> This talk shows how two bugs involving somewhat narrow-looking race windows (https://crbug.com/project-zero/1695 in the Linux kernel, https://crbug.com/project-zero/1741 in Android userspace code) can be stretched wide enough to win the race conditions on a Google Pixel 2 phone, running a Linux 4.4 kernel, by making use of the unprivileged sched_*() syscalls.

source: grugq

> It has taken many months, but I was finally able to make a decent aerogel!

I think I’ll stick with watching videos instead of making my own.

> In January 2018, the world learned about Spectre and Meltdown, a new class of issues that affects virtually all modern CPUs via nearly imperceptible changes to their micro-architectural states and can result in full access to physical RAM or leaking of state between threads, processes, or guests. In this session, we examine one of these side-channel attacks in detail and explore the implications for multi-tenant computing. We discuss AWS design decisions and what AWS does to protect your instances, containers, and function invocations. Finally, we discuss what the future looks like in the presence of this new class of issue.

This is a good recap. Specific defenses starts around 42:00.

> The goal of this talk is to broaden the awareness of the how and why container escapes work, starting from a brief intro to what makes a process a container, and then spanning the gamut of escape techniques, covering exposed orchestrators, access to the Docker socket, exposed mount points, /proc, all the way down to overwriting/exploiting the kernel structures to leave the confines of the container.

source: white

Hand drawn animation.

source: K

> Today at 14:52 I will be exactly 1 billion seconds old. To celebrate I build this machine that visualizes the number googol. That’s a 1 with a hundred zeros. A number that’s bigger than the atoms in the known universe. This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a hundred times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a google amount around. Or better said you’ll need more energy than the entire known universe has to do that. That boggles my mind.

source: K

10 short optical illusion videos.

source: HN

> The full Proceedings published by USENIX for the conference are available for download below. Individual papers can also be downloaded from the presentation page.

> Penn told this story and it provided a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the difference between recollection/a story VS the real event as there was video of the event.

I liked this a lot. It’s a pretty good story, first of all. Penn’s version is believable and essentially accurate, but suffers from a few discrepancies.

> In this paper, we introduce a framework that synthesizes the 3D Ken Burns effect from a single image, supporting both a fully automatic mode and an interactive mode with the user controlling the camera. Our framework first leverages a depth prediction pipeline, which estimates scene depth that is suitable for view synthesis tasks. To address the limitations of existing depth estimation methods such as geometric distortions, semantic distortions, and inaccurate depth boundaries, we develop a semantic-aware neural network for depth prediction, couple its estimate with a segmentation-based depth adjustment process, and employ a refinement neural network that facilitates accurate depth predictions at object boundaries. According to this depth estimate, our framework then maps the input image to a point cloud and synthesizes the resulting video frames by rendering the point cloud from the corresponding camera positions. To address disocclusions while maintaining geometrically and temporally coherent synthesis results, we utilize context-aware color- and depth-inpainting to fill in the missing information in the extreme views of the camera path, thus extending the scene geometry of the point cloud.

source: HN

As advertised.

source: K

Photo slideshow. 20 minutes.

source: K

Motorbikes in Taiwan. 3:27.

source: K

> Here Grows New York visually animates the development of this city’s street grid and infrastructure systems from 1609 to the present day, using geo-referenced road network data, historic maps, and geological surveys. The resulting short film presents a series of “cartographic snapshots” of the built-up area at intervals of every 20-30 years in the city’s history. This process highlights the organic spurts of growth and movement that typify New York’s and most cities’ development through time. The result is an abstract representation of urbanism.

source: K

> To prepare for the project, Quixel spent a month in cold and wet locations in Iceland, scanning all kinds of objects found in the natural environment using. The team returned with over 1,000 scans that captured the details of the landscape.

This looks great, but no mention of hardware or frame rates? Not sure when you’ll be seeing this on your desktop.

source: K

> The first video is the project itself, a weird self-explanatory joke, and the second one is a longer explanation of some of the technical stuff and the process that I went through to create it. Of course, up to you, but I think both have something to offer for the audience that reads Tom 7 Radar. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTlNVUmBA28

https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/tom-murphy-vii-improper-hierarchy

> Contemporary science fiction often feels fixated on a sort of pessimism that peers into the world of tomorrow and sees the apocalypse looming more often than not. At a time when simply reading the news is an exercise in exhaustion, anxiety, and fear, it’s no surprise that so many of our tales about the future are dark amplifications of the greatest terrors of the present. But now more than ever, we also need the reverse: stories that inspire hope.

> That’s why, starting on January 14th, we’ll be publishing Better Worlds: 10 original fiction stories, five animated adaptations, and five audio adaptations by a diverse roster of science fiction authors who take a more optimistic view of what lies ahead in ways both large and small, fantastical and everyday.

> Castle’s team faced a considerable number of challenges in bringing the cinematic world of Blade Runner to life using the technologies of the day, most of which stemmed from having to invent, from whole cloth, a way to seamlessly mesh their pre-rendered world with animated voxel characters (it turned out to be vastly more complicated than simply sticking a sprite in front of the background). Tackling this issue introduced an entire interconnected tapestry of difficult problems to solve, very few of which are faced by modern developers who can pick from ready-made game engines to license and use.

10 minutes.

Transcript: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/blade_runner_game.txt

> We’ll describe the ideas and implementation behind Oneliner-izer, a “”compiler“” which can convert most Python 2 programs into one line of code. As we discuss how to construct each language feature within this unorthodox constraint, we’ll explore the boundaries of what Python permits and encounter some gems of functional programming – lambda calculus, continuations, and the Y combinator.

> Lets take the camera absolutely anywhere we want to learn more about the third Fallout game!