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RetroOct 29

The Coding Placeholder 'Foo' Started in a 1930s Fireman Comic Before MIT's Model Railroad Club Adopted It

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A 1928 Punch-Card Patent Switched From Round Holes to Oblong Ones So Closely Spaced Columns Wouldn't Tear
Causal Security's AI agent Cipher found four serious bugs in EPICS, the control software behind particle accelerators and ITER's fusion project, in 3 hours 49 minutes
Apple's M6 iMac Moves to 2.5Gb Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7, and the Cheapest Model Now Starts at $1,499
Apple Made Lisa Programmers Report Weekly Lines of Code, So Bill Atkinson Made QuickDraw Six Times Faster and Wrote -2000
A Botched Server Patch Stopped a University's Email at About 500 Miles, and the Speed of Light Set the Limit

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Patch this today

GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Editionflaw under attack · added Oct 29, 2026
Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Software and Cisco Secure FTD Softwareflaw under attack · added Oct 29, 2026
Broadcom VMware ESXflaw under attack · added Oct 28, 2026
Linux Kernelflaw under attack · added Oct 28, 2026
Adobe Commerce and Magentoflaw under attack · added Oct 27, 2026

End of support

Microsoft Windows 11 23H2 (E)days left · ends Nov 10, 2026
PostgreSQL 14days left · ends Nov 12, 2026
PHP 8.2days left · ends Dec 31, 2026
Windows Server 2016 (LTSC)days left · ends Jan 12, 2027
Kubernetes 1.35days left · ends Feb 28, 2027

This day in tech history

1878 Willgodt Odhner patents his pinwheel calculator

Related to the top story

Linux Was Almost Named Freax Until the FTP Admin Who Hosted It Named the Folder Linux
Sudo Began on a VAX at SUNY Buffalo Around 1980 and Passed Through Several Teams Before Todd Miller Took It Public in 1994
Wi-Fi Stands for Nothing: 'Wireless Fidelity' Was a Tagline Its Own Founder Calls a Mistake, and the Name Nearly Lost to Trapeze
Nintendo's 1985 NES Test-Market Warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, Is Still Standing, and Three NES Historians Found It
Creeper, the 'First Computer Virus,' Was a Worm, and Reaper, the Program Built to Kill It, Was a Worm Too

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Tiny Computers folds the iPhone Duo into a pocket 1984 Macintosh, Commodore 64 or Windows 95 laptop, keyboard and all
Triage only sends you the bug reports that crash again on a clean machine
ZacOS 9 redraws the whole Mac OS 9 desktop for Debian Linux, with a SheepShaver for the real classic apps
Apple Music's 404 Page Hides a Working iPod, Down to the 5-Second Hold That Unlocks Brick
AI data centers now need their own special gray paint

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