Tootfinder

A look at Ross Ulbricht's return to public life after receiving a pardon in January, including speaking at Bitcoin 2025 and accepting millions in donations (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/technol

The Spectacular Comeback Tour of Ross Ulbricht, the Founder of Silk Road
Ross Ulbricht, who created the Silk Road dark web marketplace and was serving a life sentence for drug distribution, has embarked on a strange and unexpected comeback after President Trump pardoned him in January.

It's so weird that Ulbricht's attempt to murder people isn't the first thing anyone says about him.
"But chat logs obtained by the authorities showed the Dread Pirate Roberts discussing payments of more than $700,000 to order the murders of six people he thought threatened Silk Road’s success."

The Spectacular Comeback Tour of Ross Ulbricht, the Founder of Silk Road
Ross Ulbricht, who created the Silk Road dark web marketplace and was serving a life sentence for drug distribution, has embarked on a strange and unexpected comeback after President Trump pardoned him in January.

Oligonucleotide selective detection by levitated optomechanics
Timothy Wilson, Owen J. L. Rackham, Hendrik Ulbricht
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17940 https://

Oligonucleotide selective detection by levitated optomechanics
Here we examine the detection of oligonucleotide-specific signals in sensitive optomechanical experiments. Silica nanoparticles (SiNPs) were functionalized using ZnCl$_2$ and 25-mers of single-stranded deoxyadenosine and deoxythymidine monophosphate which were optically trapped by a 1550 nm wavelength laser in vacuum. In the optical trap, SiNPs behave as harmonic oscillators, and their oscillation frequency and amplitude can be precisely detected by optical interferometry. The data was compared…

Detachment limited interlayer transport processes during SrTiO3 pulsed laser epitaxy
Jeffrey G. Ulbrandt, Xiaozhi Zhang, Randall L. Headrick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19181 htt…

Detachment limited interlayer transport processes during SrTiO3 pulsed laser epitaxy
Pulsed laser epitaxial growth is characterized by high instantaneous deposition rates that leads to the nucleation of transient islands, both on surface terraces, and on top of stable islands formed during previous deposition pulses. We report results from combined in-situ X-ray reflectivity and kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations. Specular reflectivity monitors interlayer transport, while diffuse scattering reveals the evolution of in-plane length scales, both during the recovery time betwee…

#Wortvorschlag
"einen St.Walter machen"
Als wir vor vielleicht dreissig Jahren in Berlin waren und dort eine Schiffsrundfahrt auf den Kanälen gemacht haben, wurde uns diese Geschichte erzählt:
Walter Ulbricht, Vorsitzender der DDR, brüstete sich in zahlreichen Reden damit, dass in der DDR nie ein Bauwerk im Zeichen des Kreuzes errichtet werden würde. So war er…

Heterogeneous Dynamic Logic: Provability Modulo Program Theories
Samuel Teuber, Mattias Ulbrich, Andr\'e Platzer, Bernhard Beckert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08581

Heterogeneous Dynamic Logic: Provability Modulo Program Theories
Formally specifying, let alone verifying, properties of systems involving multiple programming languages is inherently challenging. We introduce Heterogeneous Dynamic Logic (HDL), a framework for combining reasoning principles from distinct (dynamic) program logics in a modular and compositional way. HDL mirrors the architecture of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT): Individual dynamic logics, along with their calculi, are treated as dynamic theories that can be flexibly combined to reason ab…

Towards Multimodal Understanding via Stable Diffusion as a Task-Aware Feature Extractor
Vatsal Agarwal, Matthew Gwilliam, Gefen Kohavi, Eshan Verma, Daniel Ulbricht, Abhinav Shrivastava
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07106

Towards Multimodal Understanding via Stable Diffusion as a Task-Aware Feature Extractor
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled image-based question-answering capabilities. However, a key limitation is the use of CLIP as the visual encoder; while it can capture coarse global information, it often can miss fine-grained details that are relevant to the input query. To address these shortcomings, this work studies whether pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models can serve as instruction-aware visual encoders. Through an analysis of their internal re…

It's Saturday morning, and that means it's time for Metacurity's round-up of the best infosec-related long reads of the week, available to our free and paid subscribers.
This week's selection covers
--Myanmar's junta benefits from cyberscams,
--Cyberscams could be behind the Thai-Cambodia conflict,
--Africans are tricked into cyberscam compounds,
--How China's propaganda and surveillance work,
--Vibe coding is risky,
--Ross Ul…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 9/6/25
Myanmar's junta benefits from cyberscams, Cyberscams could be behind the Thai-Cambodia conflict, Africans are tricked into cyberscam compounds, How China's propaganda and surveillance work, Vibe coding is risky, Ross Ulbricht is very lucky, Don't steal the phone of a hacker's girlfriend

Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs
Iness Ben Guirat, Jan Tobias M\"uhlberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05223 https://arxiv.org/…

Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs
The discourse about sustainable technology has emerged from the acknowledgment of the environmental collapse we are facing. In this paper, we argue that addressing this crisis requires more than the development of sustainable alternatives to current online services or the optimization of resources using various dashboards and AI. Rather, the focus must shift toward designing technologies that protect us from the consequences of the environmental damages. Among these consequences, wars, genocide…