Month: April 2023

Enlarge / We thank the curators and designers at the Strong Museum of Play for including a human-scale joystick set at ground level. While more accurate, the cabinet controls would offer terrible ergonomics. (credit: Strong Museum of Play)

Working with Nintendo, and perhaps the surreal dreams of emulation enthusiasts, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, intends to offer a nearly 20-foot-tall, yet playable, version of the 1981 classic Donkey Kong this summer.

The cabinet, built to barrel-tossing-gorilla scale, will be part of a $65 million, 90,000-foot expansion to the museum, due to open June 30, 2023. The museum, which also hosts the World Video Game Hall of Fame and contains some of the most fascinating objects of gaming history, intends to make the giga-cabinet "as authentically and true to the original game as possible," according to a press release.

The cabinet will be constructed from "an aluminum frame with MDF fiberboard." As is suggested by Strong's rendering, you won't be playing the game on a step stool or ladder, but using a human-scale, hip-height control panel from ground level. You can then be overcome with the vastness of the vertical construction worksite in which Donkey Kong holds court, whilst also holding Pauline. The game will run on "a motherboard from an original Donkey Kong cabinet," according to the Strong Museum.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of "a cyborg Twitter bird logo composed of thousands of computer chips." (credit: Midjourney)

Despite recently calling for a six-month pause in the development of powerful AI models, Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently purchased roughly 10,000 GPUs for a generative AI project within Twitter, reports Business Insider, citing people familiar with the company. The exact nature of the project, however, is still a mystery.

GPUs, or graphics processing units, are purpose-built chips originally designed for computer graphics, but their massively parallel designs make them ideal for doing generative AI processing as well. Training (creating) a new AI model usually requires a large amount of computing power, including many GPUs, which means that Musk's acquisition could represent a significant commitment toward developing a deep-learning AI model within Twitter.

In late February, The Information broke news that Musk had approached AI researchers to form a new AI lab to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, including former DeepMind researchers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss. Earlier, Musk had publicly complained about bias in OpenAI's products, saying they were too "woke." Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company after an internal disagreement in 2018.

Enlarge / NYC Mayor Eric Adams holds a press conference with members of the NYPD and Boston Dynamics' Spot. (credit: Michael Appleton/Office of the Mayor of New York City)

The New York Police Department is bringing back the idea of policing the city with robots. The department experimented with Boston Dynamics' Spot in 2021 and shut the project down after a public outcry from civil liberties groups. The idea is being brought back by NYC's new mayor, Eric Adams, who was elected in 2022 and described himself multiple times during the announcement as a "computer geek." Adams is a former NYPD captain and ran on a platform of reducing crime.

Most police departments already have an arsenal of robots, but they are usually for bomb disposal, not the day-to-day patrolling work that New York City envisions. Bomb disposal robots are usually just fancy remote-controlled cars—totally 'dumb' remote-control devices that have no automation and require one or several people to operate. NYC wants semi-autonomous robots patrolling the streets. Adams says, "If we were not willing to move forward and use technology on how to properly keep cities safe, then you will not keep up with those doing harmful things."

For active patrol work, the NYPD plans to deploy one Knightscope K5 robot. This is a 400-lb, 5-foot-tall wheeled robot that looks like a real-life giant R2-D2. The egg-shaped robot has no appendages and is mostly just a ball of sensors. It has a 360-degree camera system, a thermal camera, LiDAR, sonar, GPS, 16 microphones, and speakers to play back pre-recorded or live messages. It can autonomously patrol an area, detect people, and recognize license plates and has facial recognition, though the NYPD claims facial recognition will not be used. As a wheeled robot, it can only access ADA-compliant areas via ramps.

Artist's conception of the moment Flam_Hill realized they had won control over the EHE Corporation in Eve Online with just two votes. (credit: Disney / Gracie Films / Frinkiac)

Remember that early Simpsons episode where Martin wins the student body presidency over Bart because only two students bothered to vote? Eve Online played host to a similar situation recently as players took advantage of the game's arcane corporate voting system to give themselves full control of over an in-game corporation and an estimated $22,000 of in-game assets, all under the noses of absent corporate leadership.

How did no one notice?

User Flam_Hill laid out the mechanics of the election-based heist on Reddit. The start, Flam_Hill said, was simply an external observation of the staging area for Event Horizon Expeditionaires (EHE), a 299-member in-game corporation that dates back to 2011. That observation phase revealed the encouraging and crucial sign that the CEO and directors in charge of maintaining the corporation were "minimally active," as Flam_Hill put it.

With that information in hand, Flam_Hill used a "very clean account with a character with a little history" to apply for new membership in EHE. After weeks of waiting, corporate leadership finally logged in to perform some basic social/security checks and approve the applications for Flam_Hill and a confederate.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

By now, you’ve probably heard about a new AI-based password cracker that can compromise your password in seconds by using artificial intelligence instead of more traditional methods. Some outlets have called it "terrifying," "worrying," "alarming," and "savvy." Other publications have fallen over themselves to report that the tool can crack any password with up to seven characters—even if it has symbols and numbers—in under six minutes.

As with so many things involving AI, the claims are served with a generous portion of smoke and mirrors. PassGAN, as the tool is dubbed, performs no better than more conventional cracking methods. In short, anything PassGAN can do, these more tried and true tools do as well or better. And like so many of the non-AI password checkers Ars has criticized in the past—e.g., here, here, and here—the researchers behind PassGAN draw password advice from their experiment that undermines real security.

Teaching a machine to crack

PassGAN is a shortened combination of the words "Password" and "generative adversarial networks." PassGAN is an approach that debuted in 2017. It uses machine learning algorithms running on a neural network in place of conventional methods devised by humans. These GANs generate password guesses after autonomously learning the distribution of passwords by processing the spoils of previous real-world breaches. These guesses are used in offline attacks made possible when a database of password hashes leaks as a result of a security breach.