Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access

There’s been a dramatic change in one of the world’s least-connected countries. An anonymous reader quotes the AP: Since the summer of 2015, the Cuban government has opened 240 public Wi-Fi spots in parks and on street corners across the country… The government estimates that 100, 000 Cubans connect to the internet daily. A new feature of urban life in Cuba is the sight of people sitting at all hours on street corners or park benches, their faces illuminated by the screen of smartphones connected by applications such as Facebook Messenger to relatives in Miami, Ecuador or other outposts of the Cuban diaspora… Cuban ingenuity has spread internet far beyond those public places: thousands of people grab the public signals through commercially available repeaters, imported illegally into Cuba and often sold for about $100 — double the original price. Mounted on rooftops, the repeaters grab the public signals and create a form of home internet increasingly available in private rentals for tourists and cafes and restaurants for Cubans and visitors alike. The article also points out that last month, for the first time ever, 2, 000 Cubans began receiving home internet access. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access

How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES

If you missed it live, watch TASBot’s AGDQ 2017 run then read about it below. Can you really, playably emulate games like Super Mario 64 and Portal on a stock standard SNES only by hacking in through the controller ports? The answer is still no, but for a brief moment at this week’s Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) speedrunning marathon, it certainly looked like the impossible finally became possible. For years now , AGDQ has featured a block where TASBot (the Tool-Assisted Speedrun Robot) performs literally superhuman feats on classic consoles simply by sending data through the controller ports thousands of times per second. This year’s block (viewable above) started off simply enough, with some show-offy perfect play of Galaga and Gradius on the new NES Classic hardware (a system that TASbot organizer Allan Cecil says is “absolutely horrible” when it comes to automation). After that, TASBot moved on to a few “total control runs,” exploiting known glitches in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man to insert arbitrary code on the NES. This is nothing new for the computer-driven TASBot —the basics of the tricks vary by game, but they generally involve using buffer overflows to get into memory, then bootstrapping a loader that starts reading and executing a stream of controller inputs as raw assembly level opcodes. The method was taken to ridiculous extremes last year, when TASbot managed to “beat” Super Mario Bros. 3 in less than a second with a very specific total control glitch. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES

Ben Heck’s Xbox One S laptop

Since the teardown of the Xbox One S , Ben has been designing a laptop using the console’s innards. Building a hardware enclosure can be tricky, as Ben has to make sure the specifications are exact. He gets precise measurements with the help of a document scanner, later bringing in a laser cutter and CNC router. Naturally, though, it’s not just the aesthetics that are important: Ben also has to reduce the size of the hardware and ensure it’s cooled properly. To do so, Ben finds an appropriate fan that can be speed-controlled to ensure the laptop stays cool. What would you change about the Xbox One S notebook? Let the Ben Heck Show team know over on the element14 Community .

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Ben Heck’s Xbox One S laptop