fidzu : geek

What triggered that Airbus emergency software recall? The BBC reports that Airbus's initial investigation into an aircraft's sudden drop in altitude linked it "to a malfunction in one of the aircraft's computers that controls moving parts on the aircraft's wings and tail." But that malfunction "seems to have been triggered by cosmic radiation bombarding the Earth on the day of the flight..." The BBC believes radiation from space "could become a growing problem as ever more microchips run our lives." What Airbus says occurred on that JetBlue flight from Cancun to New Jersey was a phenomenon called a single-event upset, or bit flip. As the BBC has previously reported, these computer errors occur when high-speed subatomic particles from outer space, such as protons, smash into atoms in our planet's atmosphere. This can cause a cascade of particles to rain down through our atmosphere, like throwing marbles across a table. In rare cases, those fast-moving neutrons can strike computer electronics and disrupt tiny bits of data stored in the computer's memory, switching that bit - often represented as a 0 or 1 - from one state to another. "That can cause your electronics to behave in ways you weren't expecting," says Matthew Owens, professor of space physics at the University of Reading in the UK. Satellites are particularly affected by this phenomenon, he says. "For space hardware we see this quite frequently." This is because the neutron flux - a measure of neutron radiation - rises the higher up in the atmosphere you go, increasing the chance of a strike hitting sensitive parts of the computer equipment on board. Aircraft are more vulnerable to this problem than computer equipment on the ground, although bit flips do occur at ground level, too. The increasing reliance of computers in fly-by-wire systems in aircraft, which use electronics rather than mechanical systems to control the plane in the air, also mean the risk posed by bit flips when they do occur is higher... Airbus told the BBC that it tested multiple scenarios when attempting to determine what happened to the 30 October 2025 JetBlue flight. In this case also, the company ruled out various possibilities except that of a bit flip. It is hard to attribute the incident to this for sure, however, because careering neutrons leave no trace of their activity behind, says Owens... [Airbus's software update] works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight... As computer chips have become smaller, they have also become more vulnerable to bit flips because the energy required to corrupt tiny packets of data has got lower over time. Plus, more and more microchips are being loaded into products and vehicles, potentially increasing the chance that a bit flip could cause havoc. If nothing else, the JetBlue incident will focus minds across many industries on the risk posed to our modern, microchip-dependent lives from cosmic radiation that originates far beyond our planet. Airbus said their analysis revealed "intense solar radiation" could corrupt data "critical to the functioning of flight control." But that explanation "has left some space weather scientists scratching their heads," adds the BBC. Space.com explains: Solar radiation levels on Oct. 30 were unremarkable and nowhere near levels that could affect aircraft electronics, Clive Dyer, a space weather and radiation expert at University of Surrey in the U.K., told Space.com. Instead, Dyer, who has studied effects of solar radiation on aircraft electronics for decades, thinks the onboard computer of the affected jet could have been struck by a cosmic ray, a stream of high-energy particles from a distant star explosion that may have travelled millions of years before reaching Earth. "[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit," Dyer said. "They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Dec 2025 8:34am GMT

An anonymous reader shared this report from Autoblog: Imagine walking out to your car, pressing the start button, and getting absolutely nothing. No crank, no lights on the dash, nothing. That's exactly what happened to hundreds of Porsche owners in Russia last week. The issue is with the Vehicle Tracking System, a satellite-based security system that's supposed to protect against theft. Instead, it turned these Porsches into driveway ornaments. The issue was first reported at the end of November, with owners reporting identical symptoms of their cars refusing to start or shutting down soon after ignition. Russia's largest dealership group, Rolf, confirmed that the problem stems from a complete loss of satellite connectivity to the VTS. When it loses its connection, it interprets the outage as a potential theft attempt and automatically activates the engine immobilizer. The issue affects all models and engine types, meaning any Porsche equipped with the system could potentially disable itself without warning. The malfunction impacts Porsche models dating back to 2013 that have the factory VTS installed... When the VTS connection drops, the anti-theft protocol kicks in, cutting fuel delivery and locking down the engine completely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Dec 2025 4:36am GMT

Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA's Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he's working on "a potential key to unlock a huge power source that's rarely utilized today," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. [Alternate URL here.] Waste heat... The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, or JTEC, has few moving parts, no combustion and no exhaust. All the work to generate electricity is done by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Inside the device, pressurized hydrogen gas is separated by a thin, filmlike membrane, with low pressure gas on one side and high pressure gas on the other. The difference in pressure in this "stack" is what drives the hydrogen to compress and expand, creating electricity as it circulates. And unlike a fuel cell, it does not need to be refueled with more hydrogen. All that's needed to keep the process going and electricity flowing is a heat source. As it turns out, there are enormous amounts of energy vented or otherwise lost from industrial facilities like power plants, factories, breweries and more. Between 20% and 50% of all energy used for industrial processes is dumped into the atmosphere and lost as waste heat, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The JTEC works with high temperatures, but the device's ability to generate electricity efficiently from low-grade heat sources is what company executives are most excited about. Inside JTEC's headquarters, engineers show off a demonstration unit that can power lights and a sound system with water that's roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit - below the boiling point and barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea, said Julian Bell, JTEC's vice president of engineering. Comas Haynes, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing in thermal and hydrogen system designs, agrees the company could "hit a sweet spot" if it can capitalize on lower temperature heat... For Johnson, the potential application he's most excited about lies beneath our feet. Geothermal energy exists naturally in rocks and water beneath the Earth's surface at various depths. Tapping into that resource through abandoned oil and gas wells - a well-known access point for underground heat - offers another opportunity. "You don't need batteries and you can draw power when you need it from just about anywhere," Johnson said. Right now, the company is building its first commercial JTEC unit, which is set to be deployed early next year. Mike McQuary, JTEC's CEO and the former president of the pioneering internet service provider MindSpring, said he couldn't reveal the customer, but said it's a "major Southeast utility company." "Crossing that bridge where you have commercial customers that believe in it and will pay for it is important," McQuary said... On top of some initial seed money, the company brought in $30 million in a Series A funding in 2022 - money that allowed the company to move to its Lee + White headquarters and hire more than 30 engineers. McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon. "Johnson, meanwhile, hasn't stopped working on new inventions," the article points out. "He continues to refine the design for his solid-state battery..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Dec 2025 2:40am GMT

OSNews is funded entirely by you, our readers. There are no ads on OSNews, we are not part of a massive corporate publishing conglomerate like virtually every other technology news website, there are no wealthy (corporate) benefactors - it's just whatever funds you, our readers, send our way. As such, I sometimes need to remind everyone about this, and December, the holiday month, seems as great a time as any to do this. If you want to support a truly independent technology news website, free from the corrupting influences of corporate interests, advertising companies, managers pushing "AI", and all the other nonsense destroying the web we once loved, you can do so by donating to keep OSNews alive. This gives me the time and means to write 9000 words about dead computer ecosystems, and I'm already working on an article about the next final UNIX workstation. Every single donation, large or small, is deeply appreciated and keeps the lights on around here. There aren't many websites like OSNews left, especially not independent ones that answer to nobody. Your support keeps OSNews going, with June 2026 marking a special moment for me: it will mark twenty years since I took over this place. I'm not expecting a party - you're paying me to work, not to party - but it is still a meaningful anniversary for me personally.

