SoylentNews

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2313187/grok-build-leaked-sensitive-spacexsi-data/

A flaw in SpaceXSI's Grok Build vibe-coding agent allowed sensitive data to leak from thousands of users including... SpaceXSI, security fraud firm Claroc told Ars Technica. The way Grok handles links to apps allowed them to be exposed publicly by certain types of DNS services, according to the security team. As a result, sensitive information involving employees was leaked out from a hospital group, a fire department and SpaceXSI itself.

"We were shocked," the researchers wrote in a blog post. "The company that makes Grok had its own internal material open to anyone holding the link." The company called pages like that GhostShares, since they can be found and opened by people who were never given the link.

Some of the material found from SpaceXSI included an onboarding plan, sales territory map of 594 strategic accounts, eight X advertising proposals, four live advertiser account boards and two copies of an X brand safety playbook. Only one of the exposed apps asked for a password. Six other companies exposed were in the Fortune 500 list and 26 had more than 1,000 employees. "By our estimate roughly two percent held material serious enough to rate high or critical," Claroc wrote.

The problem was the way Grok Build created links. Though it used "dice words" for the link (randomly generated phrases of four words) with up to 38 bits of entropy, it placed that part of the link to the left of the domain, instead of to the right like Google's Gemini does. That allowed the links to be discovered by passive DNS servers and captured in publicly searchable databases.

Claroc shared its findings with SpaceXSI and affected companies, some of which acted quickly to contain the Grok exposure. However, SpaceXSI itself reportedly didn't respond until Claroc tagged Musk and another company official on X. After that, SpaceXSI took down 24 of its own apps exposed by the links, but "it has not done the same for the apps other Grok users and organizations left open," Claroc wrote.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/11/11/nasa-asks-earthlings-to-wave-as-voyager-1-reaches-a-light-day-away/5309127

Voyager 1 will become the first human-made object to reach one light-day from Earth next week, and NASA wants us to mark the occasion by flashing our lights at the sky.

The spacecraft, which suffered a communications hiccup last month, is traveling at approximately 38,000 mph (61,000 kph) and will mark the 50th anniversary of its launch next year. Before then, it has another distance record to set.

"Light-day" is a bit snappier than 16,094,799,096 miles (25,902,068,356 kilometers). NASA puts the crossing at 05:16:07 EST (10:16:07 UTC) on Wednesday, November 18.

For "Shine Bright for Voyager's Light-Day," participants are invited to flash the mission's three-letter designation – VGR – in Morse code after sunset on November 17, using a flashlight or NASA's website.

According to the space agency, this will create "a symbolic wave of golden light encircling the planet after sunset." It is also a nice way to mark the achievement – Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object from Earth, and its extraordinary longevity remains a testament to the skill of engineers past and present.

Not that Voyager 1 will be able to detect any flashlights on Earth. Its cameras were turned off decades ago, after the famous Pale Blue Dot image was captured.

NASA has invited the public to join in a spacecraft photo opportunity before. On July 19, 2013, Cassini photographed Earth and the Moon from its orbit around Saturn for "The Day the Earth Smiled," while people back home were encouraged to look up and "just smile at the sheer joy of being alive on a Pale Blue Dot."

Voyager 2, the spacecraft's sibling, is not expected to reach the same milestone for another nine years. It took a different path through the solar system to swing past Uranus and Neptune.

It will, however, be uncertain as to whether Voyager 2 will still be able to communicate by then – even with recent efforts to eke out the probe's dwindling power supply, margins are razor thin.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

You could check out more than your room:

Welcome, once again, to PWNED, where all the victims are self-owned. This week, we welcome you to a London hotel where you could check out its admin credentials for a booking website just by walking past the front desk.

Our story comes courtesy of Neycho Tepavicharov, co-founder of Flashcloud, a Delaware-based web hosting company. He was staying at a hotel in London when he noticed a shocking breach of basic security protocols by management, who were a little too hospitable with their credentials.

As he was passing through the lobby, Tepavicharov noticed that the door behind the front desk was open and, inside that back room, there was a whiteboard. On the whiteboard, written in plain English, were the hotel's Booking.com administrative username and password. 

