Taste The Television: TTTV

December 27, 2021 by 18 Comments

Associate Professor [Homei Miyashita] from Meiji University’s School of Science and Technology in Tokyo has developed a new technology for reproducing taste on a television or monitor, a system called Taste the TV (TTTV). The team of researchers used taste sensors to sample a variety of foods, and came up with a palette of 10 different aerosol flavors which can be combined in various ratios. The taste is generated in a staging area at the top of the screen onto a thin plastic film, which is then scrolled down into position.

Possible applications shown in the video below the break include cooking programs, restaurant menus, and wine tasting events. We’re not quite sure how popular this would be to consumers. Tele-tasting a cooking show with friends would be inconvenient, if not unsanitary. We’re also not aware that current video interface protocols such as HDMI or ATSC include any provisions for senses other than sight and sound. If you have access to scholarly journals, [Prof Miyashita] research paper on TTTV is available in the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

We’ve written about a couple of taste-generating projects before, see here and here.

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The ray tracer racer

Whipping Together A Little Ray Tracer Racer

December 27, 2021 by 11 Comments

When you hear raytracing, you might think of complex dark algorithms that to stare too long at their source code invites the beginning of madness. And you’re technically not far off from the truth, but [h3r2tic] put a small open-source ray tracing game demo up on GitHub. The actual rust code powering the game is relatively short (just four files), with the longest file being the physics file. But, of course, there is a small mountain of code under this sample in the form of libraries.

Kajiya, physx-rs, and dolly are the three libraries that make this little demo possible. Kajiya, in particular, is what makes raytracing possible as it uses the newer RTX features (so only more recent Nvidia and AMD cards are supported) and Vulkan bindings. But, of course, it isn’t wholly ray-traced as we are still several years out from proper real-time raytracing. Nevertheless, the blend between raytracing and traditional rasterization looks incredible. The most important thing about this simple tiny sample isn’t the game itself but what it stands for. It shows how easy it is to create a sample like this. Even just five years, creating a demo like this required massive effort and expertise.

Visually, it is stunning to look at. While the reflections are most apparent, the takeaway from this is the ease that real-time global illumination brings. A quick look through the code shows that there are very few lights in the scene, despite looking well lit with soft shadows. Traditional video games spend a significant amount of development time lighting a scene, placing additional lights, and tweaking them to make up for all the shortcuts that lighting has to take in a rasterized environment. As more and more games are built with raytracing in mind rather than tacked on at the end, we can ditch the small crumbling mountain of hacks that we are forced to use in games today and just rely on the rays to accurately light a scene.

If using a library for your raytracing seems too easy, perhaps you’d like to take on the challenge of raytracing in excel. Video after the break.

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It’s Printable, It’s Programmable, It’s E. Coli

December 27, 2021 by 11 Comments

Well, whaddya know? It seems that E. coli, the bane of Romaine and spinach everywhere, has at least one practical use. Researchers at Harvard have created a kind of 3D-printable ink that is alive and made entirely of microbes produced by E. coli. Although this is not the first so-called living ink, it does hold the title of the first living ink that doesn’t need any additional polymers to provide structure.

Passing the pillar test up to 16mm. Image via Nature

Because the ink is alive, it is technically programmable in the sense that it can self-assemble proteins into nanofibers, and further assemble those into nanofiber networks that comprise hydrogels.

One of the researchers compared the ink to a seed, which has everything it needs to eventually grow into a glorious tree. In this way, the ink could be used as a renewable building material both on Earth and in space. Though the ink does not continue to grow after being printed, the resulting structure would be a living system that could theoretically heal itself.

The ink creation process begins when the researchers induce genetically-engineered bacteria cultures to grow the ink, which is also made of living cells. The ink is then harvested and becomes gelatin-like, holding its shape well enough to go through a 3D printer. It even passes the bridging test, supporting its own weight between pillars placed up to 16 mm apart. (We’d like to see a Benchie.)

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RC3 2021: Now Here, Nowhere

December 27, 2021 by 6 Comments

The annual meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, Germany’s giant hacker group, is online again this year. While those of us here are sad that we don’t get to see our hacker friends in person, our loss is your gain — the whole thing is online for the entire world to enjoy.

This year’s Congress has gone entirely decentralized, with many local clubs hosting their own video streams and “stages”. Instead of four tracks, there are now six or seven tracks of talks going on simultaneously, so prepare to be overwhelmed by choice. You can find the overall schedule here, so if you see anything you’d like to watch, you’ll know when to tune in.

