In a recent Goodwill find, I managed to buy a mint condition $1000 Xeltek Superpro IC programmer for $5. In the process of selling it, it turns out there is a local guy that does an amazing amount of work with these devices as well as PCB repair and a whole host of other electronics work.
It appears someone has leaked a massive Valve asset repository. This is probably the biggest leak since the 2003 source code leak for Halflife (git). Instead of source code, this time it appears to be a massive package of used, prototype, early, and discarded assets for Team Fortress 2, Portal, Halflife, Counterstrike, and several other big Valve games.
Right now there is a big discussion going on at the VCC (Valve Cut Content) community discord server. They’re finding all kinds of crazy things in there, like prototype Counterstrike maps, female TF2 characters, and even some partially completed levels like this TF2 rocket-jump training map:
Update: It appears folks are now re-packaging the newly discovered maps:
HowToGeek has a wonderful little introduction on how to start write your first Stable Diffusion prompts.
Update 02-2023: Here’s 10 really amazing resources to help you to generate really great prompts and art.
They start with some simple AI image generation and move on to more and more complex examples that includes a brief introduction to some key parameters, changing and including broader image sources, and then generating various famous artistic styles.
They finish out the intro with some links to help you learn more:
Links:
Nobody seems to want to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Now late 2022, only about 15% of users have upgraded or bought machines with Windows 11 – despite it being out for well over a year. Even the Steam Hardware Survey indicates a 28% install rate on some of the newest/highest end gaming systems.
There’s a whole host of gripes about Windows 11. There have been performance and compatibility issues that are not present on Windows 10. Others greatly dislike the UI changes (this is my big gripe). Still others mention being told their hardware is incompatible. However, you may, like many others, find yourself FORCED to upgrade to Windows 11 whether you want to or not. Windows has a nasty habit of pushing such upgrades without asking.
If you want to make sure you don’t get a Windows 11 upgrade but still keep getting Windows 10 updates, you can try this trick:
First, navigate to Windows Update, then hit Pause Updates on that page.
Run
services.msc, find the Windows Update service and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), right click on them and pick Stop.Next, browse to
C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\, and delete the contents.That is it. The two services will eventually restart on their own, and next time it checks for updates it will only get Windows 10 updates.
Edit – If you want an extra layer of assurance, run the tool InControl from GRC, this free utility changes a few Microsoft sanctioned registry keys to specify what version and feature update of Windows you want to remain on. There are also details on those registry keys for those that would rather manually configure it themselves: https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm
Links:
“Air gapping” is a security measure that involves a computer being physically isolated and incapable of connecting wirelessly or physically with other computers or network devices. It’s used in high security setups. The idea is that if the system is physically incapable of connecting to other systems or networks, it should be safe. Right?
A new attack method named COVID-bit uses electromagnetic waves from power supplies to transmit data from air-gapped systems. Using this attack, even if the computer is completely isolated and unplugged from the internet, the researchers demonstrated collecting information emanating from the device by a nearby smartphone or laptop over a distance of at least two meters – even if a wall separates the two.
Researchers created a malware program that regulates CPU load and core frequency in a particular manner to make the power supplies on air-gapped computers emanate electromagnetic radiation on a low-frequency band (0 – 48 kHz).
While the attack requires at least one instance of physical access to install the malware, such attacks have happened. Examples include the Stuxnet worm in Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Agent.BTZ that infected a U.S. military base, and the Remsec modular backdoor that collected information from air-gapped government networks for over five years.
Mordechai Guri explains the primary source of electromagnetic radiation in switched mode power supplies is due to their internal design and switching characteristics in the technical paper. “In the conversion from AC-DC and DC-DC, the MOSFET switching components turning on or off at specific frequencies create a square wave,” the researcher details. The electromagnetic wave can carry a payload of raw data, following a strain of eight bits that signify the beginning of the transmission.
The attack works against air gapped pc’s, laptops, and even a raspberry pi. The receiver can be as simple as a cell phone.
Definitely worth a read.
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Overdive Media pulled their app for PC Windows 10/11 in February 23, 2022. Unfortunately, their new app, Libby, doesn’t allow you to actually download and listen to the mp3’s on your Windows desktop.
I seemed to have 2 copies of the app and they do seem to still work as of Dec 2022.
Download links:
ODMediaConsoleSetup.msi version 3.6.0 – Copyright 2016 Overdrive, Inc.
ODMediaConsoleSetup.msi version 3.2.0 from software.informer
Links:
Titanic: Honor and Glory is an independent project to re-create the RMS Titanic with unprecedented historical accuracy.
While still in development, here’s a 1 hour video demonstrating the current state walking around many different parts of the ship.
Disney published this paper about using AI to digitally age and de-age actors in a fraction of the time it usually takes for normal frame-by-frame manual aging techniques used today.
FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background. Using synthetically generated training data is a method that’s been utilized for things like training self-driving cars to handle situations that aren’t easily reproducible.
The age changes are then added/merge onto the face. It appears this approach fixes a lot of the issues common in this kind of approach: facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames. It does have some issues with greying hair and aging very young actors, but produces results better than techniques used just a few years ago (not that the bar was very hard to beat).
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The Markup reports that tax filing services like H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly sending their financial information to Facebook.
These services use Meta Pixel (also known as the Facebook retargeting pixel) – a snippet of code inserted into the back end of your website to track visitor activity. It works by loading a small library of functions which can use whenever a site visitor takes an action (called an event) that they want to track (called a conversion). Tracked conversions appear in the Ads Manager where they can be used to measure the effectiveness.
It turns out the information sent included users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and other information. The team that found this behavior has a github repo that shows the actual data sent if you want the gory details.
Intuit’s TurboTax also uses Meta Pixel – but they do not appear to send financial information to Meta.
Just more reason to be very cautious about the tax software you use. As was noted over 10 years ago, if you’re not paying for it, YOU (or your personal data) ARE the product being sold (to someone else)
If true, this is a pretty brutal way to treat your engineering staff.