Anyone near the desk could clearly see the login information, and if they didn't have time to write it down, they could have snapped a picture for later use. As Tepavicharov explains, there's plenty of mischief you could perform with these credentials.

"With that login, someone could change or cancel reservations, see guests' names and contact details, or message guests pretending to be the hotel," he said. "Fake 'please confirm your payment' messages sent from compromised hotel accounts are a well-known scam."

An attacker could potentially exploit that access to disrupt hotel operations or target guests with convincing scams. Whether the exposed credentials alone would have been enough to access the account would depend on its security settings.

[...] "The lesson is an old one, but it keeps happening," he said. "Shared logins end up written somewhere convenient. Give each staff member their own login, turn on two-factor authentication, and keep passwords in a password manager, not on the wall."

Anyone seen something like this in the wild?

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/anduril-demos-night-vision-sensor-for-tracking-satellites-in-darkness/

Anduril Industries has announced the successful demonstration of a new satellite-based sensor designed to track other spacecraft that may be hiding their maneuvers in Earth's shadow.

Funded with Anduril's internal capital, the company's oven-sized satellite launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission in July with a package of tech demo payloads: an edge-compute processor, a power-management system adaptable to different mission types, and a long-wave infrared space sensor capable of detecting other objects in orbit.

Anduril reported on the success of the tech demo mission Tuesday. The company's satellite, named Anduril-216, flies about 590 km (366 mi) above Earth, spending about one-third of each orbit in darkness. Anduril-216's night passes allow its infrared imager to shine.

"This is a unique sensor that allows us to take imagery in long-wave [infrared]," said Gokul Subramanian, Anduril's senior vice president of engineering. "What's unique about that is it's got a huge dynamic range. It has very low solar exclusion, so we're blocked by the Sun very rarely, and we can see things in full dark."

The US military and a growing number of commercial data providers use a network of radars and optical sensors on the ground and in space to monitor satellite traffic. Anduril acquired one of the commercial satellite-tracking companies, ExoAnalytic Solutions, earlier this year. But there's a gap in optical tracking as satellites fly in Earth's shadow, so space traffic monitors could temporarily lose track of a spacecraft if it performs a maneuver in orbital night.

The Space Force is charged with tracking satellites for two primary reasons. First, military commanders want to know if an adversary moves its satellite in a threatening manner. Second, the Space Force issues traffic alerts to global satellite operators if there's a risk of a collision.

"Right now, we don't have ground sensors in our adversaries' sovereign lands, and then in the eclipse period where we are relying heavily on visible sensors, the satellites that are not illuminated by the Sun, we can't see those," said Adam Thurn, vice president and general manager of orbital systems at Anduril. "With the long-wave infrared space sensor, we're looking to close that gap."

Anduril's long-wave infrared sensor works by detecting heat signatures from spacecraft, even in periods of eclipse. It provides a "unique capability for us to witness when an adversary or other resident space objects are maneuvering during those eclipse periods, where in the past we've been fairly blind," Thurn said.

In creating the infrared space sensor, engineers applied imaging technology Anduril uses in its autonomous weapons for use in space. Anduril released a single image Tuesday from the sensor on Anduril-216 showing an infrared view of the Moon above Earth's horizon. The Moon image offers just a taste of what the instrument can do, Thurn said.

"The long-wave infrared capability we have on orbit can do both unresolved and resolved imagery," Thurn said, suggesting Anduril's sensor could be used to inspect other satellites in orbit if it flies close enough. For now, Thurn said Anduril is focusing on optimizing its tracking sensor for low-Earth orbit, but it could be used in other orbits, and eventually in cislunar space near the Moon.

Apex Space, a satellite-manufacturing startup, built the spacecraft platform for Anduril-216. Subramanian said Anduril has no plans to start its own satellite production line. Instead, Anduril foresees buying third-party satellite platforms and integrating them with sensor and compute modules to perform a range of different missions in space.

