This hacker decided to make a hoodie that can blind night vision cameras. It does this by having 12 embedded ultraviolet leds (light that is invisible to the naked eye) that strobe and blow out night vision cameras.
Obviously, this can equally be used for either anonymity or criminal activities. One thing is for sure, if you’re running away from cops or helicopters using night vision – you’re going to stand out like like a Christmas tree.
This is a more active approach to similar anti-paparazzi clothes that came out a few years back. Though those are a little expensive. A trendy anti-paparazzi scarf is $249.
Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t mean your smart device can’t.
Researchers have developed a novel attack called “Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan” (NUIT) that can launch silent attacks against devices powered by voice assistants. The main principle that makes NUIT effective and dangerous is that microphones in smart devices can respond to near-ultrasound that the human ear cannot, thus performing the attack with minimal risk of exposure while still using conventional speaker technology.
The team demonstrated NUIT attacks against modern voice assistants found inside millions of devices, including Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa, showing the ability to send malicious commands to those devices.
Inaudible attacks
NUIT could be incorporated into websites that play media or YouTube videos and tricking targets into visiting sites or playing malicious media on trustworthy sites.
The researchers say the NUIT attacks can be conducted using two different methods.
NUIT-1, is when a device is both the source and target of the attack. For example, an attack can be launched on a smartphone by playing an audio file that causes the device to perform an action, such as opening a garage door or sending a text message.
The other method, NUIT-2, is when the attack is launched by a device with a speaker to another device with a microphone, such as a website or over TV to a smart speaker.
Just one more reason not to have a bunch of smart devices in your house.
AutoDMP is short for Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement. It is designed to plug into an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) system used by chip designers, to accelerate and optimize the time-consuming process of finding optimal placements for the building blocks of processors. In one of Nvidia’s examples of AutoDMP at work, the tool leveraged its AI on the problem of determining an optimal layout of 256 RSIC-V cores with 2.7 million standard cells and 320 memory macros. AutoDMP took 3.5 hours to come up with an optimal layout on a single Nvidia DGX Station A100.
Initial metrics shows it does an amazing job – in a fraction of the time. Definitely worth the read.
AutoDMP is open source, with the code published on GitHub. Below is a link to an article about Cadence’s Cerebrus AI place-and-route solution.
A few important points. The images are not activated and cannot be activated – even with a valid product key.
What about Linux?
If you want to install and run a Linux distro (Ubuntu for example), you can use Virtualbox/VMWare or the built in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With WSL, you get a Linux command prompt mounted on your local Windows filesystem and can launch X-windows apps that pop up on your Windows desktop in separate windows.
The experience is kind of a weird mash-up of Windows and Linux on the same system at the same time. Kind of like a better/embedded version of cygwin. It’s not as contained as a virtual machine host app like Virtualbox/VMWare that keeps all your windows in the virtual machine host app; but this might be enough for most people.
I haven’t done any experiments, but would love to test out some OpenGL/Vulkan apps to see if you get full GPU accelerated rendering.
Sirrandalot is not the first person to use a film-grain/film-like shader effect to give a certain feel. He is, however, the first to use Blender’s Cycles path-tracing engine to create a highly detailed physical modeling of a 3D camera body, simulate the various properties of a glass lens (then multiple lens system), the properties of chemical film, and then render scenes through this highly complex setup to generate real film-like images. Check out the final not-photos here or on Imgur.
Most PC cooling solutions cool your CPU/GPU/memory using fans or water that exchange the generated heat with the surrounding air. This means you can never cool the components to any lower temperature than the surrounding ambient air temperature.
There are people who push those boundaries to hyper-low temperatures by pouring liquid nitrogen or other hyper-cool liquids into specially designed heatsinks; but it introduces a new set of issues. A big issue for cooling below ambient temperature is condensation.
As soon as a surface is cooler than the surrounding air temperature dew point, then water from the air may start forming as condensation on the surface. We see this every summer on the sides of iced drinks. As anyone with electronics experience knows, water and electricity don’t mix.
Many people have experimented with sub-ambient cooling solutions before. The latest is EKWB with their EK-QuantumX Delta TEC EVO water block. Instead of using just a normal water block connected to a radiator, this solution uses a Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) with a controller that then dissipates that heat through a radiator.
It’s an interesting, and surprisingly complex problem.
Frore Systems has developed a cooling chip it calls AirJet that sits on top of a heat-generating chip and cools it without the need for mechanical fans. It’s 2.8mm thick and uses pulsating inlets to suck air into it and exhaust it out the sides.
The AirJet Mini looks like a credit card, and measures 41.5mm long by 27.5mm wide and 2.8mm thick. It can remove 5.25W of heat while consuming just 1W with a very quiet 21 dBA of noise. The AirJet Pro for x86 is a bit larger, naturally. It measures 71.5 mm by 31.5mm at the same 2.8mm thickness. It can exhaust 10.75W of heat while using just 1.75W.
The mechanism works via membranes inside that vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. This vibration sucks air into inlets at the top of the AirJet. Once inside the device, air is then transformed into “pulsating jets” as the air removes the heat from the heat spreader. It is eventually exhausted out of the sides via integrated spouts.
