John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded"–programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.

I don’t know exactly how it is that I missed this, or how someone didn’t tell me, but IBM on Thursday launched a public beta of its Lotus Notes and Domino 8 email and collaboration software. The public beta is designed to offer such features as a choice in office productivity tools and the ability to group related email messages together based on conversation threads, under Lotus Notes 8.

IBM expects its Lotus Notes and Domino 8 program to be available in the middle of this year.

After testing at IBM facilities, the InBoxer Anti-Risk Appliance, a leading product for email archiving, compliance, and the electronic discovery requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, has been validated by IBM as meeting compatibility and integration specifications for IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Domino software. InBoxer archives email and finds potential violations of a broad range of compliance issues, including Sarbanes-Oxley, hostile work environment (harassment), privacy, identity theft laws, HIPAA violations, and more.

IBM and Cisco Systems announced a new one-stop service designed to help businesses and government agencies respond to and recover from disasters.

The new managed service, available in early April, is aimed at emergency responders, other government agencies, and large businesses in the energy, financial services and other fields, IBM said. The two companies announced the new service at the FOSE IT-in-government trade show in Washington, D.C.

Uh-oh, Sales has lost a laptop. The nightmare that ensues brings a host of uncertainties: Exactly what data was on that thing? How do you define nonpublic, private or confidential information? What constitutes a breach or a mass data compromise? What are your obligations to protect that data, and what are your organization’s obligations regarding notifying the potential victims of identity theft?

These are just some of the questions you should answer before the laptop is lost, the BlackBerry is stolen or the database is hacked, said Mark Everist, a director of audit for American Express, during a session titled "Ensuring Customer Notification of Unauthorized Access" at the InfoSec World Conference & Expo.

Leading up to Sapphire, its big annual user conference in Atlanta next month, SAP announced the April availability of more than a dozen standards designed to help both IT and business process experts wrangle the practice of designing and executing business processes.

At the same time, the company announced a new preconfigured support package to help companies navigate complex IT upgrades and system consolidations.

Both offerings are available as part of SAP’s Solution Manager application management suite that acts as a collaboration hub of sorts, providing functional support to users through role-specific work centers where workflows, Web-based inboxes and launch pads are bundled.

Black Duck Software, maker of software compliance management solutions, has announced protexIP 4.3, the newest version of the company’s platform that will help ensure that software code is in compliance with the new version of the General Public License, Version 3, to be made final this year.

U.S. networks pumped out the highest percentage of attacks during the second half of last year, with China running a distant second, according to a report released by Symantec.

The U.S. accounted for 31 percent of malicious activity originating from computer networks, while 10 percent came from China and 7 percent from Germany, Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.

Symantec started sending out pink slips to employees across the company as part of a cost reduction effort.

The security and database management software maker in January set a goal to reduce its cost structure by $200 million. As part of that, an unspecified number of employees are now being let go.

Adobe Systems has announced the first public alpha release of Apollo, its cross-operating system run-time for Web developers.

Apollo is the code name for Adobe’s development system that enables Web developers to leverage their existing skills in Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex, as well as HTML, JavaScript and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), to build and deploy RIAs (rich Internet applications) on the desktop.