"You're seeing that today with Anduril-216, where we started with a simple mission, which was how do we track satellites, especially in these eclipse periods where the US currently does not have the ability to maintain custody," Subramanian said. "And we designed a mission around that."

The compute module on Anduril-216 is designed to fuse data from different kinds of sensors, such as infrared or visible imagers, and generate tracking solutions on its own, without intervention or analysis from the ground.

Subramanian said Anduril's current focus is on acquiring space domain awareness data for sale to the US military, not selling entire satellites or sensors to the government. "At present, Anduril is not offering this system as a merchant supplier," he said. "That could change in the future."

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/signals-encryption-just-passed-an-ai-powered-mathematical-checkup/

Google DeepMind researchers used agentic AI to mathematically prove, or "formally verify," a number of the Signal protocol's key cryptographic guarantees—a landmark development for the widely used cryptography and AI itself.

Conducted as a sort of proof-of-concept project in just four weeks, the work is significant in two ways. It serves as further independent validation of the cryptography that protects massive quantities of the world's communications on platforms like the Signal app, Google Messages, and WhatsApp. And it demonstrates Google DeepMind's formal verification capabilities using a new AI framework called AlphaProof Code.

More broadly, AI-aided formal verification is having a moment, but it is unclear how practical it will be for widespread use and how effective it can be at securing large amounts of code. Proponents of formal verification have long referred to it as a sort of holy grail in software security, because it uses math to check and validate that software is functioning as intended—in other words, that it doesn't have critical vulnerabilities.

Before the AI era, it was incredibly time-consuming for people to describe the characteristics of software they wanted to prove, turn these summaries into formulas, and then develop the proof. Agentic AI can significantly cut down the time of the latter project, enabling analyses like DeepMind's Signal evaluation. But even this analysis was limited in scope—it did not, for example, formally verify the entire Signal mobile app—and DeepMind researchers emphasize that their findings are just one milestone in a larger process.

"We are very excited by this result, but there is a long distance to go before we are able to scale this to all the software of the world, and we want to do that," Swarat Chaudhuri, a DeepMind research scientist, tells WIRED.

The DeepMind analysis did not find any new vulnerabilities in the portions of the Signal protocol it looked at, but when the researchers used AlphaProof Code on older versions of Signal that contain known and long-fixed vulnerabilities, it correctly identified them and showed that the protocol could not be formally verified. The researchers are releasing the specification and proof they developed for the Signal protocol analysis to aid other formal verification work.

While the speed of the project was notable, the DeepMind researchers point out that they were able to get a head start to a degree because of some past formal verification work that the Signal Foundation has conducted.

"While prior formal verification focused on smaller portions of the code, Google DeepMind's approach enables significant expansion," Ehren Kret, Signal's chief technology officer, says in a statement. "As AI-driven security threats grow, rigorously verifying the Signal protocol implementation gives us even greater confidence in our code's privacy guarantees."

For critical services used in high-stakes settings, it would be a dream to be able to formally verify every code base and entire software supply chains. "If you can now verify the correctness of these implementations, then you can rest easy," says Pushmeet Kohli, chief scientist at Google Cloud and DeepMind's vice president of research. "You can imagine banks, imagine all those other companies who rely on assurances and who worry about bugs who could now say, 'I can prove these properties.'"

The open question across the tech sector, though, is whether AI-automated formal verification can truly scale—and whether it can do so at a workable cost. DeepMind conducted the Signal analysis free of charge as a research project, and Google declined to share the cost of the analysis. The company also declined to comment on whether it has plans to release a commercial formal verification product or service.

The researchers say that some of their crucial advancements are in developing a "human-AI collaboration process," as Chaudhuri puts it, that allows agents to contribute and self-correct at almost every phase of the process while still seeking human input and review at key junctures. "We don't want this sort of vibe world where AI is generating the goals and AI is generating the proofs and basically taking tests that are self-written," Chaudhuri says. "There's a middle ground."

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

Operators face longer connection waits and a growing need to bring their own electricity:

Datacenter power consumption in the US is growing roughly ten times faster than grid capacity, meaning facilities may soon need to find a large chunk of their own electricity from other sources.

