"Arm has announced its first 64 bit, Linux-capable Cortex-R processor, designed for computational storage solutions," reports Electronics Weekly. SiliconAngle calls it "a chip designed to enable a new generation of storage devices that will not only hold data but also help process it." Such devices are part of an emerging hardware category known as computational storage. The technology promises to provide a speed boost for latency-sensitive workloads such as machine learning and real-time analytics applications. Normally, the task of storing data and processing it is relegated to separate components inside a system. The disk or flash drive holds onto the information while a separate processor does the processing. Data has to travel from the storage drive to the processor and back every time an operation is carried out, which creates delays that can slow down performance. The emerging computational storage devices Arm targets attempt to do away with these delays to speed up applications. Instead of sending information to a separate chip for processing, the storage drive processes it locally using its built-in controller. A controller is a tiny computing module inside flash and disk drives that normally performs only low-level tasks such as writing and reading data. Arm's new Cortex-R82 is designed to serve as the controller for computational storage devices. It's available as a chip design that hardware makers can license and customize based on their needs. "The extra computing power allows the chip to run a full Linux distribution as well as applications, all directly inside a storage drive."

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Object-oriented programming "has been wildly successful. But was the success just a coincidence?" asks Stack Overflow's blog: Asking why so many widely-used languages are OOP might be mixing up cause and effect. Richard Feldman argues in his talk that it might just be coincidence. C++ was developed in the early 1980s by Bjarne Stroustrup, initially as a set of extensions to the C programming language. Building on C , C++ added object orientation but Feldman argues it became popular for the overall upgrade from C including type-safety and added support for automatic resource management, generic programming, and exception handling, among other features. Then Java wanted to appeal to C++ programmers and doubled down on the OOP part. Ultimately, Sun Microsystems wanted to repeat the C++ trick by aiming for greatest familiarity for developers adopting Java. Millions of developers quickly moved to Java due to its exclusive integration in web browsers at the time. Seen this way, OOP seems to just be hitching a ride, rather than driving the success. While acknowledging OOP cornerstones like encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, the article still takes a skeptical stance. "Seems like in 2020, there is not so much that OOP can do that other programming paradigms cannot, and a good programmer will use strategies from multiple paradigms together in the battle against complexity."

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sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: About 3000 years ago, thousands of warriors fought on the banks of the Tollense river in northern Germany. They wielded weapons of wood, stone, and bronze to deadly effect: Over the past decade, archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of hundreds of people buried in marshy soil. It's one of the largest prehistoric conflicts ever discovered. Now, genetic testing of the skeletons reveals the homelands of the warriors—and unearths a shocker about early European diets: These soldiers couldn't digest fresh milk... The results leave scientists more puzzled than ever about exactly when and why Europeans began to drink milk. "Natural genetic drift can't explain it, and there's no evidence that it was population turnover either," says Christina Warinner, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was not involved with the study. "It's almost embarrassing that this is the strongest example of selection we have and we can't really explain it." Perhaps something about fresh milk helped people ward off disease in the increasingly crowded and pathogen-ridden European towns and villages of the Iron Age and Roman period, says the study's co-author. But he admits he's baffled too. "We have to find a reason why you need this drink."

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This week saw the release of the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results: 2,049 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2020. Some of these questions have been asked since our original survey over a decade ago, and show how the community has evolved over the last twelve years. Inside.com's developer newsletter summarized some of the results: - The typical Rails developer is self-taught, has been working with Rails 4-7 years, and works remotely... - Rails developers overwhelmingly choose lightweight solutions like jQuery over larger frameworks. - Most of the developers surveyed feel Rails is still relevant, although they were split on whether or not the Rails core team is moving in the right direction, with 48% totally agreeing with that sentiment. According to the results, 24% of survey respondents primarily developing on Linux, while 73% used Mac OS X (leaving just 3% using Windows or "Other"). Yet the most popular editor was Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (used by 32% of respondents), followed by Vim-based editors (21%), Sublime (16%), RubyMine (15%), Atom (9%), Emacs (3%), and TextMate (2%). The survey also asked the size of development teams for "your primary Rails application." A team of one - 17%Two to four - 35%Five to eight - 19%Eight to 15 - 13%16 to 25 - 6%25-50 - 5% 50-plus - 5% Meanwhile, in a recent talk, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto confirmed that Ruby 3 will finally be released this Christmas, December 25, bringing a new pattern-matching syntax, right-hand-side variable assignment, and numbered block parameters. He also promised improvements to help make Ruby more fast, more concurrent, and more correct. (Though "We don't pursue completeness nor soundness of the type systems, because, you know, Ruby is Ruby. Ruby is basically dynamically typed...")

