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Category: computing – Page 449

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there’s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into – and the 2513N 5×7 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these (Twitter, ThreadReader link), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted inside of the package. A Twitter dopamine-fueled quest for truth has led them to try their hand at making the chip work anyway. Trying to clear the short with an external PSU led to a bond wire popping instead, as evidenced by the ESD diode connection disappearing.

A dozen minutes of sandpaper work resulted in the bare die exposed, making quick work of the bond wires as a side effect. Apparently, having the bond pads a bit too close has resulted in a factory defect where two of the pads merged together. No wonder the PSU wouldn’t take that on! Some X-acto work later, the short was cleared. But without the bond wires, how would [TubeTime] connect to it? This is where the work pictured comes in. Soldering to the remains of the bond wires has proven to be fruitful, reviving the chip enough to continue investigating, even if, it appears, it was never functional to begin with. The thread continued on with comparing ROMs from a few different chips [TubeTime] had on hand and inferences on what could’ve happened that led to this IC going out in the wild.

Such soldering experiments are always fun to try and pull off! We rarely see soldering on such a small scale, as thankfully, it’s not always needed, but it’s a joy to witness when someone does IC or PCB microsurgery to fix factory defects that render our devices inoperable before they were even shipped. Each time that a fellow hacker dares to grind the IC epoxy layers down and save a game console or an unidentified complex board, the world gets a little brighter. And if you aren’t forced to do it for repair reasons, you can always try it in an attempt to build the smallest NES in existence!

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That is not to say that the advantage has been proven yet. The quantum algorithm developed by IBM performed comparably to classical methods on the limited quantum processors that exist today – but those systems are still in their very early stages.

And with only a small number of qubits, today’s quantum computers are not capable of carrying out computations that are useful. They also remain crippled by the fragility of qubits, which are highly sensitive to environmental changes and are still prone to errors.

Rather, IBM and CERN are banking on future improvements in quantum hardware to demonstrate tangibly, and not only theoretically, that quantum algorithms have an advantage.

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Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There’s a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

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In recent years, computer-generated animations of animals and humans have become increasingly detailed and realistic. Nonetheless, producing convincing animations of a character’s face as it’s talking remains a key challenge, as it typically entails the successful combination of a series of different audio and video elements.

A team of computer scientists at TCS Research in India has recently created a new model that can produce highly realistic talking face animations that integrate audio recordings with a character’s head motions. This model, introduced in a paper presented at ICVGIP 2021, the twelfth Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, could be used to create more convincing virtual avatars, digital assistants, and animated movies.

“For a pleasant viewing experience, the perception of realism is of utmost importance, and despite recent research advances, the generation of a realistic talking face remains a challenging research problem,” Brojeshwar Bhowmick, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Alongside accurate lip synchronization, realistic talking face animation requires other attributes of realism such as natural eye blinks, head motions and preserving identity information of arbitrary target faces.”

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Drilling with the beam of an electron microscope, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory precisely machined tiny electrically conductive cubes that can interact with light and organized them in patterned structures that confine and relay light’s electromagnetic signal. This demonstration is a step toward potentially faster computer chips and more perceptive sensors.

The seeming wizardry of these structures comes from the ability of their surfaces to support collective waves of electrons, called plasmons, with the same frequency as but with much tighter confinement. The light-guiding structures are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter—100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

“These nanoscale cube systems allow extreme confinement of light in specific locations and tunable control of its energy,” said ORNL’s Kevin Roccapriore, first author of a study published in the journal Small. “It’s a way to connect signals with very different length scales.”

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Topics include the prospects of technological acceleration, Metaverse development and immersive computing, transcendence and cybernetic immortality, neurotechnologies and mind uploading, outer and inner space exploration, Global Mind and phase transition of humanity, physics of time and information, consciousness, evolutionary cybernetics, Chrysalis conjecture and Transcension hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence and cyberhumanity, transhumanism and singularity, Fermi Paradox, Omega Point cosmology, Cybernetic Theory of Mind, and more. https://www.ecstadelic.net/e_news/metaverse-news-network-liv…x-vikoulov #Metaverse #Singularity #Transhumanism #Transcension #Futurism #Cybernetics #SyntellectHypothesis #AlexVikoulov

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Time crystals. Microwaves. Diamonds. What do these three disparate things have in common?

Quantum computing. Unlike traditional computers that use bits, quantum computers use qubits to encode information as zeros or ones, or both at the same time. Coupled with a cocktail of forces from quantum physics, these refrigerator-sized machines can process a whole lot of information — but they’re far from flawless. Just like our regular computers, we need to have the right programming languages to properly compute on quantum computers.

Programming quantum computers requires awareness of something called “entanglement,” a computational multiplier for qubits of sorts, which translates to a lot of power. When two qubits are entangled, actions on one qubit can change the value of the other, even when they are physically separated, giving rise to Einstein’s characterization of “spooky action at a distance.” But that potency is equal parts a source of weakness. When programming, discarding one qubit without being mindful of its entanglement with another qubit can destroy the data stored in the other, jeopardizing the correctness of the program.

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Last fall, Texas Governor Greg Abbott gathered dozens of cryptocurrency deal makers in Austin where they discussed an idea that, on its face, seemed almost upside down: Electricity-hungry Bitcoin miners could shore up the state’s power grid, a top priority after a deep freeze last winter triggered blackouts that left hundreds dead.

The industry’s advocates have been making that pitch to the governor for years. The idea is that the miners’ computer arrays would demand so much electricity that someone would come along to build more power plants, something Texas badly needs. If the grid starts to go wobbly, as it did when winter storm Uri froze up power plants in February 2021, miners could quickly shut down to conserve energy for homes and businesses. At least two Bitcoin miners have already volunteered to do just that.

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