After 35 years, the secretive CIA sculpture finally gave up its mystery, thanks to a novelist, a playwright, and some misplaced documents. But the chase to decode continues. Jim Sanborn couldn't believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4--wrong without exception.

As the Trump Administration tries to rescue symbols of the Lost Cause, an exhibition in Los Angeles, led by Kara Walker, finds meaning in their desecration. Kara Walker's "Unmanned Drone" (2023) transforms a Stonewall Jackson statue. The first thing you see is a horse's ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man's arm descends from the beast's stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a fallen sabre. Every part of the work comes from a statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021.

Plus: A secret FBI anti-ransomware task force gets exposed, the mystery of the CIA's Kryptos sculpture is finally solved, North Koreans busted hiding malware in the Ethereum blockchain, and more. In a stunning new study, researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland revealed this week that satellites are leaking a wealth of sensitive data completely unencrypted, from calls and text messages on T-Mobile to in-flight Wi-Fi browsing sessions, to military and police communications. And they did this with just $800 in off-the-shelf equipment. Face recognition systems are seemingly everywhere. But what happens when this surveillance and identification technology doesn't recognize your face as a face?

Technology Engineering A'post-apocalyptic' shipwreck tower will be Prague's tallest building Top Tower is finally moving forward after years of debate. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Czech Republic is moving forward with plans to construct what will become the country's tallest skyscraper . But even at 442 feet tall, Prague's Top Tower won't turn heads for its height alone. Architecture firm Black n' Arch, architect Tomáš Císař, and internationally renowned sculpturist David Černý first announced the surreal project in 2019 .

Anamorphosis refers to a category of images that are intentionally distorted, making them unrecognizable when viewed directly. Their true form only reveals itself when seen from a specific viewpoint, which can be through some catadioptric device like a mirror or a lens. While the construction of these mathematical devices can be traced back to as early as the 17th century, they are only interpretable when viewed from a specific vantage point and tend to lose meaning when seen normally. In this paper, we revisit these famous optical illusions with a generative twist. With the help of latent rectified flow models, we propose a method to create anamorphic images that still retain a valid interpretation when viewed directly. To this end, we introduce Laplacian Pyramid Warping, a frequency-aware image warping technique key to generating high-quality visuals. Our work extends Visual Anagrams (arXiv:2311.17919) to latent space models and to a wider range of spatial transforms, enabling the creation of novel generative perceptual illusions.

For 35 years, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to crack the code on Kryptos, a majestic sculpture that sits behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In the 1990s, the CIA, NSA, and a Rand Corporation computer scientist independently came up with translations for three of the sculpture's four panels of scrambled letters. But the final segment, known as K4, was encoded with knottier techniques and remains unsolved. This failure has only deepened the obsession of thousands of would-be cryptanalysts. When one of them thinks they have an answer, they write to Jim Sanborn for confirmation.

Deformable object manipulation remains a key challenge in developing autonomous robotic systems that can be successfully deployed in real-world scenarios. In this work, we explore the challenges of deformable object manipulation through the task of sculpting clay into 3D shapes. We propose the first coarse-to-fine autonomous sculpting system in which the sculpting agent first selects how many and where to place discrete chunks of clay into the workspace to create a coarse shape, and then iteratively refines the shape with sequences of deformation actions. We leverage large language models for sub-goal generation, and train a point cloud region-based action model to predict robot actions from the desired point cloud sub-goals. Additionally, our method is the first autonomous sculpting system that is a real-world text-to-3D shaping pipeline without any explicit 3D goals or sub-goals provided to the system. We demonstrate our method is able to successfully create a set of simple shapes solely from text-based prompting. Furthermore, we explore rigorously how to best quantify success for the text-to-3D sculpting task, and compare existing text-image and text-point cloud similarity metrics to human evaluations for this task. For experimental videos, human evaluation details, and full prompts, please see our project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/hierarchicalsculpting

Assessing the capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) often requires the creation of ad-hoc evaluations. Currently, building new benchmarks requires tremendous amounts of manual work for each specific analysis. This makes the evaluation process tedious and costly. In this paper, we present APEx, Automatic Programming of Experiments, the first framework for automatic benchmarking of LMMs. Given a research question expressed in natural language, APEx leverages a large language model (LLM) and a library of pre-specified tools to generate a set of experiments for the model at hand, and progressively compile a scientific report. The report drives the testing procedure: based on the current status of the investigation, APEx chooses which experiments to perform and whether the results are sufficient to draw conclusions. Finally, the LLM refines the report, presenting the results to the user in natural language. Thanks to its modularity, our framework is flexible and extensible as new tools become available. Empirically, APEx reproduces the findings of existing studies while allowing for arbitrary analyses and hypothesis testing.

This paper details the development of an interactive sculpture built from deprecated hardware technology and intentionally decomposable, transient materials. We detail a case study of "Strain" - an emotive prototype that reclaims two orphaned digital artifacts to power a kinetic sculpture made of common disposable objects. We use the Myo, an abandoned myoelectric armband, in concert with the Programmable Air, a soft-robotics prototyping project, to manipulate a pneumatic bladder array constructed from condoms, bamboo skewers, and a small library of 3D printed PLA plastic connectors designed to work with these generic parts. The resulting sculpture achieves surprisingly organic actuation. The goal of this project is to produce several reusable components: software to resuscitate the Myo Armband, homeostasis software for the Programmable Air or equivalent pneumatic projects, and a library of easily-printed parts that will work with generic bamboo disposables for sculptural prototyping. This project works to develop usable, repeatable engineering by applying it to a slightly whimsical object that promotes a strong emotional response in its audience. Through this, we transform the disposable into the sustainable. In this paper, we reflect on project-based insights into rescuing and revitalizing abandoned consumer electronics for future works.

The video for "A Barely Lit Path," the first single from "Again," Daniel Lopatin's tenth album as Oneohtrix Point Never, takes place on a dark road in a shadowy forest. Two CPR dummies wearing turquoise jumpsuits are strapped into a self-driving car. On the floor, there's an artificial-intelligence manual, a book about understanding computers, and a copy of "Erewhon," the 1872 satirical novel that imagines a future in which machines achieve consciousness. The dummies play chess; they nap. Their rubbery fingers reach across the seat for each other. At some point, the road gets rough and the dummies start flopping around. A Stop button is affixed to the gearshift, but it's just out of reach. One of the dummies starts to cry.