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Jaron Lanier helped design "Together" mode for Microsoft Teams, "where he has a post as an in-house seer of sorts," according to a recent profile in GQ. ("Initially he'd conceived of Together mode as a way to help Stephen Colbert — in whose house band Lanier sometimes performs when he's in New York — figure out how to host his show in front of a remote audience...") But Lanier also "might be the last moral man in Silicon Valley," they write, delving into both his support for universal basic income and his harsh view of social media, which they summarize succinctly: "in exchange for likes and retweets and public photos of your kids, you are basically signing up to be a data serf for companies that can make money only by addicting and then manipulating you." But GQ also writes that Lanier now sees some signs of hope, describing his current work as "to not fuck the future over, you know?" He said he noticed a change in how Facebook was both thought of and written about. Take the congressional hearings that were held in July with Mark Zuckerberg and other big tech leaders. "What struck me," Lanier later told me, "was how alone the four CEOs were — no friends or allies anywhere in politics or society. They've creeped everyone out with their opaque form of influence. Even Big Tobacco had friends...." I asked him: Had he noticed a change in his own relationship to technology since the pandemic started? He said that he had. "I think people are spending more time in a self-directed way by connecting with others on video chat or things like that than they are passively receiving a feed," he said. "And so I actually think things have gotten a little better." The fact that people were using computers not to pass time in algorithm-driven loops but to talk to one another, and then perhaps go outside, was a source of optimism for him. Lanier says he also feels that by provoking real and meaningful questions, some social movements are "reintroducing us to reality..." Technology was doing, as it did every once in a while, what Lanier wanted it to do: giving people a chance to be better, to know more, to lead more informed and compassionate lives... So what about the future? I asked. The thing I'd come to talk about. Was the future going to be okay? Lanier, in effect, said: Maybe... Every day Google and Facebook and other tech companies become more powerful and sophisticated by analyzing you and your choices... They don't even really acknowledge that you are contributing, as if artificial intelligence came from nowhere, instead of from data derived from you and me. "In the information age," Lanier said, "we're all workers and consumers and entrepreneurs at the same time." What if, Lanier suggested, we got paid for our labor in this system? By recognizing the roles we play in building the future, Lanier said, we might give ourselves a chance to be meaningful participants in it. "When a person is empowered to make a difference, they become more of a full person," he said. "They awaken spiritually." That would be the best case. All of us building the robot future together, and being compensated for our time and our work while doing it. And...the worst case? I asked. "Facebook might have won already, which would mean the end of democracy in this century," Lanier said. "It's possible that we can't quite get out of this system of paranoia and tribalism for profit — it's just too powerful and it'll tear everything apart, leaving us with a world of oligarchs and autocrats who aren't able to deal with real problems like pandemics and climate change and whatnot and that we fall apart, you know, we lose it. That is a real possibility for this century. I'm not saying I think it's what'll happen, but I wouldn't count it out. There's evidence every single day that it's what's happening...." [D]isinformation goes from Twitter to Fox to the social media feeds of the president, and the cycle begins anew. Look at how powerful these platforms could be, to the point where "the sway of media is more powerful than the experience of reality — that people can be watching hundreds of thousands die from this virus and yet believe it's a hoax at the same time, and integrate those two things. That's the food for evil," Lanier said... But then, here the two of us were. Him in Berkeley, me in Los Angeles, but still somehow together. A modern miracle most modern people have learned to sneer at. Not Lanier, who still sees the wonder, and the potential, of these stupid fucking screens, no matter what.

