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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

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/11/ring-cameras-go-mobile-as-amazon-debuts-ai-powered-security-drone-and-robot/

Amazon is betting that many Ring customers will also want an AI-powered security drone and robot patrolling their homes or offices.
[...]
The Ring Rover Cam and Ring Drone Cam are expected to reach customers starting at the end of 2026 and in early 2027, respectively, according to an Amazon announcement posted on November 10. Amazon describes the devices as relying on an AI Pilot system
[...]
Both devices also use that AI Pilot system to digitally map the floor plan of the customer's home or business.
[...]
Amazon's Ring Drone appears to be a direct successor to the company's Ring Always Home Cam
[...]
Amazon aims to make the drone available on January 27, 2027, with customers able to register for email updates through the product page.

The drone can supposedly follow a set route and schedule for customers who subscribe to the Amazon Ring Protect plan.
[...]
  the drone is limited to just 8 minutes of flight time when operating on a "new, fully-charged battery under controlled conditions" according to the product description. It comes with a docking station for charging.

Another caveat in the product description is that the Ring Drone Cam may experience degraded performance when navigating in environments with reflective surfaces such as "polished marble or wet tile," blank matte walls without any features, or transparent surfaces like frameless glass and mirrors.
[...]
Amazon has pitched the Ring Rover Cam priced at $1,000 as "an autonomous security robot designed for business." This product is already available for preorder for those so inclined and scheduled to start shipping to customers on December 16, 2026.
[...]
Like the Ring Drone, the Ring Rover can automatically respond to alerts from connected Ring devices by following its preprogrammed patrol points. But the wheeled robot is only designed to operate within a single-floor, indoor environment because it lacks stair-climbing capability.
[...]
Amazon touts the new Ring Robotics products as offering "privacy and security without compromise,"
[...]
Ring was previously charged in a 2023 Federal Trade Commission investigation with allowing employees and contractors to watch Ring video recordings of customers' private spaces. The FTC also described Ring as having lackluster safeguards that allowed hackers to access 55,000 US customers' accounts.

Videos taken by the new Ring Drone and Ring Rover will be protected with Ring's Throw Away the Key Encryption that was introduced in September 2026, according to Amazon's announcement. The digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has described this as an improvement over Ring's former default settings, but still well short of end-to-end encryption.
[...]
Amazon's previous attempt to launch its Ring Always Home Cam drone also led to expanded privacy concerns. Ryan Calo, a law and technology researcher at the University of Washington, previously described such a flying security camera as providing new ways to surveil others indoors, along with giving companies much greater access to potentially sensitive or identifying details of homes and businesses.
[...]
Ring has allowed owners of fixed Ring doorbell cameras to turn on a "Familiar Faces" feature that uses facial recognition technology on visitors—and that is already the subject of a class action lawsuit.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Author, system administrator, and developer, Peter N M Hansteen, has written a blog post about a major e-mail provider's failure to handle e-mail:

This means that after several years of mostly managing to deliver messages sent from our systems to their intended recipients in Google managed domains (at random times deciding to put mail from here in their users' Spam folders), somebody decided it was time to disregard our domains' published SPF and DMARC information.

Their "very low reputation of the sending domain" is is likely down to a very poor understanding of how modern mail delivery works.

More likely than not, the volume of messages sent with faked sender addresses claiming to be from our domains and a source IP address in the great elsewhere is vastly larger than the actually valid messages sent from valid users, all of which will come from the hosts listed in our published records.

The existence of spamtraps should not be a surprise either, after all we have been doing greytrapping for more than eighteen years.

I would posit that this is a mail services provider that has demonstrated that they do not, in fact, understand SMTP mail at all.

Fortunately, he was able to get the problem on their end fixed ... for now ... this time.

Previously:
(2026) Self-Hosted Email Is In Steep Decline, Microsoft And Google Are Taking Over
(2026) Almost Nobody Pays Attention to Web Standards Anymore
(2014) Microsoft Outlook Outage Affects North American Customers

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/11/ceo-jensen-huangs-job-is-suddenly-on-the-line-at-nvidia/

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has resigned following revelations that he had two extramarital affairs, plunging the chipmaker at the heart of the global AI boom into crisis.
[...]
Huang, who cofounded Nvidia in 1993, led it to become what was until recently the world's most valuable company.

