Dutch company Holoconnects showed off its Holobox at CES. The selling point is it can bring realistic holograms into conference venues, hotels and more. The Holobox has an 86-inch, transparent 4K LCD screen for a life-size and realistic-looking holographic projection. Because of the lighting behind the screen, it creates the illusion of a 3D projection or hologram.
This works a bit better for multiple viewers compared to head tracking techniques that only work for one viewer.
Takashi Yoshinaga created a version that uses HoloLens2 and allows you to pull the person out of the holobox.
Want to know how policy is generated and how governments evaluate challenges and future direction? Companies like Moss Adams present interesting research they do.
In this interesting discussion, Richard Florida (author of Rise of the Creative Class and award winning commentary on socio-economic urban studies) points out the misconceptions and changes facing cities in 2023 and beyond. He gives a really interesting summary of how things are (which is very different than what the media tells us), and will likely change, since Covid.
It’s an interesting take on how cities are changing and likely futures.
This seems like quite a shock for a big company that is clearly dominating the marketplace – but the reason is likely strategic. Unity has been on a tear acquiring lots of tool and support companies in the last few years to make Unity the engine that has everything you need – from rendering, to marketing, to authoring, to storefronts.
Still, as the economic reigns tighten, this likely can’t continue. There was already a disastrous attempt to start charging fees for this once free engine, as well as announcing 3% layoffs on some of it’s more speculative VFX division.
Rowhammer is a DRAM memory security vulnerability discovered in June 2014 (paper here). It demonstrates a security problem in which programs can modify memory they should not have access too. In the paper, they note how DRAM memory cells interact electrically between themselves by leaking their charges, possibly changing the contents of nearby memory rows that were not addressed in the original memory access. This circumvention of the isolation between DRAM memory cells results from the high cell density in modern DRAM, and can be triggered by specially crafted memory access patterns that rapidly activate the same memory rows numerous times.
The row hammer effect has been used in some privilege escalation computer security exploits (Paper here). Google’s Project Zero demonstrated two working privilege escalation exploits based on the row hammer effect in 2015. Since then, there has been a back and forth war of fixes and new exploits – some even involving ways to circumvent ECC (error-correcting) DRAM.
Now we fast forward to today, and there is another way to manipulate bits – RowPress (Paper here). Instead of ‘hammering’ neighbor rows with certain write patterns, this method involves manipulating the length of time the aggressor row is left open when reading it. When a computer accesses a chunk of memory, it opens the rows to the cells storing the desired data and transfers it to the CPU. The researchers show you can use clever methods to manipulate how long that row is left open. When an attacker row is left open the optimal amount, you can affect nearby victim rows:
We show that keeping a DRAM row (i.e., aggressor row) open for a long period of time (i.e., a large aggressor row on time, tAggON) disturbs physically nearby DRAM rows. Doing so induces bitflips in the victim row without requiring (tens of) thousands of activations to the aggressor row. We characterize RowPress in 164 off-the-shelf DDR4 DRAM chips from all three major manufacturers and find that RowPress significantly amplifies DRAM’s vulnerability to read-disturb attacks (i.e., greatly reduces the minimum number of total aggressor row activations to cause at least one bitflip, ACmin.
The methods they use are VERY clever. They started on a FPGA-based test beds to test the idea, then moved to PC’s. This required a deep knowledge of memory hardware and involves clever manipulation of the memory controller and cache systems (section 6.2 of the paper). The summary in the comments was great:
With respect to knowing how physical memory maps to their process memory, they allocated a 1GB hugepage and use a technique called DRAMA to determine the row-column mapping.
To keep their target row open, they take advantage of the fact (new to me) that multiple cache blocks will live on the same physical row, which means that repeated accesses to those blocks can influence the memory controller to keep that row open. They also empty the processor cache between each iteration so that they can be sure that they will hit the actual RAM. To bypass the target row refresh (TRR) mechanisms that have been implemented to counter traditional RowHammer attacks, they also toggle a large number of dummy rows so that the TRR will pick up on those rather than the actual aggressor rows, since TRR implementations apparently have a small number of candidate aggressor rows.
There’s no rules against household pets speed-running games – so JSR trained his shiba inu Peanut Butter to speed run the 90’s era Nintendo game Gyromite. He didn’t set any world records, outside of being maybe the first dog to complete the game; but dang – what a good boy.
Backup Ukraine, a collaborative project between UNESCO National Commission and Polycam (a 3D creation tool) which enables anyone equipped with a cell phone to scan and capture photorealistic 3D models of heritage sites in order to preserve them in case they are bombed.
Armed with the Polycam software (offered for free for the project) and an iPhone, the technology allows citizen archivists off the frontlines to preserve Ukrainian heritage sites.
This kind of cultural and artistic preservation is unfortunately something the West and even my home town of Portland likely needs. In 2020, Portland Oregon saw over 100 nights of rioting and targeted, wide-spread artistic and cultural destruction by increasingly armed left wing protesters.
Fast forward and Pyramiden has seen a little rebirth. The hotel has been renovated and reopened with a restaurant, bar, and post office.
The movie theater was also restored and even hosts an annual Pyramiden Cinema Festival in September (facebook page). Even more amazing is that the movie theater housed an archive of over 1000 Soviet era films that sat quietly on the racks when they were abandoned.
Developer Charlie Holtz combined GPT-4 Vision (commonly called GPT-4V) and ElevenLabs voice cloning technology to create an unauthorized AI version of the famous naturalist David Attenborough narrating his every move on camera.