Like last year, there is also a parallel 2D simulation world, like Zelda with videoconferencing, but for which you’ll need a ticket, and they’re sold out. (Check out the demo video if you want to see what that’s about.) And what would a conference be without t-shirts, armbands, and even a sticker exchange? Or course, it all has to be done by mail, but you do what you can.

We’ll be keeping our eyes on the talks, and let you know if we see anything good. If you do the same, let us know in the comments!

The Label Says HDMI 2.1 But That Doesn’t Mean You’ll Get It

December 27, 2021 by 48 Comments

Technology moves quickly these days as consumers continue to demand more data and more pixels. We see regular updates to standards for USB and RAM continually coming down the pipeline as the quest for greater performance goes on.

HDMI 2.1 is the latest version of the popular audio-visual interface, and promises a raft of new features and greater performance than preceding versions of the standard. As it turns out, though, buying a new monitor or TV with an HDMI 2.1 logo on the box doesn’t mean you’ll get any of those new features, as discovered by TFT Central.

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First Hacks: The Brand New Nokia 5G Gateway Router

December 27, 2021 by 29 Comments

Aside from being the focus of a series of bizarre conspiracy theories, 5G cellular networks offer the promise of ultra-fast Internet access anywhere within their range. To that end there are a new breed of devices designed to provide home broadband using 5G as a backhaul. It’s one of these, a Nokia Fastmile, that [Eddie Zhang] received, and he’s found it to be an interesting teardown and investigation. Spoiler: it runs Android and has exploitable bugs.

A privilege escalation bug in the web administration tool led to gaining the ability to export and modify configuration files, but sadly though a telnet prompt can be opened it’s not much use without the password. Uncovering some blocked-off ports on the base of the unit revealed a USB-C port, which was found to connect to an Android device. Via ADB a shell could be opened on Android, but on further  investigation it was found that the Fastmile is not a single device but two separate ones. Inside is a PCB with an Android 5G phone to handle the connection, and another with a completely separate home router.

With access to the Android side and a login prompt on the router side that was as far as he was prepared to go without risking bricking his Fastmile. It only remained to do a teardown, which reveals the separate PCBs with their own heatsinks, and an impressive antenna array. Perhaps these devices will in time become as ubiquitous as old routers, and we’ll see them fully laid bare.

It’s a shame that we’ve had to write more about the conspiracy theories surrounding 5G than real 5G devices, but maybe we’ll see more teardowns like this one to make up for it.

Inspecting a SIM card via MTM

Diving The Depths Of Ma Bell

December 27, 2021 by 13 Comments

The modern smartphone is a marvel of sensors, radios, inputs, outputs, and processing power. In particular, some of those radios, such as WiFi and cellular, have grown fiendishly complex over the years. Even when that complexity is compressed down for the user into the one-dimensional space of the signal strength bars at the top of your phone. So when [David Burgess] was asked to look at some cellphone records of text messages and figure out where some of the more mysterious messages were coming from, it led him down a rabbit hole into the dark arts behind the glowing phone screen.

The number in question was 1111340002, sent by a phone connected to AT&T at the time, and was crucial for a legal case around distracted driving. [David’s] tools in his investigation were YateBTS (a cellular network simulator), SimTrace2 (pictured above), and old reliable Wireshark. Since the number isn’t a specific phone number and is not reachable from the public phone network, it must be a unique number inside AT&T processed by one particular AT&T SMSC (Short Message service center). The SMSC in question is in Atlanta and isn’t a typical texting center, so it must have some particular purpose. The message’s payload is raw binary rather than text, and [David] has done a pretty good job of decoding the majority of the format.

The most exciting revelation in this journey is that the phone (in the traditional sense) does not send this message. The processor on the phone does not know this message and executes no code to send it. Instead, the SIM card itself sends it. The SIM card is connected directly to the baseband processor on the phone, and the baseband polls the sim every so often, asking for any commands. One of those commands is an SMS (though many other commands have worrying consequences).

The SMS that [David] was chasing is triggered whenever a SIM detects a new IMEI, and the message lets the network know what about the previous and current IMEI. However, in the case of this message, it was unlikely that the SIM changed phones, so what happened? After some additional lab work and the deposition of an AT&T employee, [David] showed that a baseband firmware update would also trigger this SMS.

It’s a fascinating journey into the fragmented world of a smartphone’s minds and [David] does a fantastic job on the writeup. If you’re interested in sniffing wireless accessories, you will enjoy this soundbar’s wireless protocol laid bare.