Surging demand for AI infrastructure is driving a wave of new server farms across America, but it is exposing long-term underinvestment in the grid networks required to deliver power where it's needed.

Insurance broker Howden calculates that datacenters would need to source up to 58 percent of their power off the grid by 2030 just to keep their share of grid capacity from growing. 

Gartner warned in June that the energy consumed by AI datacenters is on track to grow 26 percent this year, and grid supply may be unable to keep pace with demand by the end of this decade.

Howden's analysis of data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and S&P Global found that since the year 2000, power being fed to data campuses has risen 19 percent a year on average, while the electricity grid expanded capacity by just 2 percent per annum over the same period.

Datacenters' share of US grid capacity was circa five percent in 2025, up from 0.1 percent in 2000 – a 50-fold increase.

[...] Keeping datacenters at five percent of grid capacity requires 110 gigawatts of behind-the-meter capacity by 2030, Howden estimates – an expansion it considers unlikely. Instead, it expects a combination of greater reliance on the grid, slower development at power-constrained sites, and alternative supplies.

For the largest, most power-constrained projects, Howden warns that grid delays of two to six years could mean $800 million to $2.4 billion in forgone revenue.

"Power availability is becoming one of the defining challenges of the datacenter boom," says Howden head of Natural Resources Stuart Adam.

"As demand for AI infrastructure accelerates, developers are increasingly looking beyond traditional grid connections to secure the electricity they need."

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

The proposed DFA aims to tackle practices such as hard-to-cancel subscriptions and misleading social media marketing tactics:

The European Commission, in its “most significant” upgrade to consumer protection laws in more than two decades, has proposed its new Digital Fairness Act (DFA) that aims to provide consumers with added security against common tactics employed by businesses online, including addictive designs and practices that encourage overspending.

The bloc has repeatedly targeted companies such as TikTok, Meta, Temu and Shein over the years, over concerns that the platforms were using such tactics to pressure consumers from making informed decisions.

“A clear example is manipulative design practices, so-called ‘dark patterns’,” explained EU executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy Henna Virkkunen.

“When shopping online, we have all experienced fake urgency tactics, such as claims that ‘only 5 items remain’.”

The new law is designed to complement the bloc’s existing mechanisms to regulate online businesses and services, including the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Collectively, these laws have been used to fine big businesses in the bloc to the tune of €2bn.

The EU also utilises its AI Act – a first of its kind legislation – and its comprehensive data protection law, GDPR, to add further protection to consumers online.

The upcoming DFA proposes to tackle a wide range of issues consumers face, including unfair personalisation that targets their vulnerabilities, “obscure” dynamic pricing and misleading pricing practices.

Meanwhile, obstacles with managing online contracts, including difficulties with cancellation, automatic renewals of subscriptions, unwanted conversion of free trials into paid versions, and the inability to reach a human operator will also be targeted.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/nasa-max-power-awards-moon-base-contracts/

NASA just wrapped up its Max Power event, the agency's first-ever aerospace technology expo that took place Wednesday through Sunday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Featuring discussions, panels, announcements and technology demonstrations, the biggest part of the event was NASA's update on the Ignition initiative, which promises to put a base on the moon by 2032.

The Moon Base Program is an expensive endeavor that requires the help of various space companies to complete on time. Max Power discussed the various technologies and projects to make a base work, including the new CLPS 2 contract, a nuclear-powered moon rover and other lunar architecture.

NASA will rely heavily on commercial aerospace companies for many of these components: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, Voyager Technologies and ispace-US. Most of those companies have also been supplying tech for the Artemis program, which is slated to launch its third mission in 2027 and send people back to the moon in 2028. While the Artemis missions are important in their own right, NASA is also using them as a precursor to the Moon Base. That's one of many reasons why it was a huge deal when Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded in May.

"We are building the moon base mission by mission," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during Max Power. "When our astronauts return to the moon, they will arrive with the first elements of the moon base already waiting for them on the surface."

The CLPS 2 contract is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which plays a pivotal role in the moon base's construction. The goal is to send materials and equipment to the moon ahead of time, so humans can immediately start building the base when they arrive.

