Daily Archives: March 4, 2021

Volumetric OLED Display Shows Bladerunner Vibe, Curious Screen Tech

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Sean Hodgins] is out with his latest video and it’s a piece of art in itself. Beyond a traditional project show and tell, he’s spun together a cyberpunk vibe to premiere the volumetric display he built from an OLED stackup.

The trick of a volumetric display is the ability to add a third dimension for positioning pixels. Here [Sean] delivered that ability with a stack up of ten screens to add a depth element. This is not such an easy trick. These small OLED displays are all over the place but they share a common element: a dark background over which the pixels appear. [Sean] has gotten his hands on some transparent OLED panels and with some Duck-Duck-Go-Fu we think it’s probably a Crystalfontz 128×56 display. Why is it we don’t see more of these? Anyone know if it’s possible to remove the backing from other OLED displays to get here. (Let us know in the comments.)

The rest of the built is fairly straight-forward with a Feather M4 board driving the ten screens via SPI, and an MPU-6050 IMU for motion input. The form factor lends an aesthetic of an augmented reality device and the production approach for the video puts this in a Bladerunner or Johnny Mneumonic universe. Kudos for expanding the awesome of the build with an implied backstory!

If you can’t find your own transparent displays, spinning things are a popular trend in this area. We just saw one last week that spun an LED matrix to form cylindrical display. Another favorite of ours is a volumetric display that spins a helix-shaped projection screen.

Source: Volumetric OLED Display Shows Bladerunner Vibe, Curious Screen Tech | Hackaday

Bag maker Peak Design calls out Amazon for its copycat ways

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Amazon is well-known for its copycat ways, but it’s not so often that another company calls it out on it, much less in a way that’s funny. But that’s exactly what Peak Design did today when it uploaded a video to YouTube comparing its Everyday Sling to a camera bag from AmazonBasics that shares the exact same name.

“It looks suspiciously like the Peak Design Everyday Sling, but you don’t pay for all those needless bells and whistles,” the video’s narrator declares. Those extras include things like a lifetime warranty, BlueSign approved recycled materials, as well as the time and effort the company’s design team put into creating the bag.

In its most on-the-nose jab at Amazon, the video includes a “dramatization” of how the AmazonBasics design team created their take on the bag. “Keep combing that data,” a googly-eyed executive tells his subordinate, who’s played here by Peak Design founder and CEO Peter Dering. “Let’s Basic that bad boy,” they say after finding the Everyday Sling.

Source: Bag maker Peak Design calls out Amazon for its copycat ways | Engadget

RAWGraphs releases version 2

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RAW Graphs is an open source data visualization framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone.

Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW Graphs aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch).

The project, led and maintained by the DensityDesign Research Lab (Politecnico di Milano) was released publicly in 2013 and is regarded by many as one of the most important tools in the field of data visualization.

Source: About | RAWGraphs

Posted in Art

Hackers exploit websites to give them excellent SEO before deploying malware

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According to Sophos, the so-called search engine “deoptimization” method includes both SEO tricks and the abuse of human psychology to push websites that have been compromised up Google’s rankings.

[…]

In a blog post on Monday, the cybersecurity team said the technique, dubbed “Gootloader,” involves deployment of the infection framework for the Gootkit Remote Access Trojan (RAT) which also delivers a variety of other malware payloads.

The use of SEO as a technique to deploy Gootkit RAT is not a small operation. The researchers estimate that a network of servers — 400, if not more — must be maintained at any given time for success.

[…]

Websites compromised by Gootloader are manipulated to answer specific search queries. Fake message boards are a constant theme in hacked websites observed by Sophos, in which “subtle” modifications are made to “rewrite how the contents of the website are presented to certain visitors.”

“If the right conditions are met (and there have been no previous visits to the website from the visitor’s IP address), the malicious code running server-side redraws the page to give the visitor the appearance that they have stumbled into a message board or blog comments area in which people are discussing precisely the same topic,” Sophos says.

If the attackers’ criteria aren’t met, the browser will display a seemingly-normal web page — that eventually dissolves into garbage text.

[…]

Victims who click on the direct download links will receive a .zip archive file, named in relation to the search term, that contains a .js file.

The .js file executes, runs in memory, and obfuscated code is then decrypted to call other payloads.

According to Sophos, the technique is being used to spread the Gootkit banking Trojan, Kronos, Cobalt Strike, and REvil ransomware, among other malware variants, in South Korea, Germany, France, and the United States.

