Cody Taylor

nk497 writes “The UK justice secretary Jack Straw has been criticised for using Hotmail as his official government email account after he apparently fell foul of a Nigerian spammer in a phishing attack. A security researcher said using such an account not only left the government in security trouble, but meant any emails sent could not be necessarily accessed via the Freedom of Information Act.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dazedNconfuzed writes “Whatever happened to the 19th IOCCC? The opening thereof was announced over two years ago and the winners’ names were posted, but the source code was never released — leaving the results of the 2006 contest unknown as we get well into 2009. Emails to questions@ioccc.org just bounce. Surely the quiet absence of a high point of geekdom becomes news at some point!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of Gmail users were faced with blank screens for two hours this morning, after a widespread outage of the webmail service.

With so many people losing their jobs the farewell email, letting colleagues and contacts know where you are moving and how you can be reached, has become common. Writing a really good one, whether it be funny, sad or just plain mad is an art form. Chris Kula a receptionist at a New York engineering firm, wrote: “For nearly as long as I’ve worked here, I’ve hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support.” In May, lawyer Shinyung Oh was let go from the San Francisco branch of the Paul Hastings law firm six days after losing a baby. “If this response seems particularly emotional,” she wrote to the partners, “perhaps an associate ‘s emotional vulnerability after a recent miscarriage is a factor you should consider the next time you fire or lay someone off. It shows startlingly poor judgment and management skills — and cowardice — on your parts.” Lets hear the best and worst goodbye emails you’ve seen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

lou ibmix XI submitted an email written by Bill Gates a few years ago and turned over to the feds as part of the government anti trust case. Great quotes like ‘Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?’ and ‘The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.’ We like to think of him as an abstract, but I think this is interesting stuff.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.