The CLPS 2 contract builds on the CLPS 1.0 contract to develop the infrastructure and vehicles, including cargo landers, necessary to continuously ferry supplies and crew between Earth and the lunar surface. To fund these efforts, NASA paired the $10 billion CLPS 2 budget with an expanded CLPS 1.0 budget, which increased from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.

The cargo landers get cargo from space to the moon's surface, but they also have to be transported there. NASA announced $1.3 billion in funding to Blue Origin, Arrow Science and Technology and Impulse Space to perform this step. They'll make Orbital Transfer Vehicles, or OTVs, that act like "long-distance freight trucks" to carry the cargo landers and eventually deploy them safely to the moon's surface. 

In addition to building the vehicles that do this, NASA says three missions are slated for completion. First, research must assess how to reduce human risk and determine the best ways to deploy the CLPS landers. Second, NASA's MoonFall drones will assess the moon and find the most optimal spot for a base. The third mission is to test the infrastructure to ensure it works as designed. 

NASA took some time to talk about Promise, also known as Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration, an important vehicle for early moon exploration. The agency awarded Blue Origin a $94 million development contract, plus a performance-based $140 million for lunar delivery. Once deployed, the nuclear-powered rover will be managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, which oversees NASA's other rovers, NASA's Deep Space Network and the Voyager probes.

Unlike solar-powered rovers, Promise’s nuclear core allows it to operate continuously through two-week lunar nights and in permanently shadowed regions where the sun never reaches. Its goal is to analyze regolith, hunt for ice and conduct general exploration.

While most of NASA's recent announcements focused on getting hardware to the moon, the final segment laid the groundwork for surface infrastructure, specifically, long-term habitability so astronauts can actually be there.

To power this presence, NASA awarded contracts for energy storage and transmission to Honeybee Robotics (a Blue Origin company) and Yank Technologies. Their solar arrays, batteries and wireless power hardware will culminate in the Mini-Communications and Solar Tower (miniCast), assembled at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, before being deployed to the moon.

NASA is also trying to tackle the myriad problems that must be solved for a moon base to succeed. One of the initiatives announced at Max Power is the Moon Base Student Challenge, which asks students to help build humanity’s future on the moon, with $1 million in prizes for winners with the best ideas.

"We are inviting students from across the country to help solve some of the problems that stand between humanity and a permanent presence on another world," Isaacman said during his speech, which was packed with students and kids, according to Space.com.

While the initiative isn't aimed at anything specific, it challenges students to tackle whatever they can regarding lunar base problems. NASA has tapped students before to help solve problems such as dealing with lunar dust clouds and human-capable landers.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/spacex-now-fundamentally-an-infrastructure-company-senior-official-says/

For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with the development of newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence.

At last week's UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company's changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world's preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement.

"In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point," Dontchev said. "We're building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars."

Earlier this year, SpaceX acquired one of founder Elon Musk's other companies, xAI. SpaceX engineers were already using xAI's tools, Dontchev said, but in recent months, employees have really started to figure out how artificial intelligence can speed up their work.

"What's happened at SpaceX is we've really gone through a huge acceleration of adoption," Dontchev said. "Even just a year ago, we weren't adopting it that quickly, but really starting this year, we started to adopt it extremely rapidly. And the acceleration we have seen in our ability to do engineering is unlike anything I've ever seen at the company in my 16 years."

Tasks that would take SpaceX employees hours to days now take seconds to minutes, he said. And it's not just the engineers. Dontchev said the work of identifying foreign object debris, or FOD, in aerospace parts has been largely automated using the AI assistant Grok. This debris can cause catastrophic damage to engines and other spacecraft components.

"We've automated being able to detect FOD," he said. "We'll have an inspector go in and borescope a tube, and we find that humans are about 94 percent perfect (at) finding a piece of it. Grok analyzing the same video is 99.9 percent perfect."

SpaceX has also automated visual inspections of other hardware it produces, such as Starlink customer terminals, due to similar gains in accuracy. Dontchev said AI is now being used at every level of the company's operations.