07 Dec 2025 8:50pm GMT

Some of you may be aware of rePalm, a project by Dmitry Grinberg to port the PalmOS to various devices it was never supposed to run on. We covered rePalm back in 2019 and again in 2023. His latest project involved porting PalmOS to a set of digital toys that were never intended to run PalmOS in any way. Fisher-Price (owned by Mattel) produced some toys in the early 2000 under the Pixter brand. They were touchscreen-based drawing toys, with cartridge-based extra games one could plug in. Pixter devices of the first three generations ("classic", "plus", and "2.0") featured 80×80 black-and-white screens, which makes them of no interest for rePalm. The last two generations of Pixter ("color" and "multimedia") featured 160×160 color displays. Now, this was more like it! Pixter was quite popular, as far as kids' toys go, in USA in the early 2000s. A friend brought it to my attention a year ago as a potential rePalm target. The screen resolution was right and looking inside a "Pixter Color" showed an ARM SoC - a Sharp LH75411. The device had sound (games made noises), and touch panel was resistive. In theory - a viable rePalm target indeed. ↫ Dmitry Grinberg Considering the immensely limited ARMv7 implementation he had to deal with - no cache, no memory management unit, no memory protection unit - it's a miracle Grinberg managed to succeed. To make matters even harder, the first revision boards of the "color" model only had 1MB of flash, which is incredibly small even for PalmOS 5, so he had to rewrite parts of it to make it fit. Implementing communication over infrared was also a major difficulty, but that, too he managed to get working - on a device that doesn't have IrDA SIR modulation. Wild. Grinberg went above and beyond, making sure the buttons on the devices work, developing and building a way to put PalmOS on a "game" cartridge, reverse-engineering the display controller to make sure things like brightness adjustment works, adding screen type detection for that one small run of Pixter Color devices that came with a TFT instead of an STN screen, and so, so much more. Until you read the article, you have no idea how much work Grinberg put into this project. I continue to be in awe of Grinberg's work every time I come across it.

07 Dec 2025 8:24pm GMT

Now this is a great initiative by the Haiku team: highlight a number of stale commits that've been without interaction for years, explain why they've stalled, and then hope renewed interest might grow (part 1 and part 2). Recently some discussions on the forum led to asking about the status of our Gerrit code review. There are a lot of changes there that have been inactive for several years, with no apparent interest from anyone. To be precise, there are currently 358 commits waiting for review (note that Gerrit, unlike Github and other popular code review tools, works on a commit-by-commit basis, so each commit from a multiple-commit change is counted separately). The oldest one has not seen any comments since 2018. Today, let's have a look at some of these changes and see why they are stalled. Hopefully it will inspire someone to pick up the work and help finishing them up. ↫ Pulkomandy at the Haiku website Browsing through the highlighted stalled commits, there's a few that seem quite interesting and relatively easy for a (new?) contributor to seek their teeth into. For instance, there's a stalled commit to remove GCC from Haiku images built with clang/llvm, which stalled mostly because there are still other issues when building Haiku with clang/llvm. For a more complex problem, there's the issue of how every menu in BeOS/Haiku is also a window, including its own thread, which means navigating deeply nested menus creates and destroys a lot of threads, that all need to be synchronised, too. If you want to get really ambitious, there's the stalled commit to add initial 64bit PowerPC support. There's more of these, of course, so if you have the skills and will to contribute to a project like Haiku, this might be a great place to start and get your feet wet. Now that these commits are back in the spotlight, there's sure to be team members and regular contributors lined up to lend an extra hand, as well.

07 Dec 2025 4:03pm GMT

Dog behavior is a lot more complicated than any one gene variant.

07 Dec 2025 12:08pm GMT

The port will revolutionize global trade, but it's sparking destructive rainforest routes.

06 Dec 2025 12:30pm GMT

This could be just what Fubo and its subscribers need.

05 Dec 2025 10:56pm GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

The waydroid package prior to version 1.5.4-2 (including aur/waydroid) creates Python byte-code files (.pyc) at runtime which were untracked by pacman. This issue has been fixed in 1.5.4-3, where byte-compiling these files is now done during the packaging process. As a result, the upgrade may conflict with the unowned files created in previous versions. If you encounter errors like the following during the update:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/app_manager.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem

You can safely overwrite these files by running the following command: pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/\*__pycache__/\*

06 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT