I wrote this on Facebook earlier today.

After a week of using the new Facebook user interface — it’s awful. The first thing you want to do when you come to Facebook is find out what’s new, so you pull down the menu with all the new stuff in it. In the old version in that menu were links to all of the comments, posts, likes of people I follow. Perfect. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. In the new version most of the new items are friend requests. I get huge numbers of spam friend requests. I can’t tell in this menu which are spam and which are real so I just delete them all. And it’s hard to find the new comments posts and likes of my friends. Usually new interfaces are upsetting in the first few days and then you get used to them and that’s it. That isn’t happening with this interface. It’s just wrong. Facebook you should fix it. I know this because I still have the old interface on my iPad and it’s much much easier to use. I apologize for typos in this. I recited it using voice recognition on my iPad, and it’s not perfect.

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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Trump can hardly complain about anonymous sources when he destroys the careers of people who tell the truth about him under oath. Can't have it both ways. Schmuck.

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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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Today’s song: Mama Tried.

Science Alert reports: People who eat a lot of industrially processed junk food are more likely to exhibit a change in their chromosomes linked to aging, according to research presented Tuesday at an online medical conference. Three or more servings of so-called "ultra-processed food" per day doubled the odds that strands of DNA and proteins called telomeres, found on the end of chromosomes, would be shorter compared to people who rarely consumed such foods, scientists reported at the European and International Conference on Obesity. Short telomeres are a marker of biological aging at the cellular level, and the study suggests that diet is a factor in driving the cells to age faster. While the correlation is strong, however, the causal relationship between eating highly processed foods and diminished telomeres remains speculative, the authors cautioned.

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A study reveals true scale of the prehistoric mega-shark made famous in Jason Statham's The Meg.

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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A demo app to view BingeWorthy's RSS feed.

"SpaceX took another step forward Thursday in developing its next-generation Starship rocket, conducting the second short flight test of a prototype in the past month," reports CNBC: Starship prototype Serial Number 6, or SN6, took off from the launchpad at SpaceX's facility in Boca Chica, Texas. It gradually rose to about 500 feet above the ground before it returned back to land, touching down on a concrete area near the launchpad. The flight test appeared to be identical to the test SpaceX conducted of prototype SN5 on Aug. 5... The company is developing Starship with the goal of launching cargo and as many as a 100 people at a time on missions to the Moon and Mars. SpaceX has been steadily building multiple prototypes at a time at the company's growing facility in Boca Chica. While SpaceX's fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are partially reusable, Musk's goal is to make Starship fully reusable — envisioning a rocket that is more akin to a commercial airplane, with short turnaround times between flights where the only major cost is fuel. After SpaceX in May launched a pair of NASA astronauts in its first crewed mission, Musk pivoted the company's attention, declaring that the top SpaceX priority is now development of Starship. Musk said in an email obtained by CNBC that Starship's program must accelerate "dramatically and immediately..." He expects Starship's first flight tests to orbit won't come until 2021, saying that SpaceX is in "uncharted territory." Commenting on the test launch of the bulky spacecraft, Elon Musk tweeted "Turns out you can make anything fly haha."

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Many years ago at a tech conference in Arizona, I was seated next to a billionaire. He had started a shoe company, very successful, sold it. I tried to have a conversation, but he mostly ignored me.

He said something I remembered. You can't get by on less than $20 million a year. I looked to see if he was joking. He wasn't. I said you know that's not true. I live quite well, but I don't even spend $1 million a year (an understatement, I probably didn't spend $100K a year).

I said there are lots of people who get by on $30K a year (it was a long time ago). He didn't say another word the whole meal.

All that ignorance because he made shoes a lot of people liked. Shoes. I've seen it many times. Vast wealth doesn't make people smarter, though a lot of people including the super rich think it does. It actually makes you stupider.

A guy like Trump has no idea what it means to be president. Yet for some reason he decided that's what he wants to be. And he is. And he probably doesn't understand why people are so upset with what he said about suckers and losers.

I could imagine one of my roommates at UW-Madison saying something like what Trump said in the 70s. But a president not only can't, but a president can't even think it. A president has to send people to their deaths. That's a very big responsibility.

A person who truly believes what Trump does can not be president. We could argue about it in a living room on E Johnson St in Madison, but he doesn't get to be undecided on that.

I applied for an absentee ballot in New York State. It seems to me they could allow me to download and print a PDF of the ballot, instead of mailing it to me via USPS. The first half of the process could be electronic. At least they didn't require you to send them a printed request to send you a ballot. They didn't ask for an email address. That's a shame, because that could be used to debug problems with the system, or provide confirmation when they receive the ballot. Also note they don't ask for your mailing address. This is good. However, they display the person's physical address in the form, once you provide information that isn't that hard to guess. Not a good idea.