Huang's departure marks a startling end to his more than 33-year tenure, during which Nvidia evolved from a small video-game chip company into the linchpin of the global AI infrastructure boom.
[...]
Shares were down 10.2 percent in pre-market trading, a move that would wipe off more than $400 billion in market capitalization.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2309632/one-problem-with-new-hdds-5000-drives-study/

One problem with Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) is mechanical unpredictability. In other words, they can fail because of a factory defect in the first week or chug away quite happily until failing without warning once they get older.

Recent data from the cloud storage giant Backblaze shows roughly 1.5% of all HDDs fail and nearly half of those fail in year one. Additionally, 30% of those failed drives break down without warning. That data is based on its experience managing a huge fleet of over 350,000 storage drives.

These insights are confirmed by a Secure Data Recovery report based on what it learned working with drives that had already failed. As well as confirming similar failure rates, it claims HDDs last 807 days on average, though this only reflects those drives that had already failed.

Failure can be a result of production defects, such as head misalignment or seized motors; accidents, such as power surges or drops; and damage to the drive's internal operating system. Backblaze has been sharing statistics about its hundreds of thousands of drives for years. Its data shows Seagate was the most mechanically reliable across the April-June 2026 period, though some models were more reliable than others. Drives from Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital tend to lead in similar analyses of failure rates.

The trade-off for the mechanical risk inherent to HDDs is that this kind of storage remains significantly cheaper by GB than other storage media, particularly as demand from AI data centers pushes SSD (solid state drive) storage prices higher. Granted, one reason SSDs are such a success in the AI industry is because they're much faster than HDDs, making it possible for AI systems to work swiftly with very large data sets. Where cost matters more than performance, when it comes to high-capacity storage, the cost advantage is so significant that you can build RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) systems based on HDDs for less than the cost of a single high-capacity SSD.

All the data confirms a connection between HDD failure rate and age, suggesting drives become more prone to fail once they reach seven years old. This implies that if you rely on HDDs in your workflow and need to keep your data, you should plan a replacement schedule for aging drives or invest in additional storage solutions, such as cloud.

Bad as they seem, these failure rates aren't unexpected and can be seen as reflective of the technology itself. One of the reasons Apple pioneered use of SSDs in consumer devices was their relative durability compared to HDDs.

Will HDD technology evolve to become more resilient? The technology is advancing, but the vast majority of drives rely on CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) tech, which provides predictable performance. Backblaze is monitoring emerging HDD technologies such as SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and laser-heated HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) but doesn't currently use any. This suggests the next evolution of HDD tech isn't with us yet.

In the end, you must craft your setup to prepare for failure. Tech pundits have argued for years that we should be combining cloud, local and off-site storage systems to properly secure data against theft, fire and mechanical failure. If you're currently using HDD storage, don't drop it; use these tips to monitor its condition and invest in supplemental storage to guarantee data integrity.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

There are six levels of (vehicle) driving autonomy, according to the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). Levels 0 to 2 require the human driver to continuously monitor the road, but things start getting interesting from Level 3 upwards: from there, legal liability shifts from the human driver towards the automated system itself.

A little more than a year ago, the Low Countries (The Netherlands, Belgium) allowed Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) Mode on its roads -- a first in Europe. Now that list has grown to 10 countries, with Germany and Italy set to follow. If 15 countries, which together represent more than 65 percent of the EU's population, allow FSD, this opens up the possibility that FSD automatically will be approved in the whole of the EU. The expectation is that this milestone will be reached by December -- yes, that's December, next month.

Tesla has had to make some allowances though. First one is that the term 'FSD' needs to be withdrawn: the system will be renamed to Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD). Four more things: (a) customers need to be presented with an explanatory video making clear that the system is, in fact, not able to self-drive, (b) the system needs to disable itself when the driver doesn't show focus enough (i.e. is toddling off), (c) FSD/TAD is allowed only up to speeds of 130km/hr (80 miles per hour) and (c) the system's speeding is limited to 10%.

Tesla hopes to sell more Tesla's that way; but that is not guaranteed. Returning to those SAE levels, Tesla's FSD/TAD is classified as a 2+ system. Other US competitors are also at that level, reportedly (Ford Mustang Mach-E, F-150, Expedition; Lincoln Navigator, Cadillac Escalade / LYRIQ, Chevrolet Silverado / Blazer EV, GMC Hummer EV).