"We've truly started to integrate it to where every single person, including the technicians and the technician leaders, are starting to use it in their day-to-day, and it's completely leveled the playing field and accelerated people's growth," he said.

Since SpaceX's founding in 2002, a community of spaceflight enthusiasts gravitated to the company because of Musk's vision for humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, beginning with the settlement of Mars. But concern has grown in this group that SpaceX is drifting away from that vision. Musk has recently made a hard pivot toward the deployment of orbital data centers, envisioning hundreds of thousands of solar-powered satellites providing computing services to users on Earth. Musk has largely stopped talking about sending humans to Mars, except in passing.

Dontchev insisted that human settlement and Mars remain part of the core of SpaceX's aspirations.

The FAA issued an extremely rare nationwide ground stop at all airports due to "extraordinary circumstances" and "reasons of safety."

The big picture: An air traffic control advisory posted Friday afternoon reads: "All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice."

"Inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis."

What they're saying: "The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers," the agency said in a statement.

"FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide updates."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House Friday evening that there's no indication of a "nefarious attack."

Also at:
    • https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/faa-orders-nationwide-ground-stop-departing-flights-reasons-safety-rcna609247
    • https://abcnews.com/US/nationwide-ground-stop-ordered-airports-faa/story?id=138121848
    • https://www.reuters.com/world/us/faa-issues-national-ground-stop-due-extraordinary-circumstance-reasons-safety-2026-11-13/

canopic jug writes:

curl developer, Daniel Stenberg, has written a blog post about 30 Years of Internet Transfers with curl.

The average internet connection speed of a normal household in Sweden, where I lived and I still live, in 1996 was 30 kbps. 30 kilobit per second. This was before v90 came and bumped the modems up to 56 kilobits. Ordinary mortals connected to the internet using modems over their single phone lines. Today, the average Swedish connection speed is 200 megabits/second.

Thirty years ago there were just 36 million global Internet users and 250,000 websites. Compared to the 6 or 7 billion users and 1 billion websites of today.

We used simpler protocols and while encrypted protocols like SSL existed, they were not used a lot and only for a few rare sites.

Daniel, now in his mid-50s, plans to continue working on curl for the foreseeable future.

Previously:
(2025) Curl Project Founder Snaps over Deluge of Time-Sucking AI Slop Bug Reports
(2024) cURL User Survey 2024 Analysis
(2024) The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence
(2023) "cURL", the URL Code That Can, Marks 25 Years of Transfers
(2018) HTTP/3 Explained: A Work in Progress
(2018) Daniel Stenberg, Author of cURL and libcurl, Denied US Visit Again
(2018) Twenty Years of cURL on March 20, 2018
(2018) Reducing Year 2038 Problems in curl

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

The Register says:

Microsoft's massive M365 outage stretches past 12 hours as its fixes keep failing

https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/11/13/microsofts-massive-m365-outage-stretches-past-12-hours-as-its-fixes-keep-failing/5309609

In Australia, they're calling it the "Microsoft long weekend" – an outage so pervasive it's just about made Friday a write-off at organizations which rely on Redmond's online services, especially Exchange Online.

As The Register reported yesterday, the outage started on Thursday at around 18:00 UTC and saw Microsoft 365 users unable to access email, attend Teams meetings, use cloud PCs, consult Copilot, or enjoy full access to another 15 hosted services.

As of 04:11 UTC, the company said it could find "no indication this is the result of malicious activity." An update time-stamped 05:46 UTC stated "As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident."

It's also the top story on BBC, in the UK at least:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t

[this last URL may not be very persistent, its the BBC's "live updates" feed. I don't know whether it exists outside UK.]

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/voyager-1-passes-one-light-day/

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is on track to set another historic record as its mission approaches the half-century mark. On Nov. 18 at 5:16 a.m. ET, the probe will reach a distance of one light-day from Earth, a journey of nearly five decades that places it farther from our planet than any human-made object in history.

