And here are some agoraphobic chickens.
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Speed matters: How Ethernet went from 3Mbps to 100Gbps… and beyond
With Ethernet turning 50 this year, Ars is resurfacing this feature on the development and evolution of Ethernet that was originally published in 2011.
Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn't completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per second. But long-distance digital communication was common enough, relative to the number of computers deployed. Terminals could also be hooked up to mainframe and minicomputers over relatively short distances with simple serial lines or with more complex multidrop systems. This was all well known; what was new in the '70s was the local area network (LAN). But how to connect all these machines?
The point of a LAN is to connect many more than just two systems, so a simple cable back and forth doesn't get the job done. Connecting several thousands of computers to a LAN can in theory be done using a star, a ring, or a bus topology. A star is obvious enough: every computer is connected to some central point. A bus consists of a single, long cable that computers connect to along its run. With a ring, a cable runs from the first computer to the second, from there to the third and so on until all participating systems are connected, and then the last is connected to the first, completing the ring.
Hackers can steal cryptographic keys by video-recording power LEDs 60 feet away
Researchers have devised a novel attack that recovers the secret encryption keys stored in smart cards and smartphones by using cameras in iPhones or commercial surveillance systems to video record power LEDs that show when the card reader or smartphone is turned on.
The attacks enable a new way to exploit two previously disclosed side channels, a class of attack that measures physical effects that leak from a device as it performs a cryptographic operation. By carefully monitoring characteristics such as power consumption, sound, electromagnetic emissions, or the amount of time it takes for an operation to occur, attackers can assemble enough information to recover secret keys that underpin the security and confidentiality of a cryptographic algorithm.
Side-channel exploitation made simple
As Wired reported in 2008, one of the oldest known side channels was in a top-secret encrypted teletype terminal that the US Army and Navy used during World War II to transmit communications that couldn’t be read by German and Japanese spies. To the surprise of the Bell Labs engineers who designed the terminal, it caused readings from a nearby oscilloscope each time an encrypted letter was entered. While the encryption algorithm in the device was sound, the electromagnetic emissions emanating from the device were enough to provide a side channel that leaked the secret key.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Monty
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Hovertext:
It turns out if you switch to the one that definitely for sure has a ferrari you might be worse off because there is information embedded in...
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Cooperation
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Hovertext:
Cooperation is when we hurt people together!
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Offensive AI
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I'm slightly regretting not having this as the twist ending to a comedic novel. Gimme a few years.
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One week until BEA WOLF DAY!
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Service
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This is just a big thank you to Bea Wolf buyers. We're already in our 3rd printing and it doesn't come out for a month. If you want a hardcover, lock it in soon - they're gorgeous :D
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Thanks y'all, I mean it. Here's one more heartmelting review:
"An instant classic. Like nothing I have ever seen. The unforgettable characters within Treeheart and their death-defying (and extremely funny) heroics now have a permanent place in my brain. This combination of impossibly charming art and boundlessly thrilling and hilarious text is a required addition to your family's library. I love this so much."
â Nathan Pyle
A history of ARM, part 2: Everything starts to come together
The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, had invented a powerful new computer chip, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Acorn released a new computer line, the Archimedes, that used these ARM chips. But the world wasn’t beating a path to the company's door. (Read part one here.)
From the beginning, it was hard to get anyone to care about this amazing technology. A few months after the first ARM chips had shipped, Acorn Computers' Steve Furber called a tech reporter and tried to get him to cover the story. The reporter replied, “I don’t believe you. If you’d been doing this, I’d have known.” Then he hung up.
As Acorn struggled, Furber tried to imagine how the ARM chip could be spun off into a separate company. But he couldn’t figure out how to make the business model work. “You’d have to sell millions before royalties start paying the bills,” he said in an interview. “We couldn’t imagine selling millions of these things.”
New AI tool colorizes black-and-white photos automatically [Updated]
DanielAmazing
A Swedish machine-learning researcher named Emil Wallner has released a free web tool called Palette.fm that automatically colorizes black-and-white photos using AI. After uploading a photo, users can choose a color filter or refine the colors using a written text description.
Palette.fm uses a deep-learning model to classify images, which guides its initial guesses for the colors of objects in a photo or illustration. We asked Wallner what kind of back-end technology runs the site, but he didn't go into specifics. "I’ve made a custom AI model that uses the image and text to generate a colorization," Wallner replied. "One model creates the text and the other takes the image and the text to generate the colorization."
After you upload an image, the site's sleek interface provides an estimated caption (description) of what it thinks it sees in the picture. If you don't like any of the preset color filters, you can click the pencil icon to edit the caption yourself, which guides the colorization model using a text prompt.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Adverbially
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Hovertext:
I worry this is one of those situations where I'm the only person in the room saying 'amIright??'
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