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"A few years ago, a hacker managed to exploit vulnerabilities in Tesla's servers to gain access and control over the automaker's entire fleet," remembers Electrek (in a story shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo). Tesla enthusiast Jason Hughes had already received a $5,000 bug bounty for reporting a vulnerability, but "knowing that their network wasn't the most secure, to say the least, he decided to go hunting for more bug bounties." After some poking around, he managed to find a bunch of small vulnerabilities. The hacker told Electrek, "I realized a few of these things could be chained together, the official term is a bug chain, to gain more access to other things on their network. Eventually, I managed to access a sort of repository of server images on their network, one of which was 'Mothership'." Mothership is the name of Tesla's home server used to communicate with its customer fleet. Any kind of remote commands or diagnostic information from the car to Tesla goes through "Mothership." After downloading and dissecting the data found in the repository, Hughes started using his car's VPN connection to poke at Mothership. He eventually landed on a developer network connection. That's when he found a bug in Mothership itself that enabled him to authenticate as if it was coming from any car in Tesla's fleet. All he needed was a vehicle's VIN number, and he had access to all of those through Tesla's "tesladex" database thanks to his complete control of Mothership, and he could get information about any car in the fleet and even send commands to those cars. Last week Hughes released an annotated version of the bug report he'd submitted to Tesla. "Hughes couldn't really send Tesla cars driving around everywhere..." reports Electrek, "but he could 'Summon' them..." Telsa gave him a special $50,000 bug report reward — several times higher than their usual maximum — and "used the information provided by Hughes to secure its network." Electrek calls it "a good example of the importance of whitehat hackers."

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An anonymous reader shares a fascinating true-crime story from Pittsburgh. Smithsonian magazine reports: Like nuclear power plants and sensitive computer networks, the safest rare book collections are protected by what is known as "defense in depth" — a series of small, overlapping measures designed to thwart a thief who might be able to overcome a single deterrent. The Oliver Room, home to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's rare books and archives, was something close to the platonic ideal of this concept. Greg Priore, manager of the room starting in 1992, designed it that way. The room has a single point of entry, and only a few people had keys to it. When anyone, employee or patron, entered the collection, Priore wanted to know. The room had limited daytime hours, and all guests were required to sign in and leave personal items, like jackets and bags, in a locker outside. Activity in the room was under constant camera surveillance. In addition, the Oliver Room had Priore himself. His desk sat at a spot that commanded the room and the table where patrons worked. When a patron returned a book, he checked that it was still intact. Security for special collections simply does not get much better than that of the Oliver Room. In the spring of 2017, then, the library's administration was surprised to find out that many of the room's holdings were gone. It wasn't just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million... Perpetrating a daring 25-year heist, the thief "stole nearly everything of significant monetary value," the magazine reports. So who done it? Just about the only thing that keeps an insider from stealing from special collections is conscience. Security measures may thwart outside thieves, but if someone wants to steal from the collection he stewards, there is little to stop him. Getting books and maps and lithographs out the door is not much harder than simply taking them from the shelves... The perpetrator was ultimately sentenced to three years' house arrest and 12 years' probation, the article reports, while his fence received four years' house arrest and 12 years' probation. "After the sentences were made public, Carole Kamin, a member of the board of the Carnegie Natural History Museum, wrote to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that supporters of local nonprofits 'were appalled at the unbelievably light sentences.'"

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On the 25th anniversary of Java, Oracle's director of developer content released a list of the 25 greatest Java apps ever written. This week they shared the responses it got. "The U.S. National Security Agency was secretly pleased we noticed its Ghidra binary decompilation tool..." The tenor of conversation was both positive and polite. That speaks volumes about the excellent character of Java developers, don't you think? But, developers being who they are, opinions on what should have made the list abounded... Another Twitter commenter said I should have included Cassandra, the Spring Framework, Apache Spark, the Hazelcast open source in-memory data grid, and Apache Kafka.... - Reader Victor Duran suggested a Java app called Swish, which, he said, "made the entire Swedish economy go cashless." Swish handled 25 billion Swedish krona in May 2020; that's a little more than 2.8 billion US dollars. According to a company spokesperson, parts of the back end are written in Java. - There are many Java games to choose from, of course, but I was called out for not including Runescape and Old School Runescape, two popular Java-based applications that entertain millions to this day... - As a commenter pointed out, mobile apps for both WordPress and Telegram are written in Java — and Telegram's encrypted, self-destruct chat feature makes it one of the most popular apps in the world with more than 400 million active users.... - In the final category, several researchers at CERN pointed out that some Large Hadron Collider (LHC) software and other data analytics software are written in Java. That includes the LHC Logging Service, which captures and stores the LHC data. As you can see in this 2006 paper, the LHC Logging Service has been using Java for many years.