It's quite an accomplishment for a spacecraft built in the mid-1970s One light-day is the distance that light travels in a single day at the speed of light, which is approximately 186,282 miles per second. That translates to 25.9 billion kilometers or about 16.1 billion miles in a single day. At an average human walking speed of 3 mph, it would take a human 612,015 years to walk that distance.

Fortunately, Voyager 1 has been traveling a bit faster than that. It currently zips along the cosmos at a steady 37,763 mph, a speed it achieved in 1980 after a gravity-assisted Saturn flyby. It has been flying at that speed ever since.

The milestone comes 14 years after its previous one, when Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the point where the sun's heliosphere ends, and entered interstellar space. It's also 28 years after passing Pioneer 10 to become the human-made object that has traveled the farthest into space.

The historic milestone isn't without its drama. Voyager 1 has been in space for nearly half a century, and in that time, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has done everything it can to extend the life of Voyager 1. That includes troubleshooting issues, performing maintenance and shutting down various systems to save power and extend the spacecraft's life-span.

Several of those efforts took place in 2026. The team running Voyager 1 spent weeks shutting down three devices and powering on three low-power alternatives to reduce overall power usage. This initiative, which was internally called The Big Bang, was also performed on Voyager 2. The transition was completed in early September, giving Voyager 1 more time with its dwindling power supply while also keeping it warm enough to continue operating in the frigid conditions of interstellar space. 

It was a tricky maneuver that required the team to simultaneously turn multiple instruments on and off. The difficulty of the maneuver was amplified by the fact that it took almost a full day for any signal to reach Voyager and another full day for Voyager to send a signal back, with hours of downtime while the spacecraft performed the operations. 

All of this took place several months after Voyager 1 experienced a sudden drop in power, which necessitated shutting off one of its three remaining instruments still in operation. Voyager 1 now has only two instruments still in operation.

Making it a whole light-day away from Earth is likely going to be Voyager 1's final milestone while it still has enough power to communicate with Earth. Voyager 1 is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators. They are essentially nuclear-powered batteries that generate energy by converting the steady heat from decaying plutonium-238. 

When Voyager 1 first launched, its radioisotope thermoelectric generators produced about 470 watts of power. But plutonium-238 doesn't last forever, and after 50 years in space, the RTGs now produce about 215 watts of power, with an average loss of about 4 watts per year. Most of that power is used to keep Voyager 1 up and running, which is why NASA has shut down eight of the 10 instruments that Voyager had when it launched.

At its current rate of usage and decay, Voyager 1 is expected to shut down its final science instrument in the 2030s and will eventually lose communication with Earth in 2036 due to insufficient power to send back a radio signal. 

The same fate is expected for Voyager 2, Voyager 1's twin, which has also spent half a century in space. While it is labeled the sequel, Voyager 2 actually launched 16 days before Voyager 1, and the two have spent nearly identical amounts of time traversing the cosmos. Thanks to its slower speed and trajectory, it likely won’t reach the one light-day distance until after its instruments shut down.

Thanks to the vastness of space, Voyager 1 will lose all of its power before it hits its next milestone, which is the beginning of the Oort Cloud, a vast, icy shell of comets at the edge of our solar system. It'll take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to make it there.

Thanks to the near-perfect vacuum of outer space, Voyager 1 will continue to fly at its current speed even after it shuts down entirely. So it'll still hit that milestone; it just won't be able to phone home to tell us about it.

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Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2307769/116-underwater-drone-swarm-world-record-china/

Researchers have set a record for the largest swarm of underwater drones in history. Officially recognized by Guinness World Records, the trial saw 116 TH-618 drones deployed in a 164 ft by 65 ft pool, where they autonomously executed a series of formations and maneuvers. (For comparison, and Olympic-sized swimming pool is approximately 164 ft by 82 ft.)

The August 2026 test has strong ties to the People's Republic of China's military pipeline. It was conducted by researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University, an institution designated by the US government as a developer of technologies for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The university conducted the experiment in conjunction with Xi'an Tianhe Maritime Technologies, a subsidiary of defense contractor Xian Tianhe Defense Technology.

