For everything from family to computers…
Cancer researchers have found that certain types of dental X-rays significantly increased the incidence of the most common type of brain tumor in the United States: meningioma. More »
from Gizmodo
Dr. Mac is the security firm that discovered last week’s all-Mac botnet, something that is pretty unprecedented for the operating system. After sending Apple the findings of their research, Dr. Mac heard nothing. And while it technically has yet to acknowledge Dr. Mac at all, the fact that Apple attempted to nix the group’s monitoring servers shut down suggests it’s very aware of the situation. More »
from Gizmodo
Variations of the Flashback trojan have reportedly infected more than half a million Macs around the globe, according to Russian antivirus company Dr. Web. The company made an announcement on Wednesday—first in Russian and later in English—about the growing Mac botnet, first claiming 550,000 infected Macs. Later in the day, however, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan posted to Twitter that the count had gone up to 600,000, with 274 bots even checking in from Cupertino, CA, where Apple’s headquarters are located.
We have been covering the Mac Flashback trojan since 2011, but the most recent variant from earlier this week targeted an unpatched Java vulnerability within Mac OS X. That is, it was unpatched (at the time) by Apple—Oracle had released a fix for the vulnerability in February of this year, but Apple didn’t send out a fix until earlier this week, after news began to spread about the latest Flashback variant.
from Ars Technica
Booooo!!!
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Modern food packaging has transformed our diets for the better in many ways—fresh-tasting canned tomatoes in January and low rates of food-borne disease are not to be scoffed at. But increasing scrutiny of the materials in the cans, bottles, and vacuum packs you bring back from the store have raised fears that certain chemicals—notably, those like bisphenol A (BPA) that can mimic hormones such as estrogen—may be prompting early puberty in children, among other health problems. Last year, the National Resource Defense Council sued the FDA demanding that the agency respond to a petition to ban BPA in food packaging. Yesterday, the FDA announced that it would not be banning BPA, saying that the science linking the chemical to health risks is not yet convincing. But some companies, responding to consumer desires, are already moving to remove it from their packaging.
Studies have found that there are low levels of BPA present in many people’s urine, but what’s still under discussion is whether the amounts we pick up can do anything to us, and even if it does little to adults, whether there are any stages of development—infancy, say—when BPA exposure might be …
from Discover Magazine
“All across the country, gas companies are poisoning water, tearing apart communities and destroying the American dream for thousands of families who can’t protect their children from what comes out of the tap.”