With European competitors, on the other hand, Level 2+ is moving towards standard for mid-market vehicles (BMW 530i, new €51,000, used €30,000): but then Mercedes (S-Class, EQS Sedan) and BMW (7 Series/i7 with Personal Pilot L3) are already at Level 3 -- breaking through that SAE's magical automation barrier.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

By revisiting the famous problem mathematicians have gained important new insights into the nature of graphs:

Some math problems continue to haunt researchers long after they've been solved. A proof emerges, is even celebrated, and yet dissatisfaction lingers. Perhaps the argument is too convoluted — the hunt persists for the elusive one-page paper — or perhaps it fails to give a deeper theoretical insight into why something is true. Whatever the reason, mathematicians return, again and again, to a case that is otherwise considered closed.

One of the most famous such cases is that of the four-color theorem, a problem that transformed how mathematicians think about their subject.

The problem is simple to state, and even simpler to see: Given a contiguous map, is it possible to color each region with one of four colors such that no neighboring regions share a color? In the mid-19th century, the question was of trifling interest to mapmakers, who had far more than four colors at their disposal and saw no particular reason to restrict their palette. But to mathematicians, both amateur and professional, the brain teaser quickly turned into an obsession.

The first purported proof, announced in 1879, stood for 11 years before it was proved incorrect. More wrong answers would follow, from lawyers and doctors and famous graph theorists, too. "Here we have a problem that even a child can understand," said Carsten Thomassen, a graph theorist at the Technical University of Denmark. "I think that's the reason why it has been such a big challenge."

The theorem was finally proved nearly a century later — but with computer methods that were considered scandalous at the time, causing mathematicians to question what they considered a proof in the first place. The status of the problem remained a source of debate until 1997, when the use of computers became more common and a simpler computer-assisted proof was found.

Yet even today, the "four-color disease," as Mikkel Thorup, a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen, puts it, continues to circulate. He and Thomassen count themselves among the afflicted. For such a simple statement, there must be a simpler reason why it is true. Or at least a more efficient way to demonstrate it.

[...] In 1852, the mathematician Francis Guthrie was coloring in a map of English counties when he noticed that he needed only four colors. Was this always true, he wondered? He asked his brother Frederick, also a mathematician, whose adviser, Augustus De Morgan, took an interest in the question and decided to market it to a wider audience. In 1879, when a mathematician named Alfred Bray Kempe claimed to have a solution, a press release announced the achievement in Nature.

Kempe started by assuming the opposite of what he wanted to prove: that there is a map that can't be colored with only four colors. He then sought to show that this assumption would ultimately lead to a contradiction — meaning that no such map could exist. In that case, all maps would have to be four-colorable.

First, he said, imagine that the non-four-colorable map from your assumption is as "minimal" as possible: If you were to remove any country from it, the remaining map would be four-colorable. Next, do away with geography and other extraneous details by redrawing your map as what's known as a planar graph. Represent each country as a point (or vertex), and draw a line (or edge) between two points if those countries share a border. Your map-coloring problem is now a graph-coloring one, opening it up to the tools of graph theory.

Snotnose writes:

I'm probably one of a dozen to submit this, but I'm not seeing it in the subs queue so here goes.

Sam Altman is not having a good couple of weeks; ever since he said OpenAI's ram needs are more important than consumer electronics, the internet has been unforgiving. But one man has taken things one step further to mock Altman's ridiculous super villain sounding statements.

Open-source developer Iain Kay has created an open-source BASH script called "Ram Altman" for Linux systems designed to monitor how much idle RAM you have sitting on your rigs, laptops, etc.

The percentage of unused RAM is then emailed to Sam Altman

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2026/11/signetics-st680a-dtl-nand.html

Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL).1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor logic works.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

Fixes are arriving faster than new bug reports for one major Linux project:

The worst of the patchpocalypse may be behind us, according to Linus Torvalds.

Writing in his weekly kernel update post, the Linux kernel dev leader delivered Linux 7.4 rc2 – the second rough cut of the next kernel – which he rated as a big release for two reasons.

One is that he left some code out of rc1, because he was busy and because it was already the largest such release in the history of the kernel.

The other is what Torvalds described as "various AI fixes."

[...] Torvalds' post suggests that, perhaps, the worst of this is behind us.

"This time around Alexei claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true," he wrote.

That's a reference to Alexei Starovoitov, co-creator and lead dev on the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), the project that makes it possible to run sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel.

"I think most other areas haven't reached that point yet, but it's at least a sign that we _may_ be starting to see the tide starting to turn," he added. "Don't hold your breath, but maybe cross your fingers we'll be getting there in the not entirely distant future."

If Torvalds is correct, that's welcome news. The Linux kernel's 40-million-plus lines of code makes it one of the world's bigger software projects. If AI soon stops finding flaws in other parts of the kernel beyond eBPF, perhaps the deluge of fixes developers and users alike will need to handle has peaked.

