Removing Portland’s hoboats in 2024

Removing Portland’s hoboats in 2024

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Portland’s homeless don’t just camp on the streets – they’re also living on ramshackle and abandoned boats at an ever-increasing rate. Unfortunately, they are a source of a lot of solid human waste and pollution – especially when they sink or are abandoned. Recently they’ve been parking them right in the middle of downtown right beside OMSI children’s museum or St Johns.

The problem is only getting worse. 44 boats were removed from the river in 2024 through funding from the Oregon State Marine Board and the American Rescue Plan Act. Over the past three years, a total of 88 boats were retrieved from the river including 25 in 2022 and 19 in 2023. It doesn’t help that the parks department is forced to store the boats for 30 days before they can clean up the mess.

Either way, it’s costing us millions to get rid of them.

In a step sideways; the city is spending a lot to dispose of voluntarily surrendered boats before they’re abandoned. It prevents them from being abandoned/taken by homeless, but still costs taxpayers to dispose of them.

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New kind of multi-color LED bulb

New kind of multi-color LED bulb

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There’s plenty of color changing bulbs out there – but they usually only display one color at a time. The Moonside Star-Bulb allows you to have mulitple colors from the same bulb. Make one side one color, the other side another, or have the colors rotate and move in interesting ways. Very resonable at only $37 per bulb.

Wayne Enterprises

Wayne Enterprises

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Are you a millionaire? Want to live the real Bruce Wayne lifestyle? Warner Bros partnered with a PR firm to create the luxury Wayne Enterprises company. How luxury? How about buying one of 10 real life, functional, Wayne Enterprises Tumblers – for a cool $2.9 million?

Or perhaps $20,000 custom chairs, $5,000 shoes, $120,000 wall clocks, $21,000 lamps, or $3,000 luggage? All of these ultra-luxury items are real and for sale.

Head over to Wayne Enterprises website and start living the luxury lifestyle you never knew existed.

Pixeldarts kickstarter

Pixeldarts kickstarter

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This is an interesting twist – instead of the old dartboard – how about a digital pixel art dart board. It can be programmed with images to change gameplay and to display art, data, and even play retro games.

It uses silicone suction darts with a sensor chip that can send data on its exact position on the board to keep score. They also plan to make NERF-compatible sensor darts.

Google implements Spatial Memory Safety in C++

Google implements Spatial Memory Safety in C++

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After analyzing nearly 10 years of CVEs, Google researchers calculated that at least 40% of safety exploits in C++ were related to spatial memory exploits like writing to an out-of-bounds memory location.

Google researchers showed they were able to “retrofit” spatial safety onto their C++ codebases, and to do it with a surprisingly low impact on performance. They used straightforward strategies such as bounds checking buffers and data structures – as is done in other languages and released a new, safer Hardened libc++. 

The results show up in this chart of segfaults across the entire fleet of computers before and after using the improvements. Their internal red team testing results were also much improved, uncovered over 1000 bugs and likely prevent 1000-2000 new bugs each year based on current development rate.

Here’s a blog post about their results.

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Input to display latency metering tool

Input to display latency metering tool

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AMD has just unveiled Frame Latency Meter (FLM) – which allows you to determine keyboard to display latency. Normally, this was done with a high-speed camera, a mouse, and an FPS game with a visible muzzle flash. The camera would capture the moment the mouse was clicked, and you would count the frames until the muzzle flash or other on-screen reaction appeared.

This utility does not require any special equipment and works with any AMD, Nvidia, or Intel GPU that supports DirectX 11 or newer. For capturing data, AMD GPUs use the Advanced Media Framework or AMF codec, while other GPUs use the DirectX Graphics Infrastructure or DXGI codec. FLM can generate detailed latency and effective frame-rate statistics, which can be exported to CSV files for further data analysis.

The way it works is clever: FLM measures latency by continuously capturing frames and comparing each one to the previous frame within a selected region. It then generates a mouse movement event using standard Windows functionality and waits for the frame contents to change. The time between the mouse movement and the detected frame change is recorded as the latency.

FLM is available as a free download for Windows 10 and 11 users via GPU Open or the official GitHub repository

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Hackers are targeting open-source

Hackers are targeting open-source

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A Microsoft engineer became suspicious of performance problems while optimizing his code. After digging in, he discovered that a simple data compression library called XZ Utils was creating a secret backdoor. What made this discovery noteworthy is that the innocuous looking compression library is used in tons of open-source projects and Linux distributions.

The analysis of how the code got into XZ utils uncovered a fiendishly sophisticated operation. The XZ utility was understaffed with only one primary maintainer. He was increasingly catching flack for falling behind – an increasing problem with open source projects. An eager developer named Jia Tan had been a contributor to the XZ project since at least late 2021 and built trust with the community of developers working on it. Eventually Tan ascended to being co-maintainer of the project which allowed him to add code without needing the contributions to be approved.

Tan did this by what now appears to be a coordinated set of accounts and discussions that were aimed at installing him as a co-owner. Various accounts appeared and started complaining about the speed of updates, features, and questions. They coordinated questions and complaints as well as contributions by Tan appear to create pressure for the owner to elevate Tan as a co-owner. Whether this was done by one person or several, this mechanism is known as ‘persona management’ – something that’s been proposed as far back as 2010.

“I think the multiple green accounts seeming to coordinate on specific goals at key times fits the pattern of using networks of sock accounts for social engineering that we’ve seen all over social media,” said Molly, the EFF system administrator. “It’s very possible that the rogue dev, hacking group, or state sponsor employed this tactic as part of their plan to introduce the back door. Of course, it’s also possible these are just coincidences.”

The code introduced was sophisticated enough that analysis of its precise functionality and capability is still ongoing.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center has defined this kind of attack as a ‘supply chain attack’; and open-source projects are particularly susceptible to it.

It’s definitely worth reading the article because these kinds of sophisticated social attacks are obviously now reality.

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Did it get creepy? It got creepy

Did it get creepy? It got creepy

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Realbotix got a decent amount of press in the ‘in other things we saw at CES 2025’ category. They’re a company which aims to make more humanoid robots in both appearance and conversation – though it appears they aren’t making robots that look like just anyone. Maybe to attract a certain demographic(s) that might shell out the $125k for one?

It was kind of fun to watch the press tastefully stumble around how to describe them.