Shared posts

18 Mar 21:45

Going Outside

by Doug
06 Mar 05:51

Preparation

by Doug
09 Jan 04:07

Hard Day

by Reza
28 Dec 09:41

Supersymmetry

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.
22 Nov 00:35

Apocalypse Meow

by Doug

Apocalypse Meow

And more cats.

20 Sep 22:22

xkcd Phone Flip

Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.
20 Sep 22:21

Speed matters: How Ethernet went from 3Mbps to 100Gbps… and beyond

by Iljitsch van Beijnum
Extreme close-up photo of cables.

Enlarge (credit: Adrienne Bresnahan | Getty Images)

With Ethernet turning 50 this year, Ars is resurfacing this feature on the development and evolution of Ethernet that was originally published in 2011.

Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn't completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per second. But long-distance digital communication was common enough, relative to the number of computers deployed. Terminals could also be hooked up to mainframe and minicomputers over relatively short distances with simple serial lines or with more complex multidrop systems. This was all well known; what was new in the '70s was the local area network (LAN). But how to connect all these machines?

The point of a LAN is to connect many more than just two systems, so a simple cable back and forth doesn't get the job done. Connecting several thousands of computers to a LAN can in theory be done using a star, a ring, or a bus topology. A star is obvious enough: every computer is connected to some central point. A bus consists of a single, long cable that computers connect to along its run. With a ring, a cable runs from the first computer to the second, from there to the third and so on until all participating systems are connected, and then the last is connected to the first, completing the ring.

Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

20 Sep 21:51

Content

by Doug

Content

Dedicated to my fellow creatives.

09 Jul 02:54

Everything I Do

by Doug
09 Jul 02:54

The Sun

by Doug

The Sun

And more sun.

09 Jul 02:54

Exercise

by Doug

Exercise

More exercise or more drinking.

09 Jul 02:54

Super

by Doug
09 Jul 02:54

The Future

by Doug
09 Jul 02:54

Robots

by Doug
19 Jun 11:05

Hackers can steal cryptographic keys by video-recording power LEDs 60 feet away

by Dan Goodin
Left: a smart card reader processing the encryption key of an inserted smart card. Right: a surveillance camera video records the reader's power LED from 60 feet away.

Enlarge / Left: a smart card reader processing the encryption key of an inserted smart card. Right: a surveillance camera video records the reader's power LED from 60 feet away. (credit: Nassi et al.)

Researchers have devised a novel attack that recovers the secret encryption keys stored in smart cards and smartphones by using cameras in iPhones or commercial surveillance systems to video record power LEDs that show when the card reader or smartphone is turned on.

The attacks enable a new way to exploit two previously disclosed side channels, a class of attack that measures physical effects that leak from a device as it performs a cryptographic operation. By carefully monitoring characteristics such as power consumption, sound, electromagnetic emissions, or the amount of time it takes for an operation to occur, attackers can assemble enough information to recover secret keys that underpin the security and confidentiality of a cryptographic algorithm.

Side-channel exploitation made simple

As Wired reported in 2008, one of the oldest known side channels was in a top-secret encrypted teletype terminal that the US Army and Navy used during World War II to transmit communications that couldn’t be read by German and Japanese spies. To the surprise of the Bell Labs engineers who designed the terminal, it caused readings from a nearby oscilloscope each time an encrypted letter was entered. While the encryption algorithm in the device was sound, the electromagnetic emissions emanating from the device were enough to provide a side channel that leaked the secret key.

Read 37 remaining paragraphs | Comments

19 Jun 03:10

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Monty

by Zach Weinersmith


Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
It turns out if you switch to the one that definitely for sure has a ferrari you might be worse off because there is information embedded in...


Today's News:
04 Apr 01:06

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Cooperation



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Cooperation is when we hurt people together!


Today's News:
15 Mar 03:36

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Offensive AI

by tech@thehiveworks.com


Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I'm slightly regretting not having this as the twist ending to a comedic novel. Gimme a few years.


Today's News:

One week until BEA WOLF DAY!

09 Mar 04:35

George

by Toonhole Chris
23 Feb 23:38

Wasting

by Doug
21 Feb 00:02

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Service

by tech@thehiveworks.com


Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
This is just a big thank you to Bea Wolf buyers. We're already in our 3rd printing and it doesn't come out for a month. If you want a hardcover, lock it in soon - they're gorgeous :D


Today's News:

Thanks y'all, I mean it. Here's one more heartmelting review:

"An instant classic. Like nothing I have ever seen. The unforgettable characters within Treeheart and their death-defying (and extremely funny) heroics now have a permanent place in my brain. This combination of impossibly charming art and boundlessly thrilling and hilarious text is a required addition to your family's library. I love this so much."

— Nathan Pyle



24 Jan 23:42

Not Tired

by Doug
22 Dec 04:55

Cold Complaints

Our investigation into whining-based remedies became the first study to be halted by the IRB on the grounds that the treatment group was 'too annoying.'
18 Dec 10:52

A history of ARM, part 2: Everything starts to come together

by Jeremy Reimer
The Acorn Archimedes 3000, released in May 1989.

Enlarge / The Acorn Archimedes 3000, released in May 1989. (credit: Wikipedia)

The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, had invented a powerful new computer chip, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Acorn released a new computer line, the Archimedes, that used these ARM chips. But the world wasn’t beating a path to the company's door. (Read part one here.)

From the beginning, it was hard to get anyone to care about this amazing technology. A few months after the first ARM chips had shipped, Acorn Computers' Steve Furber called a tech reporter and tried to get him to cover the story. The reporter replied, “I don’t believe you. If you’d been doing this, I’d have known.” Then he hung up.

As Acorn struggled, Furber tried to imagine how the ARM chip could be spun off into a separate company. But he couldn’t figure out how to make the business model work. “You’d have to sell millions before royalties start paying the bills,” he said in an interview. “We couldn’t imagine selling millions of these things.”

Read 43 remaining paragraphs | Comments

30 Nov 01:16

Diplomacy

by Doug
23 Oct 10:25

New AI tool colorizes black-and-white photos automatically [Updated]

by Benj Edwards
Daniel

Amazing

Palette.fm does AI photo colorization using text prompts for refinement.

Enlarge / Palette.fm does AI photo colorization using text prompts for refinement. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

A Swedish machine-learning researcher named Emil Wallner has released a free web tool called Palette.fm that automatically colorizes black-and-white photos using AI. After uploading a photo, users can choose a color filter or refine the colors using a written text description.

Palette.fm uses a deep-learning model to classify images, which guides its initial guesses for the colors of objects in a photo or illustration. We asked Wallner what kind of back-end technology runs the site, but he didn't go into specifics. "I’ve made a custom AI model that uses the image and text to generate a colorization," Wallner replied. "One model creates the text and the other takes the image and the text to generate the colorization."

After you upload an image, the site's sleek interface provides an estimated caption (description) of what it thinks it sees in the picture. If you don't like any of the preset color filters, you can click the pencil icon to edit the caption yourself, which guides the colorization model using a text prompt.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

14 Sep 06:12

Once upon a Teams meeting…

by CommitStrip
04 Sep 06:40

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Adverbially

by tech@thehiveworks.com


Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I worry this is one of those situations where I'm the only person in the room saying 'amIright??'


Today's News:
01 Aug 22:31

Favorite Things

by Reza
29 Jul 10:24

Working Hard?

by Doug

Working Hard?

And more work.