431 open source security alerts. The alerts include 148 that are considered...

The career path to the software industry used to be cut and dry. Coders had a choice of either developing projects as part of a remotely dispersed community or punching a clock as a slave to a commercial software house. The former usually meant being considered a player in the software bush league. The latter meant a promotion to the industry's majors...

OpenLogic, a provider of open source packages, has begun the task of quantifying the extent of open source code used on enterprise computers. The company will roll out its global Open Source Census in several phases over the next six months In early December, OpenLogic announced the first phase with the release of OSS Discovery under an open source...

Certifying Linux technicians is a developing trend. The Linux OS is growing up. This is pushing many computer engineers and IT professionals to prove their skills as programmers and systems administrators While not quite a common job requirement yet, some employers and high-level software developers are looking for Linux-certified employees. This i...

"Web 2.0" was one of the computing industry's biggest catch phrases of 2007. Much like a software upgrade, Web 2.0 brings to mind images of bug fixes and new features. In reality, however, Web 2.0 is nothing more than a new round of Internet functionality bolted onto a very tired and old World Wide Web infrastructure The rise of Web 2.0 technologie...

Shakespeare wrote that a rose called by any other name would still smell as sweet. Proponents of open source software and standardizing document formats might wonder whether the same sentiments apply to the poetry between the OpenDocument Format, or ODF, and the Compound Document Format, or CDF The Organization for the Advancement of Structured In...

For a computer addict, choosing a Linux distribution is much like being an unsupervised child in a candy store. So many flavors with so many choices make the task of picking just one type of candy a near-impossible -- but fun-filled -- task For a consumer or business exec who must pick a Linux distribution (known as "distro"), the task is even more...

Web 2.0 applications are quickly taking over traditional activities on the Internet. Web sites are becoming interactive as they offer multiple function applications. This, in turn, is creating greater security risks for both consumers and network operators One of the biggest concerns is the need for Web 2.0 developers to build their applications wi...

Running Microsoft Windows or Apple's Mac OS X gives users about the same amount of flexibility as was offered to early car buyers. They could drive any kind of car they wanted, as long as it was a Model T and as long as it was black When the free open source Linux OS first showed up, early developers offered much the same set of options. Today, how...