Tootfinder

I have a brief story to tell: Earlier this week, a large DDoS attack against 2 out of our larger set of #Tor (@…) relays - which also act as stable HSDir nodes - has managed to partially interrupt Internet traffic for the whole #JKULinz. While the attack was not huge compared to others (peak traffic around 3-4 Gbit/s, well above 1M PPS), we suspect either a nation state actor or fairly well-funded organization for 3 reasons:
* The attack was more advanced than simply saturating the upstream with bandwidth/packets, but had proper handshakes with the Tor relays, trying to cause resource exhaustion on the application level (we have seen this pattern multiple times in the last 6 months, but this one was much more massive in terms of incoming packets).
* The attack was very targeted, affecting only 2 IPs out of 25, consistently over some time. This indicates that either the position in the HSDir or specific connections or hidden services that were relayed over those nodes were the target - but note that these are only guesses, we don't have hard data on the motivation of this targeting.
* The only motivations that come to mind are either de-anonymization attacks or take-downs of particular hidden services. These do not seem to be relevant for usual ransom DDoS botnet attackers, but more for political reasons.
We have some flow data and would be interested in doing more analysis. Any ideas or correlation with other data on Tor relay attacks welcome :)
CC @…

Fires in the deep: The luminosity distribution of early-time gamma-ray-burst afterglows in light of the Gamow Explorer sensitivity requirements
D. A. Kann, N. E. White, G. Ghirlanda, S. R. Oates, A. Melandri, M. Jelinek, A. de Ugarte Postigo, A. J. Levan, A. Martin-Carrillo, G. S. -H. Paek, L. Izzo, M. Blazek, C. Thone, J. F. Agui Fernandez, R. Salvaterra, N. R. Tanvir, T. -C. Chang, P. O'Brien, A. Rossi, D. A. Perley, M. Im, D. B. Malesani, A. Antonelli, S. Covino, C. Choi, P. D…

Fires in the deep: The luminosity distribution of early-time gamma-ray-burst afterglows in light of the Gamow Explorer sensitivity requirements
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are ideal probes of the Universe at high redshift (z > 5), pinpointing the locations of the earliest star-forming galaxies and providing bright backlights that can be used to spectrally fingerprint the intergalactic medium and host galaxy during the period of reionization. Future missions such as Gamow Explorer are being proposed to unlock this potential by increasing the rate of identification of high-z GRBs to rapidly trigger observations from 6-10 m ground telescopes,…

Ultraviolet Positioning via TDOA: Error Analysis and System Prototype
Shihui Yu, Chubing Lv, Yueke Yang, Yuchen Pan, Lei Sun, Yubo Zhang, Juliang Cao, Ruihang Yu, Chen Gong, Wenqi Wu, Zhengyuan Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19013

Ultraviolet Positioning via TDOA: Error Analysis and System Prototype
This work performs the design, real-time hardware realization, and experimental evaluation of a positioning system by ultra-violet (UV) communication under photon-level signal detection. The positioning is based on time-difference of arrival (TDOA) principle. Time division-based transmission of synchronization sequence from three transmitters with known positions is applied. We investigate the positioning error via decomposing it into two parts, the transmitter-side timing error and the receive…

On metric equivalence of the Brieskorn-Pham hypersurfaces
Alexandre Fernandes, Zbigniew Jelonek, Jos\'e Edson Sampaio
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06922 …

On metric equivalence of the Brieskorn-Pham hypersurfaces
We show that two bi-Lipschitz equivalent Brieskorn-Pham hypersurfaces have the same multiplicities at $0$. Moreover we show that if two algebraic $(n-1)$-dimensional cones $P, R\subset\mathbb C^n$ with isolated singularities are homeomorphic, then they have the same degree.

MetaSplit: Meta-Split Network for Limited-Stock Product Recommendation
Wenhao Wu, Jialiang Zhou, Ailong He, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen, Bo Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06747

MetaSplit: Meta-Split Network for Limited-Stock Product Recommendation
Compared to business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce systems, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce platforms usually encounter the limited-stock problem, that is, a product can only be sold one time in a C2C system. This poses several unique challenges for click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Due to limited user interactions for each product (i.e. item), the corresponding item embedding in the CTR model may not easily converge. This makes the conventional sequence modeling based approaches cannot…

Change Point Detection in Dynamic Graphs with Generative Model
Yik Lun Kei, Jialiang Li, Hangjian Li, Yanzhen Chen, Oscar Hernan Madrid Padilla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04719

Change Point Detection in Dynamic Graphs with Generative Model
This paper proposes a simple generative model to detect change points in time series of graphs. The proposed framework consists of learnable prior distributions for low-dimensional graph representations and of a decoder that can generate dynamic graphs from the latent representations. The informative prior distributions in the latent spaces are learned from observed data as empirical Bayes, and the expressive power of a generative model is exploited to assist change point detection. Specificall…

Stochastic partial differential equations for superprocesses in random environments
Jieliang Hong, Jie Xiong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03638 https://

Stochastic partial differential equations for superprocesses in random environments
Let $X=(X_t, t\geq 0)$ be a superprocess in a random environment described by a Gaussian noise $W^g=\{W^g(t,x), t\geq 0, x\in \mathbb{R}^d\}$ white in time and colored in space with correlation kernel $g(x,y)$. We show that when $d=1$, $X_t$ admits a jointly continuous density function $X_t(x)$ that is a unique in law solution to a stochastic partial differential equation \begin{align*} \frac{\partial }{\partial t}X_t(x)=\fracΔ{2} X_t(x)+\sqrt{X_t(x)} \dot{V}(t,x)+X_t(x)\dot{W}^g(t, x) , \qu…