Pigeon Milk seems to be infrequently doing some shows like this as well. They don’t seem to have any schedule or even a website. Looks like you’ll have to use your local event tracking sites to find them.
One should never plug their phone into public chargers and devices (hotel clocks, gym machines, airport chargers, or things left laying around at hacker’s conventions…). This kind of attack is called Juice Jacking and has already been demonstrated for well over a decade. Innoculous looking charging devices, gym plugs, and hotel clocks can install malware, viruses, and steal data off phones and devices.
The OMG Cable from Hak5 was designed for exactly this. What looks like an innocent cable actually contains wifi that can be remotely controlled to act like a keyboard, log all keyboard activity, create a bi-directional network connection to control the system, and even self destructs if detected.
They also make the famous RubberDucky that you plug in and can delivery and copy data mercilessly. It acts like a normal keyboard, but by injecting simple pre-recorded commands it can direct the computer to do anything anyone sitting at the keyboard can do – including copying all your critical data to the device and walking away with it.
Protection from USB injection
Portapow creates a number of data blockers that allow you to use public USB charging ports by an adapter that physically removes the data lines. You can use them to charge devices, but they physically cannot transfer data.
Hak5 also makes a version called the malicious cable detector that detects all the currently known malicious cables.
But what if you do need to check the contents of a drive? Enter USBValve.
USBValve has an onboard microcontroller advertise itself as a storage device, pretending to have a filesystem with some common files available. When an unknown USB device is first inserted into the USB port on the USBValve tool, USBValve displays usage information, via the attached OLED screen, on whether the USB device is accessing files it shouldn’t be or immediately trying to write to the filesystem, which is a clear sign of malicious behavior.
This gives you access to a bunch of the lowest level debug – but likely requires a LOT of work and knowledge to use safely. It’s unlikely to be safe against hardware attacks, but it does give you something that you can potentially blow up cheaply before you plug it into a real system.
The AirNow website is not only good for getting air quality measurements for your area, but also checking in on the current smoke and fire maps.
Sadly, this is now just as required checking as weather information when going camping or hiking in the Pacific Northwest. A trend that is almost certainly going to get worse due to decades of misguided over-conservation forest management.
Now the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sent warning letters to eight companies about their warranty practices, including ASRock, Gigabyte and Zotac, voicing concerns that stickers used by these manufacturers violate the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (via The Verge)
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act was brought into effect in 1975 and was created to prevent manufacturers from using disclaimers on warranties in an unfair or misleading manner.
The FTC deems this sort of wording—alongside the warning stickers attached to multiple companies’ products—as hindering the consumer’s ability to perform routine maintenance and repairs. The US government agency has urged each company in its letter to review promotional and warranty materials to ensure that they do not “state or imply that warranty coverage is conditioned on the use of specific parts or services.”
Here’s the bottom line according to the iFixit article. Under US law, these are the actions that do not void your warranty:
Modifications or improvements (like painting the case of a device or upgrading its software), as long as those improvements don’t damage the product
Performing an upgrade that requires opening the device (like adding more RAM, or a bigger hard drive), as long as you don’t damage the product while opening it
Repairs to fix accidental damage (like a broken screen), so long as the repair doesn’t damage other components
Casual disassembly and tinkering for curiosity’s sake, as long as you don’t break anything in the device
It’s not hard to find faceless YouTube channels that have automated voices talking on particular subjects with just a few pictures or clips. These faceless channels are an attempt to very quickly use AI to generate videos – and money for their owners.
They often do this by stealing embedded transcript files from good YouTubers that generate content, run them through AI summarizers, and generate their own instant knock-offs. One YouTuber, F4mi, is trying to fight back.
By using some of the features in the .ass captioning format, she embeds her closed caption transcripts with junk data that is invisible to humans but poisonous to any AI that reads them.
A team consisting of Skatterbencher who’s renowned for overclocking prowess; Diabatix, specializing in generative AI for thermal solutions; 3D Systems for additive manufacturing; and finally ElmorLabs for overclocking gear put together a unique cooler.
The team took ElmorLabs’ existing Volcano LN2 container as a reference point, then used Diabatix’s ColdStream Next AI to generate an improved design. 3D Systems then 3D printed a prototype using oxygen-free copper powder. The cutting-edge process commanded a steep $10,000 price tag – a far cry from the $260 cost of the original Volcano.
The design did do better than the stock Volcano. Using 500mL of LN2, it hit -133°C, while the Volcano stopped short at -100°C
The fast-food giant ended a test run of its AI drive-thru technology partnership with IBM in more than 100 restaurants. The so-called Automated Order Taker will be shut off no later than July 26, 2024.
The global AI partnership began in 2021. The combination of technologies from the two companies aimed to simplify and speed up operations with voice-activated ordering.
Two sources familiar with the technology told CNBC that among its challenges, it had issues interpreting different accents and dialects, which affected order accuracy.
Researchers have created holograms using the light emitted from an ordinary smartphone screen.
In the study, the cascade began with a static color image shown on an iPhone. Light waves emitted from it were refined through the SLM — a device used to control and adjust the phase (timing), amplitude (strength or brightness) and polarization (direction) of light waves. Using the SLM, scientists progressively refined and layered the light waves to build up the 3D image step-by-step.
To achieve the holographic effect, the scientists had to determine the specific adjustments of light needed to create the 3D hologram from the image displayed on the iPhone’s screen.
This involved working backwards from the desired output to determine the specific adjustments needed in the light’s phase and amplitude at each step of the journey, from the iPhone display through the SLM, to recreate the hologram accurately.
They detailed their findings in a study published April 2 in the journal Optics Letters.
