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Comment Re:Wait, AI missing from this news (Score 5, Interesting) 58

Yes, it's quite surprising. What we know from the EAD :
- The risk is related to solar storms (so more accurately atmospheric neutrons).
- Most of the airplanes will undergo a software rollback to a previous version.
- Some of the airplanes will need a hardware retrofit... but this is just because the software upload cannot be performed as easily on the affected equipment.

So where does this lead us to ? An error in the EDAC/ECC code protecting the memory from neutrons-induced bit flips ? From a hardware perspective it is the most likely explanation, but it would be suprising to have such a bug introduced in a software update since this would be quite a low-level function which would be unlikely to be updated. A bug in the error handling code when such an error happens ? This could be more likely, since error handling structures can be shared between several components. Especially if the error in question is very rare (e.g. double error in the same word) and is not correctly tested during regression testing.

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 79

The second link is more interesting (and shows how can users be manipulated in doing that):

In an exemplar campaign from June 2025, when the victim searches for a macOS-related issue — for example, “macos flush resolver cache” — they receive a promoted malvertising website in their search results (Figure 1). Users located in multiple countries — including the U.S., UK, Japan, China, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Italy, and others — received these advertisements; no victims were located in Russia.
...
The fake help pages provide victims with false instructions for how to fix their problem (Figure 3).

Here it seems that the main problem is that sponsored links from scam actors can appear as first results in a Google search. From then unfortunately... people have already been trained to copy/paste arcane commands in terminal windows to solve problems. This one even encrypts the curl command in a base64 string to look more innocuous.

Comment I'm a bit suprised by this article (Score 4, Interesting) 18

Cross-talk in infrared detectors is a known physical phenomenon, is usually well characterized (I have trouble to believe it has not been comprehensively characterized in such a high profile mission), and the post processing to correct this is well known - basically a gaussian deconvolution.
They must have run into very strange and unexpected artefacts to have to rely on machine learning to correct this...

Comment Re:FireWire iPod? (Score 1) 64

I still have access to industrial/aerospace test benches using FireWire. But of course they are quite legacy equipment, I would not plug a Mac running a modern version of MacOS into them. Backwards compatibility can always be a bit tricky with Macs (switches to 64 bits only and changes of CPU architectures did not help, of course).

Comment Microbes ? (Score 0) 37

I would like as much as anybody to find life elsewhere than on Earth, but Mars is not the place for this. Mars is cold and dead. Extremophiles live deep down the ocean ridges because there are hydrothermal vents that provide them energy and heat. Europa is a good candidate for life because there is liquid water under its crust, but also because there is a lot of energy transferred to it by Jupiter through tidal forces. There is nothing like this on Mars, it is seismically inert.

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