Cody Taylor

Last month the pooch underwent surgery to remove 15 pacifiers, a bottle cap and a piece of a basketball from its stomach. Apparently Lulu’s owner, Jennifer Zwart of suburban Warson Woods, thought her child’s missing pacifiers dropped from the stroller during walks or disappeared under the couch.

The Mac clone maker being sued by Apple Inc. because it installs Mac OS X on generic Intel-based systems said it bought copies of the operating system from Apple which can’t tell it what to do with legit copies, court documents show

rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) “So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. … There was one further step that we were going to take but didn’t end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. … It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode and, in turn, destroy much of its fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said Tuesday.

When reports of security issues in Apple’s Safari browser come over the transom, they get our attention. When they’re exploitable in both the Mac and Windows versions of Safari, they get our full and undivided attention. When the person reporting them is Brian Mastenbrook (credited with discovering multiple previous vulnerabilities in Mac OS X)…

theodp writes “PC Magazine’s John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II.” On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at IBM have built a microscope that they say has 100 million times the display resolution of MRI machines used in hospitals. The new microscope is designed to study complex 3-D structures at the atomic level. Scientists say they’re hoping the microscope could help researchers who are investigating diseases and creating new medications.

A comprehensive survey of the drinking water for more than 28 million Americans has detected the widespread but low-level presence of pharmaceuticals and hormonally active chemicals.