Category Archives: news

Artificial Intelligence at the Top of a Professional Sport

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

The lights dim and the music swells as an elite competitor in a silk robe passes through a cheering crowd to take the ring. It’s a blueprint familiar to boxing, only this pugilist won’t be throwing punches.

OpenAI created an AI bot that has beaten the best players in the world at this year’s International championship. The International is an esports competition held annually for Dota 2, one of the most competitive multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games.

Each match of the International consists of two 5-player teams competing against each other for 35-45 minutes. In layman’s terms, it is …read more

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Posted in ai, competition, Current Events, dota2, Elon Musk, esport, Featured, Interest, machine learning, neural network, news, openai, Original Art, Software Development, video game | Leave a comment

About That Giant Robot Battle Last Night

Posted on October 18, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Two years ago we wrote about a giant robot battle between the USA and Japan. After two years in the making, MegaBots (team USA) and Suidobashi (team Japan) were finally ready for the first giant robot fight. If you are into battle bots, you probably did not miss the fight that happened around 7:00 pm PST. If you missed it, you can watch the whole thing here.

There were two duels. First it was Iron Glory (MkII) vs. Kuratas, and after that it was Eagle Prime (MkIII) vs. Kuratas.

Be warned, spoilers ahead.

Or not that much. The first combat …read more

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Posted in battlebots, mech, megabots, news, robots hacks, suidobashi | Leave a comment

Bad RSA Library Leaves Millions of Keys Vulnerable

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

So, erm… good news everyone! A vulnerability has been found in a software library responsible for generating RSA key pairs used in hardware chips manufactured by Infineon Technologies AG. The vulnerability, dubbed ROCA, allows for an attacker, via a Coppersmith’s attack, to compute the private key starting with nothing more than the public key, which pretty much defeats the purpose of asymmetric encryption altogether.

Affected hardware includes cryptographic smart cards, security tokens, and other secure hardware chips produced by Infineon Technologies AG. The library with the vulnerability is also integrated in authentication, signature, and encryption tokens of other vendors and …read more

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Posted in encryption, factorization, news, ROCA, rsa, security, security hacks | Leave a comment

Carbon Quantum Dots in Your Favorite Color

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Citizen scientist extraordinaire [Thought Emporium] put out a new video about colorful quantum dots which can be seen below the break. Quantum dots are a few nanometers wide and you can tell which size they are by which color they fluoresce. Their optical and electrical properties vary proportionally with size so red will behave differently than purple but we doubt they will taste like “cherry” and  “grape.” Let’s not find out. This makes sense when you realize that a diamond will turn into black powder if you pulverize it. Carbon is funny like that.

[Thought Emporium] uses the video for …read more

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Posted in carbon, carbon dots, carbon quantum dots, chemistry hacks, color, dots, news, pigment, quantum | Leave a comment

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and encourage women in the fields of science and technology. The day is named after Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, born Byron. (You can see why we just call her Ada Lovelace.) She was a brilliant mathematician, and the writer of what’s probably the first real computer program — it computed the Bernoulli series. At least according Charles Babbage, in correspondence to Michael Faraday, she was an “enchanted math fairy”. Not only a proto-coder, she wrote almost all of the existing documentation about Babbage’s computation engine. She’s a stellar example …read more

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Posted in Ada Lovelace, ada lovelace day, Featured, Interest, Marie Curie, news, science, slider, superheroes, women, women in technology | Leave a comment

Project Loon Will Float LTE to Puerto Rico

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Some of the biggest names in technology have offered their help in rebuilding Puerto Rico’s infrastructure. The newest name on the list? The X division of Alphabet, who want to help fill the huge communications gap using Project Loon, their high-altitude balloon network. It looks like X is going to get their wish, as they have just been granted license from the FCC to deploy LTE cell coverage to both Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

The plan is to launch 30 balloons that will act as a network of floating cell towers to radiate an LTE signal originating …read more

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Posted in high altitude balloon, LTE, news, puerto rico, stratosphere | Leave a comment

SpiderMAV Drone Shoots Webs To Perch And Stabilize

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Introducing your friendly neighborhood SpiderMAV, a micro aerial vehicle that shoots webbing to enable it to hang from ceilings and stabilize itself horizontally using low power. It’s inspired by the Darwin’s bark spider that spins a circular web with anchor lines up to 25 meters (82 feet) long.

For the DJI Matrice 100 drone to hang from a ceiling, a compressed gas cylinder fires a magnet with a trailing polystyrene line up to a steel beam. The line can then be reeled in to the desired length. For horizontal stabilization, line-trailing magnets are fired horizontally instead and then reeled in …read more

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Review: New 3G and Cat-M1 Cellular Hardware from Hologram

Posted on October 5, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

In July we reported on the launch of the Hologram developer program that offered a free SIM card and a small amount of monthly cellular data for those who wanted to build connectivity into their prototypes. Today, Hologram has launched some new hardware to go along with that program.

Nova is a cellular modem in a USB thumb drive form factor. It ships in a little box with a PCB that hosts the u-blox cellular module, two different antennas, a plastic enclosure, and a SIM card. The product is aimed at those building connected devices around single-board computers, making it …read more

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Posted in 3g, Cat-M1, Cellphone Hacks, cellular modem, Featured, hologram, Hologram nova, Hologram.io, LTE, news, NoVA, reviews, u-blox, wireless hacks | Leave a comment

Get Hands-On at Supercon: Workshop Tickets Now Available

Posted on October 2, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Build something cool and pick up new skills from the workshops at the Hackaday Superconference. Last week we announced all of the talks you’ll find at Supercon, and starting today you can reserve your spot at one of the workshops.

You must have a Superconference ticket in order to purchase a workshop ticket; buy one right now if you haven’t already. You can get mechanical with Haptics and Animatronics, take your product design from schematic to PCB and enclosure, brush up your embedded development on several choices of platform, make cell towers do your bidding, or dump way too many …read more

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Posted in 2017 Hackaday Superconference, cons, Hackaday Columns, hands on, news, Supercon, Superconference, tickets, workshops | Leave a comment

FM Snake Feeds Off Radio Waves

Posted on October 2, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

[Eric Brasseur] built a radio-detecting snake that consists of a LED that lights up when around reasonably strong radio waves. Near an FM radio mast you’ll find a huge amount of waste energy being dumped out in the 88 to 108 MHz range.

[Eric]’s rig consists of a pair of 1N6263 Schottky diodes, flip-flopped with one set of ends soldered to the antenna and the other ends soldered to the leads of the LED with about a foot of wire in between. The antenna can be a single wire as the diodes are soldered together. This one is around 4 …read more

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Posted in antenna, fm radio, led, news, schottky diode | Leave a comment