“At several points, it’s possible for end-users to avoid the infection, if they recognize the signs,” the researchers say. “The problem is that, even trained people can easily be fooled by the chain of social engineering tricks Gootloader’s creators use. Script blockers like NoScript for Firefox could help a cautious web surfer remain safe by preventing the initial replacement of the hacked web page to happen, but not everyone uses those tools.”

[…]

Source: Hackers exploit websites to give them excellent SEO before deploying malware | ZDNet

ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His ‘Background’

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Peter Sunde was one of the key people behind The Pirate Bay in the early years, a role for which he was eventually convicted in Sweden.

While Sunde cut his ties with the notorious torrent site many years ago, he remains an active and vocal personality on the Internet.

[…]

Sunde is also involved with the domain registrar Sarek, which caters to technology enthusiasts and people who are interested in a fair and balanced Internet, promising low prices for domain registrations

As a business, everything was going well for Sarek. The company made several deals with domain registries to offer cheap domains but there is one element that’s missing. To resell the most popular domains, including .com and .org, it has to be accredited by ICANN.

ICANN is the main oversight body for the Internet’s global domain name system. Among other things, it develops policies for accredited registrars to prevent abuse and illegal use of domain names. Without this accreditation, reselling several popular domains simply isn’t an option.

ICANN Denies Accreditation

Sunde and the Sarek team hoped to overcome this hurdle and started the ICANN accreditation process in 2019. After a long period of waiting, the organization recently informed Sunde that his application was denied.

[…]

“After the background check I get a reply that I’ve checked the wrong boxes,” Sunde wrote. “Not only that, but they’re also upset I was wanted by Interpol.”

The Twitter thread didn’t go unnoticed by ICANN who contacted Sunde over the phone to offer clarification. As it turns out, the ‘wrong box’ issue isn’t the main problem, as he explains in a follow-up Twitter thread.

“I got some sort of semi-excuse regarding their claim that I lied on my application. They also said that they agreed it wasn’t fraud or similar really. So both of the points they made regarding the denial were not really the reason,” Sunde clarifies.

ICANN is Not Comfortable With Sunde

Over the phone, ICANN explained that the matter was discussed internally. This unnamed group of people concluded that the organization is ‘not comfortable’ doing business with him.

“They basically admitted that they don’t like me. They’ve banned me for nothing else than my political views. This is typical discrimination. Considering I have no one to appeal to except them, it’s concerning, since they control the actual fucking center of the internet.”

[…]

Making matters worse, ICANN will also keep the registration fee, so this whole ordeal is costing money as well.

Source: ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His ‘Background’ * TorrentFreak

Yup. ICANN. It’s an autocracy run by no-one but themselves. This is clearly visible in their processes, which almost led to the whole .org TLD being sold off for massive profit (.org is not for profit!) to an ex board member.

SpaceX Mars prototype rocket nails landing for the first time – then explodes

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SpaceX rocket prototype, known as SN10, soared over South Texas during test flight Wednesday before swooping down to a pinpoint landing near its launch site. Approximately three minutes after landing, however, multiple independent video feeds showed the rocket exploding on its landing pad.

SpaceX’s SN10, an early prototype of the company’s Starship Mars rocket, took off around 5:15 pm CT and climbed about six miles over the coastal landscape, mimicking two previous test flights SpaceX has conducted that ended in an explosive crash. Wednesday marked the first successful landing for a Starship prototype.
“We’ve had a successful soft touch down on the landing pad,” SpaceX engineer John Insprucker said during a livestream of the event. “That’s capping a beautiful test flight of Starship 10.”
It was unclear what caused the rocket to explode after landing, and the SpaceX livestream cut out before the conflagration.
[…]

Source: SpaceX aborts Mars prototype rocket nails landing for the first time – CNN

No wonder that Japanese businessman is trying to give away his tickets to space on Musk’s explody rides

How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (GTA fix JSON handler pls)

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[…]

tl;dr

  • There’s a single thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA Online
  • It turns out GTA struggles to parse a 10MB JSON file
  • The JSON parser itself is poorly built / naive and
  • After parsing there’s a slow item de-duplication routine

R* please fix

If this somehow reaches Rockstar: the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve. Please do something about it :<

You could either switch to a hashmap for the de-duplication or completely skip it on startup as a faster fix. For the JSON parser – just swap out the library for a more performant one. I don’t think there’s any easier way out.

Source: How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%