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NCamero (Slashdot reader #35,481) brings some news from the world of 12-sided dodecahedrons: Quanta magazine reports that a trio of mathematicians has resolved one of the most basic questions about the dodecahedron. The cube, tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron cannot have a straight path you could take [starting from a corner] that would eventually return you to your starting point without passing through any of the other corners. The dodecahedron can. Mathematicians studied dodecahedrons for over 2,000 years without solving the problem, reports Quanta magazine. But now... Jayadev Athreya, David Aulicino and Patrick Hooper have shown that an infinite number of such paths do in fact exist on the dodecahedron. Their paper, published in May in Experimental Mathematics, shows that these paths can be divided into 31 natural families. The solution required modern techniques and computer algorithms. "Twenty years ago, [this question] was absolutely out of reach; 10 years ago it would require an enormous effort of writing all necessary software, so only now all the factors came together," wrote Anton Zorich, of the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris, in an email.

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CBS Sports reports: Wednesday's game between the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays was stopped in the bottom of the first because of a "drone delay." After the second base umpire pointed to something in the sky and motioned for teams to leave the field, the cameras picked up an identifiable flying object hovering over the field during the game. CBS reports it's the third drone delay experienced by Major League Baseball this year: The first came in a Twins-Pirates game in early August, and the second happened just a week later in a game between the Red Sox and Rays... This move isn't just a hazard for those on the field, it's actually outright illegal. The Federal Aviation Administration's rules state that drones and other "unmanned aircraft systems" are prohibited from flying within a radius of three nautical miles of any MLB stadium starting one hour before a game's scheduled start and ending one hour after the game's end. This isn't just exclusive to baseball, as it also applies to NFL games, top-tier NCAA football games and auto racing events.

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Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: A drone over Tel Aviv's Rabin Square dropped hundreds of bags of weed on Thursday, setting off a mad scramble by onlookers to stock up, the Jerusalem Post reported. According to the Post, the giveaway was orchestrated by a Telegram group called Green Drone that advocates for the legalization of marijuana throughout Israel. (Medical marijuana is legal in Israel and a major export as of May; the Ministry of Security partially decriminalized recreational marijuana use in 2017 but full legalization efforts are still being negotiated.) The group told followers on Telegram that this was just the start of an ongoing "rain of cannabis...." The Times of Israel, however, reported that the weed-dropping drone might have had more to do with viral marketing than activism: the Green Drone channel is also a marijuana delivery service. The bags dropped also contained business cards with a contact number for potential customers... Police arrested two individuals on suspicion of having operated the drone.

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ZDNet reports: An anonymous reader shares this enthusiastic report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds approved of adding drivers and other components in Rust to Linux.* Last week, at the virtual Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. ["Nothing firm has been determined yet," reported Phoronix, "but it's a topic that is still being discussed."] And, now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its just-released Bottlerocket Linux for containers is largely written in Rust. Mozilla may have cut back on Rust's funding, but with Linux embracing Rust, after almost 30-years of nothing but C, Rust's future is assured. Rust was chosen because it lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS Product Manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar. Bottlerocket also improved its security by using Device-mapper's verity target. This is a Linux kernel feature that provides integrity checking to help prevent attackers from overwriting core system software or other rootkit type attacks. It also includes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), In Linux, eBPF is used for safe and efficient kernel function monitoring. * Linus's exact words were "people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day." The article also reminds readers that AWS's Bottlerocket "is also designed to be quick and easy to maintain... by including the bare essentials needed to run containers..." "Besides its standard open-source elements, such as the Linux kernel and containerd container runtime, Bottlerocket's own code is licensed under your choice of either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license."

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