According to the South China Morning Post, the university said that developing submersible drone swarms "has always been a core challenge in the global field of underwater intelligent equipment. This time, the stable navigation of a cluster of hundreds of vehicles represents a breakthrough in the large-scale coordinated navigation of underwater unmanned systems."

The record-setting day could prove a major milestone in the PLA's development of autonomous drone swarms — an increasingly vital point of emphasis in the Eastern power's military buildup. Currently the world's largest navy, the PLA Navy (PLAN) is largely made up of smaller nimble ships designed to patrol the contested littoral waters of the South China Sea. And while the nation has commissioned three aircraft carriers in the last decade and a half, its fleet still lags behind the United States in total fire power.

Some believe drones could close this gap and enable PLA's increasingly expansive naval ambitions. Others worry the proliferation of drones will lower the threshold for naval engagements at a a time when naval intelligence is already beset with uncertainty.

The test's TH-618 drones resemble long pipes equipped with four propellers and a camera. Roughly 2 ft long and half a foot wide, the 11lb drones have a range of just over 18 miles and can operate continuously for roughly 8 hours. To navigate, the drones use smartphone cameras attached to the front, allowing AI systems to adjust routes in real time to respond to underwater disturbances and collisions. According to the university [Website in Chinese --Ed], the drones can autonomously conduct complex maneuvers like terrain tracking, landmark recognition, vertical lift, depth and speed control and hovering in water using multi-degree-of freedom thrusters.

Underwater drone navigation is exceedingly complex when compared to its aerial counterpart because developers cannot utilize wireless communications or satellite positioning and navigation systems for course calibration. Low visibility and high water pressure further complicate subsurface coordination. Drones must rely on an amalgamation of underwater sensing, subsurface target detection and acoustic communication to autonomously respond to their irregular operating environment. Coordinating these efforts is another challenge altogether.

The culmination of over two decades of research, this record-breaking exercise could represent a major leap in AI-powered underwater navigation technologies. Over roughly 34 minutes, the drones relied solely on visual data to autonomously navigate around the pool, covering over 1,600 feet without human intervention. In creating a miniaturized submersible capable of coordinating autonomous responses to environmental stimuli, researchers at NWPU may have taken a step towards a new era of subsurface research, intelligence gathering and warfare.

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2311878/spacex-first-attempt-to-catch-both-starship-stages-november-13/

SpaceX is aiming to launch Starship's Flight 15 mission on November 13. It's still pending regulatory approval, but if it gets the go-ahead and the weather is favorable, the super heavy-lift vehicle's 75-minute launch window will open at 5:45PM Eastern time that day. Flight 15 won't be like any of the vehicle's previous test flights. SpaceX will attempt to retrieve the full orbital launch system, both the Super Heavy booster and the Ship upper stage, for the first time.

The company had returned and caught Starship's Super Heavy booster thrice in the past. It has never attempted to catch Ship, though, because it travels much higher and faster than the booster, making it more difficult to catch.

Starship achieved its first orbital flight during the vehicle's 14th test mission. However, SpaceX had to cut the trip short, and Ship only spent around two hours in orbit instead of the 10 hours the company had planned. This time, SpaceX will try to get Ship to orbit our planet around 14 times in a flight that's expected to last more than 22 hours before the vehicle deorbits. The stage will also deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites as part of its primary objectives.

In the company's latest earnings call, Elon Musk showed a short video, demonstrating how SpaceX intends to catch both the Super Heavy and Ship stages. It will use its launch tower's "chopstick arms" to catch Super Heavy like it did in the past, just a few minutes after launch. Then a day later, it will use the same arms to catch the Ship stage. SpaceX will only attempt to capture it if it's able to deorbit at any of several pre-determined areas and if conditions are optimal. That means we may or may not see the company catch Ship for the first time in a few days.

If it does succeed in catching both stages, it would be a huge step forward into achieving full reusability, which has been the company's goal for the Starship from the start. You can watch the full event, including the Ship catch if it happens, on SpaceX's account on X.

Flight 15 is targeting to launch as early as Friday, November 13, pending regulatory approval → https://t.co/K5XRci6bnw pic.twitter.com/WS2xGLjVsx

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