ReadWriteEnterprise

The site that hosts the Linux kernel's source code, Kernel.org was compromised earlier this month. The discovery was made on August 28th, and steps are being taken now to enhance security for the site and recovery is underway. The kernel code repositories are believed to be unaffected.

According to an unattributed post on the front page of Kernel.org, intruders managed to gain access via a compromised user credential. It's currently unknown how the attacker managed to escalate to root access.

It may seem less of a shock to those who experience history as a constant, flowing stream, who perceive events as progressions rather than snapshots, who remember the recent, and then the distant, past by rewinding their memories past last week, last year, the year before, to eventually arrive at a different era. For anyone else who can instantly recall the power newspapers once held, walking out on your porch for your daily bottles of milk, and how refreshing a cold bottle of Coke could be on a sweaty summer Saturday, this photograph is like being flung mercilessly into a Ray Bradbury novel.

The smart folks at Zurb have come up with yet another clever app, this time for testing presentations called Reel. Like their other tools, it is free, it is all Web-based, and it involves a quick way to collect up/down votes. Think of it as Prezi with "likes" added.

If you want something more capable than Hootsuite to handle your social media marketing, then you might want to take a closer look at what Pardot's Marketing Automation service provides. The marketing automation platform has gotten some new social media features that complement its existing tools for handling CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting.

Anyone who runs an online site knows that comment spam is a continuing battle. And as the accompanying infographic shows, prepared by social spam fighter Impermium, it is a big problem. They took samples of the social Web this summer, looking at more than 100 million different pieces of user-generated content around the world from various Web sites and comment streams. They found that on some sites as many as 40% of the registered accounts were spammers. One site saw more than 30,000 fraudulent new accounts created in an hour, with a combined posting of 475,000 garbage messages. The boot maker Uggs was the most exploited brand by a factor of two over others, and fashion even beat out porn in spam postings. That is saying something.

This week SplashData will announce the launch of SplashID Enterprise 2.0, featuring updated Windows and Mac OS clients, new mobile apps and a Web-based application for better ID management. They have also integrated the service into Microsoft's Active Directory and now offer a free 30-day trial for unlimited users, and $5 per user per month afterwards.

They are the latest in a long line of password management tools that bridge the gap between traditional packaged software and cloud apps that are designed to be deployed across the enterprise.

Cisco announced today that collaboration tools vendor Versly.com is now part of its ever-growing family. Versly hasn't yet had a real product, but you can apply for a chance to be in its closed beta on their site.

Versly's ten employees will be integrated into Cisco Collaboration Software Group that also includes its WebEx, Jabber and Quad product lines. It will be offered as a separate service, but Cisco will eventually integrate its features into these three existing services designed for enterprise customers, perhaps as early as 2012. So comment streams, detecting whether someone is actually inside a document at any given moment, and jointly editing documents will all be parts of Cisco's collaboration tools eventually.

Last year, financial analysts took note of the steepening share decline by SAP in the CRM software market, with the other three major players - Salesforce.com, Siebel (Oracle), and Microsoft Dynamics - reaping the benefits. This week's buzz around the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco (which formally gets under way tomorrow) lends credence to the observation that SAP is no longer the acknowledged market leader, at least among hearts and minds.

One way Microsoft has always competed with hearts and minds when it really needs to is with dollars. This morning, in advance of its competitor's big show, Microsoft announced a rich set of $150 per-seat rebates on new client access licenses (CALs) purchased directly from Microsoft.

An article by Derek Singleton on the blog for Software Advice talks about five things that he sees makes SaaS unique, including the talent draw of cloud companies, the ability to scale up operations more smoothly, the way cloud software is being purchased and consumed and other reasons.

While Singleton makes a lot of sense - and I do like the folks on Software Advice and think they are generally smart guys - he is missing a few major drawbacks with SaaS that are holding things back for better enterprise adoption.

You probably don't know that IBM sells a social media and community building tool that competes with Socialtext and Jive and combines wikis, social streams, discussion forums and integrates with IBM's Sametime for presence/IM communications. It is called Connections and today IBM announced that mobile versions of Connections are free to download. This is a good thing, because their pricing was driving me batty. The software that has more options than your father's Oldsmobile, and trying to find the right place to learn about it on IBM's Web site isn't easy either. (Try starting here.)