River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up

 https://river-runner.samlearner.com/

Teardown of a PC power supply

 https://www.righto.com/2021/05/teardown-of-pc-power-supply.html

You might wonder how the controller chip on the primary side receives feedback about the voltage levels on the secondary side, since there is no electrical connection between the two sides. (In the photo above, you can see the wide gap separating the two sides.) The trick is a clever chip called the opto-isolator. Internally, one side of the chip contains an infra-red LED. The other side of the chip contains a light-sensitive photo-transistor. The feedback signal on the secondary side is sent into the LED, and the signal is detected by the photo-transistor on the primary side. Thus, the opto-isolator provides a bridge between the secondary side and the primary side, communicating by light instead of electricity.

Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate

 https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/try-this-one-weird-trick-russian-hackers-hate/

DarkSide and other Russian-language affiliate moneymaking programs have long barred their criminal associates from installing malicious software on computers in a host of Eastern European countries, including Ukraine and Russia. This prohibition dates back to the earliest days of organized cybercrime, and it is intended to minimize scrutiny and interference from local authorities.

In Russia, for example, authorities there generally will not initiate a cybercrime investigation against one of their own unless a company or individual within the country’s borders files an official complaint as a victim. Ensuring that no affiliates can produce victims in their own countries is the easiest way for these criminals to stay off the radar of domestic law enforcement agencies.

 

DarkSide, like a great many other malware strains, has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries which are the principal members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — former Soviet satellites that all currently have favorable relations with the Kremlin, including Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Romania, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. The full exclusion list in DarkSide (published by Cybereason) is below:

Simply put, countless malware strains will check for the presence of one of these languages on the system, and if they’re detected the malware will exit and fail to install.

An A.I. Finally Won an Elite Crossword Tournament

 https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/american-crossword-puzzle-tournament-dr-fill-artificial-intelligence.html

Steam's login method is kinda interesting

 https://owlspace.xyz/cybersec/steam-login/

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float

 https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html

Predicting Hard Drive Failure with Machine Learning

 https://datto.engineering/post/predicting-hard-drive-failure-with-machine-learning

 

 

Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2

 https://bert.org/2021/01/04/t2-pin-cracking/

Gaia’s stellar motion for the next 1.6 million years

 

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/edr3-startrails

The stars are constantly moving across the sky. Known as proper motion, this motion is imperceptible to the unaided eye but is being measured with increasing precision by Gaia. This animation shows the proper motions of 40 000 stars, all located within 100 parsecs (326 light years) of the Solar System. The animation begins with the stars in their current positions; the brightness of each dot representing the brightness of the star it represents.

As the animation begins, the trails grow, showing how the stars will change position over the next 80,000 years. Short trails indicate that the star is moving more slowly across the sky, whereas long trails indicate faster motion. To avoid the animation becoming too difficult to interpret, the oldest parts of the trails are erased to only show the newer parts of the stellar motions into the future.

Sometimes it appears as if a star is accelerating (as indicated by a longer trail). This is due to the star getting closer to us. Proper motion is a measure of angular velocity, which means that close-by stars appear to move more quicker across the sky even when their speed is the same as that of other, more distant stars.

Towards the end of the animation, the stars appear to congregate on the right side of the image, leaving the left side emptier. This is an artefact and is caused by the average motion of the Solar System with respect to the surrounding stars.

The animation ends by showing star trails for 400 thousand years into the future.

Cameras and Lenses

 https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/

Over the course of this article we’ll build a simple camera from first principles. Our first steps will be very modest – we’ll simply try to take any picture. To do that we need to have a sensor capable of detecting and measuring light that shines onto it.