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Submission + - Garmin Emergency Autoland deployed for the first time (flightradar24.com)

Submitted by alanw
alanw writes: On Saturday, 20 December 2025, the Garmin’s Emergency Autoland was used for the first time in a real world emergency situation. The Emergency Autoland system is designed to take control of an aircraft in the event of pilot incapacitation and safely land at a nearby airfield.

That is precisely what happened on Saturday as the pilot of Beech B200 Super King Air N479BR became incapacitated about 20 minutes after departing Aspen for Denver.

Submission + - SPAM: Fire destroys gov cloud storage, no backups available

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NIRS fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available

“A fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS)'s Daejeon headquarters destroyed the government’s G-Drive cloud storage system, erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil servants, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said Wednesday.”

Submission + - DJB on the NSA's attempt to remove backup algorithms from post-quantum crypto

Submitted by alanw
alanw writes: Daniel J. Bernstein" has made a couple of blog posts about the NSA's attempts to influence NIST post-quantum cryptography standards, by removing the "belt and braces" current algorithms and silencing dissent.

NSA and IETF: Can an attacker simply purchase standardization of weakened cryptography?

MODPOD: The collapse of IETF's protections for dissent.

Submission + - Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: But Amazon’s fee isn’t 10%. Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51% margins.
Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist.

Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.
Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.

The platform has turned into a pile of shit, and we’re at the bottom of it.
A rival – and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Any time you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.

Comment O Really (Score 1) 80

by alanw (#65594002) Attached to: Python Surges in Popularity. And So Does Perl

And here was me last night looking at my shelf of O'Reilly Perl books and wondering whether I'll ever refer to them again. I don't suppose with AI "help" available at the click of a mouse that there's much of a second hand market for them.

Comment Toyota anti-lock brake update (Score 1) 83

by alanw (#65562038) Attached to: Skipping Over-The-Air Car Updates Could Be Costly

I hope Toyota release an update for their anti-lock braking system soon, and all owners install it.

Tyre detaches from rim, anti-lock braking system prioritises stability over braking, driver dies

A woman who died in a crash on the M25 in a "terrifying situation" was unable to stop in time as an anti-locking system reduced her car's braking effect, a coroner has said.

"The brakes did not work effectively because when the brake pedal was pressed, the vehicle's anti-locking braking system was activated, and it operated to prevent instability, but, thereby reduced the braking effect almost entirely,"

...

He added that this was an "unintended effect of the system's design" which arose because the specific scenario, of a tyre detaching while the vehicle was being driven, had not been considered as part of the design.

...

Once on the hard shoulder, she pressed the brake pedal, with increasing force, on a further five occasions, but this did not result in any significant reduction in the Toyota's speed."

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