Original Submission

For decades universities and researchers around the world have spent countless hours to achieve the holy grail of programming: codeless programs. Many tools, going all the way back when with CASE, claim to have done this, but few have achieved success. A workshop in Bundaberg Queensland has children making games with AI by speaking.

Mr Quarrell said with creativity the main driver of game design, AI made it accessible to everyone.

The idea started with Mr Quarrell's 16-year-old son, Oscar, who cannot read or write — but was able to talk to AI.

"The AI didn't stop. It didn't get confused. It took everything that Oscar had said as a prompt and it filtered through all of these 'ums' and 'ahs' and it got the core substance from it and it created something," Mr Quarrell said.

"We've removed the need for reading and writing and we've just allowed his imagination to be captured."

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

Tuning in to electronic noise can tell us whether electrons have paired up or not:

Superconductors carry electricity without resistance, but most only work a few degrees above absolute zero. In the late 1980s, copper-based materials called cuprates were found to superconduct at higher temperatures—reachable with affordable liquid nitrogen. Yet nearly 40 years later, physicists still don't agree on why.

In a recent Science study, a team of physicists led by Milan Allan of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Ingmar Swart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands has found some answers by listening to the faint electrical crackle of current flowing into a cuprate.

Central to the mystery of cuprates' high-temperature superconductivity is a strange state called the pseudogap. "The pseudogap is a phenomenon of missing electrons," Allan said. Above the temperature at which cuprates become superconducting, some of their electrons seem to vanish—measurements find far fewer of them at the energies where they should be. "Everybody knows that from different probes, you see that there's these vanishing electrons, but nobody knows why," Allan said.

Over the decades, physicists have put forward two main competing explanations. The first hypothesizes that the electrons get stuck in some sort of structure. In this view, electrons freeze into patterns, such as charge density waves, and superconductivity develops separately. The alternative explanation tightly links this phenomenon to superconductivity. "Other people think they're missing because they form pairs," Allan said. Pairs of electrons, called Cooper pairs, are what carry current in a superconductor. If, as the material cools, these pairs appear before the material becomes superconducting, they would be a precondition of superconductivity, a waiting room of sorts, where pairs exist but can't yet move together in lockstep.

Settling this proved extremely hard. "Lots of different experimental signatures are kind of lumped inside this," Allan said. Different instruments all see something, but their readings, Allan said, are never conclusive. "It's always something kind of incoherent, hard to grasp," he said.  What the researchers needed was a way to see pairs directly, and Allan and his colleagues figured it out.

The team decided to listen to shot noise—tiny fluctuations caused by the arrival of individual charges that form the stream of an electric current. Allan says it resembles rain drumming on the roof.  "If you imagine that you have raindrops and then all of a sudden you make the drops twice as heavy, there'll be more noise," Allan said. "With the electrons it's similar. If you have two electrons coming always together, because they're associated with pairing, then it will be more noise."

hubie writes:

Synaptics Appears To Use Legal Threats To Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver:

From earlier in the year you may recall a new experimental open-source Linux driver for modern DisplayLink hardware. That "Vino" driver for DisplayLink driver was a clean-room reverse-engineered DisplayLink driver that was developed in part by AI and written in Rust. Unfortunately, that open-source driver has disappeared following legal threats by Synaptics.

I hadn't heard anything more on this in-development Rust kernel driver in a while until this morning when a Phoronix reader pointed out a troubling post on the mailing list that I missed. It appears Synaptics resorted to using their legal team to block this independent, community-developed driver on the basis of violating their patents.

A cease and desist notice was sent to the Vino driver developer of this open-source driver. Those curious can find the various correspondence via attachments on this LKML thread.

The Vino driver repository on GitHub is no longer publicly available. So don't look for an open-source, upstream DisplayLink driver in Linux anytime soon... The original USB2-era DisplayLink hardware worked well on Linux and even had open-source driver support, but looks now like Synaptics will ensure that no open-source driver exists for their latest IP around USB graphics.

Good luck playing whack-a-mole in this Claude Code world of ours with people willing to spend their tokens towards this.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/11/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-summoned-by-congress-over-chinese-espionage-concerns/

Top Republican lawmakers have asked Jensen Huang to appear before Congress to answer questions after it was reported that US intelligence officials believe Nvidia's chief executive has been targeted by a Chinese spying operation.

The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs, and intelligence wrote to Huang this week asking him to appear before a joint closed-door briefing for their committees on November 18.

"Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the People's Republic of China's access to sensitive US technology and information," representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford wrote.

"The issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge US technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress. It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which US national security has been placed at risk," the lawmakers added.

The New York Times last week wrote that US intelligence officials believed Huang had been the target of a Chinese spy operation. The concerns center on a Chinese woman named Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company that has bought billions of dollars of Nvidia's chips.

Nvidia has rejected the claims and on Thursday would not say if Huang would appear before Congress. "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job. Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," the company said.

"Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information—not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets—and zero information relevant to national security," it added.

The lawmakers said they wanted Huang to discuss the security protocols Nvidia had in place to protect against "foreign adversary espionage." The company said its chief executive had an "outstanding security team" that travels with him.

The New York Times said Huang had not received a "defensive briefing," which the intelligence community usually, but not always, provides potential espionage targets to warn them about the activity.

Nvidia said it was confident that the US government would have let the company know if it thought a person was a threat to US industry and that it often receives updates from Washington about people of concern.

The US has previously scrutinized Megaspeed, founded in 2023 as a spin-off from a Chinese gaming company, for potential chip smuggling, although no charges followed.

Nvidia launched its own unannounced on-site inspections at Megaspeed in Singapore when it became aware of the US concerns, but the internal probe found no evidence of its chips being diverted into China, said people familiar with the matter.

The company's supply chain has come under increasing scrutiny as US export controls have prompted increased smuggling of its chips. Earlier this year Wally Liaw, a co-founder of Supermicro, one of Nvidia's key supply chain partners, was arrested in the US and charged with smuggling Nvidia chips into China. He denies any wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/11/06/us-air-traffic-control-enters-the-21st-century-starts-to-abandon-floppy-disks/5308210

The Federal Aviation Administration still uses computers that require floppy disks. But those are finally on the way out within the next few years.

Yes, it's still 2026, and yes, you read that right: The FAA – the agency responsible for overseeing aviation safety in the US – is finally getting rid of four systems dating back to the 1980s that remain in use at more than 400 facilities around the country, the agency announced on Thursday.

"Good news America: floppy disks are out, 21st century tech is in," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in the FAA's announcement. Only a few decades late, Sean, but we're sure the flying public appreciates it. 

The new system, known as Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS), is designed to consolidate data from various systems into a common digital platform, allowing air traffic controllers to access operational information and alerts needed to manage flights.

E-IDS is replacing four legacy systems: Information Display System 4, used to track weather and operational info; the Automated Surface Observing System Controller Equipment Information Display System, which also relays weather information; the NAS Information Display System, which relays information about airports and other airspace conditions; and the En Route Information Display System (ERIDS), which handles information about flights. 

The FAA said E-IDS will improve how Pilot Reports and Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) are collected and distributed. The agency has had its share of air traffic control SNAFUs, including one in 2023 that temporarily halted domestic flight departures nationwide after someone accidentally deleted a file from the NOTAM system.

The FAA said it has already lined up five facilities to receive E-IDS upgrades: airports in Atlantic City, Nashville, and Rochester, New York, along with data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City. The agency plans to install the system at 435 sites by the end of 2028.

That 2028 deadline echoes the ambitious three-year timetable Duffy laid out last year for overhauling the nation's air traffic control system.

Aside from the four systems E-IDS will replace, the FAA has a lot of outdated technology, with the Government Accountability Office saying in 2024 that 51 of the agency's 138 ATC systems were unsustainable due to lack of parts and funding to sustain or replace them.

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill allocated $12.5 billion for the FAA's overhaul efforts, but that's far short of what's actually needed. In December of last year, the FAA said that it needed an additional $20 billion to handle upgrade costs, and that appears to still be the case. 

"To continue modernizing our air traffic control facility, Secretary Duffy and FAA Administrator Bedford are calling on Congress to pass the Modern Skies Act," an FAA spokesperson told The Register in an email. That bill is asking for $30 billion to get ATC modernization across the finish line, the spokesperson added.

"It will modernize our air traffic control system, replace crumbling aviation infrastructure, and build world-class airports across the country," they said. In other words, the FAA wants to get rid of floppy disks, but it's probably not accurate to say they're "out," as Duffy put it.

The GAO said in September that the FAA was still well short of its financial needs, with an additional $10.2 billion needed for the second phase of upgrades, which has yet to receive a completion date.

As with so many government ambitions, budgets often get in the way, and this wider modernization effort still seems more ambitious on paper than the FAA may be able to deliver.

Original Submission