Cody Taylor

Facebook contacted Stephanie and agreed to take down the facebook page of her dead brother, an award-winning investigative journalist and Nazi hunter. “Thank you again, Ben,” she wrote. “My family has no words that truly express how we feel.”

Software giant sends a letter to some of the 1,400 employees it laid off last month letting them know they were overcompensated and that it would like the money back. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Microsoft.

A picture will always be worth a thousand words. The good news is that in the open source world, there are many excellent, free graphics and animation tools, plus free resources for getting started with them right away.

Microsoft has announced that it will be opening its own retail stores, a la the Apple Store. eWEEK imagines what you may find when you walk through the doors. Slideshow.

Barence writes “Adobe claims that its Flash platform reaches ‘99% of internet viewers,’ but a closer look at those statistics suggests it’s not exactly all-encompassing. Adobe puts Flash player penetration at 947 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices, but the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago. What’s more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people — around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jonniee writes “D is a programming language created by Walter Bright of C++ fame. D’s focus is on combining the power and high performance of C/C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. And now he’s ported it to the Macintosh. Quoting: ‘[Building a runtime library] exposed a lot of conditional compilation issues that had no case for OSX. I found that Linux has a bunch of API functions that are missing in OSX, like getline and getdelim, so some of the library functionality had to revert to more generic code for OSX. I had to be careful, because although many system macros had the same functionality and spelling, they had different expansions. Getting these wrong would cause some mysterious behavior, indeed.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DesScorp writes “The AP reports that the Obama administration has picked up where the Bush administration left off on the missing White House email issue by trying to have a lawsuit dismissed that would have kept investigating whether or not email was still missing. Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President expressed disappointment with the Obama administration’s actions. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government. The Justice Department ‘apparently never got the message’ from Obama, Blanton said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

McGruber writes “Northrup-Grumman’s Govtrip.com website has been shut down following a security breach, according to a report by ‘Security Fix’ blogger Brian Krebs. Being a federal employee and frequent work traveler, I am (was?) a Govtrip user. My agency required me to use Govtrip to book all of my trips, including my airfare, car rentals, and hotel reservations, so Northrup-Grumman’s Govtrip databases contain my frequent flier numbers, Avis & Budget car rental numbers and frequent hotel guest (Choice Privileges, Marriott Rewards, Priority Club, etc.) numbers. Northrup-Grumman also stored all of my trip itineraries, including destinations, dates & modes of travel and the particular vendors (airline, hotel, rental car brand, etc.) used on a particular trip. Also stored on the website were my work travel credit-card (it has a ,000 charge limit), personal checking account where my travel reimbursements were deposited, my home address, and emergency contacts … just imagine what an accomplished social engineer can do with that combination of information!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.