Ranting and Raving

Big surprise. After Senator Elizabeth Warren started raising a stink about the military being unable to repair its own equipment, military contractors started "intensely lobbying" for a new system of "data as a service", which would probably have been even worse. Both systems were excluded from the final bill.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/09/us_military_right_to_repair_stripped/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/12/09/2123219/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-us-military-spending-bill

Called Pairdown, located at https://pairdown.com/

In the initial level, you click on a letter to remove it, forming a new word. Then the letters that you remove form a word! The second level, you remove two letters of different color, and the first color forms one word, the second another.

Then the harder difficulty blurs a letter in the word!


Another game on the web site is I'm Squeezy at https://imsqueezy.com/. You click on a letter in the column on the left to insert it into the spaces between letters in the words on the right.

to focus entirely on commercial manufacturing, i.e. data centers and AI requirements.

I can't fault them, they're going where the money is, and they are required to pursue maximum shareholder value, as sick as that may be.

To illustrate the state of weirdness going on in the memory market, a "typical 32GB DDR5 RAM kit that cost around $82 in August now sells for about $310, and higher-capacity kits have seen even steeper increases." People are being told that if you need a new computer or upgrade right now, forget it. Wait a year or two. Russet is getting a new MacBook Pro from work, but Apple is a bit insulated from this kerfuffle, plus work is paying for it.

The weird bit is that high-end graphics cards spiked as AI stocks started soaring, and now graphics cards are coming down in price. But memory and solid-state drives are soaring. One thing becomes reasonable, and everything else gets priced out of reach.

Micron will continue shipping Crucial memory through February 2026 and will be honoring consumer warrantees as needed. After that, they will only be selling Micron memory to commercial customers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/

This is... interesting. In October, an A320 operated by Jetblue was en route from Cancun to Newark when it suffered an unexpected loss of altitude. It made an emergency landing in Miami. No injuries or damage to the aircraft. The FAA directive reported that the October flight "experienced a malfunction in its elevator aileron computer (ELAC), which is a computer that controls the plane’s pitch or nose angle. Airbus believes that solar flares—intense and concentrated streams of electromagnetic solar radiation—may have corrupted the data and caused the ELAC to malfunction, suddenly sending the aircraft plunging down."

The article goes on to say "The fix for the issue is a relatively quick revert to earlier software before the planes can fly again, except for some jets that may require a complete hardware replacement." (emphasis mine)

Now, this raises some questions. First, why does reverting the software to a previous version fix the problem? Obviously reinstalling software would fix a corruption issue, unless there was hardware damage, in which case you'd have to replace the hardware and then reinstall the software. Since you're reverting the software, that implies that the older software had some self-healing features that could detect if something had damaged the program and it could reload part or all of itself from safe storage, not unlike error-correcting memory. And personally, if I were designing software for aviation that would fly on aircraft, I'd like to have this feature. I have no idea if their software can do this.

But this is the big question: if the software can self-repair, WHY WOULD SUCH A FEATURE BE REMOVED? Clearly such a feature would take a lot of resources, both occupying computer memory (overhead) and processing power (CPU resources) with its monitoring. BUT THIS IS A FIELD WHERE YOU WANT BOTH BELT AND SUSPENDERS! I just don't get why you would dumb-down a program.

The other question is why the computer doesn't have increased shielding? Granted, you cannot completely shield equipment in aircraft against high-energy particles, it's just not practical. The particles are too energetic, the weight and size of such shielding would be prohibitive. And because aircraft fly at high altitude, you don't have as much atmosphere acting as an attenuator, slowing down the particles a little bit. This is why living at high altitude, such as Russet and I do at 9,000', people have increased rates of thyroid problems and cataract formation: we are exposed to harsher sunlight and more directly hit by higher energy sunlight, where as people living at sea level get the full benefit of a skyful of air slowing things down.

So a couple of questions linger over this. Reloading an older version of the software shouldn't take long: after it's reloaded, the flight crew will have to confirm the ELAC system is functioning as expected. And if it doesn't load properly, it's probably due to damage to said system and the plane will have to be taken out of service pending replacement of the computer. Disruptions to air travel to accommodate things like this will cost the airlines a lot of money and result in hordes of angry passengers whose travel plans are being disrupted.

https://gizmodo.com/how-solar-flares-could-have-corrupted-an-airbus-plane-2000693690

We just got back from seeing it, and it is a fantastic sequel! They brought back pretty much the entire cast, though they did replace the mayor. I'm not going to talk about the plot at all, except to say that the script writers did a wonderful job on the story. And I'm going to leave it at that.

One thing is that I would strongly recommend re-watching the original movie before going to this one. It starts like a week after the end of the first movie and hits the ground running. Or hopping.

:-)

Oh, there's a 40 second clip at the end of the credits. There's something at the very end of the clip that I'm not sure if it's foreshadowing Zootopia 3 or not, I guess we'll find out when it gets made and released. NINE YEARS between the first and second movies, I hope we don't have to wait that long for #3.

This is both funny and sad because (A) it happened to the International Association of Cryptologic Research, an organization that's been around for 50-some years, and (2) because it demonstrates how brittle encryption can be.

The organization was its annual leadership election, and was using high-strength and verifiable encryption. Everyone who submitted their vote could verify, through their own encryption key, that their vote was correct and not tampered with. Three members of the election committee each held one-third of the key required to completely decrypt the master file to tabulate the vote, so all three had to simultaneously submit their part of the key to process the votes.

One of the members lost their part of the key, irrecoverably, through simple human error - not a hack. Thus, the file remains forever locked.

The IACR is re-running the election which will close on December 20 using a different encryption methodology requiring two of the three key portions. And the person who lost their part of the key has resigned from the election committee, I don't know if they're still part of the organization.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/11/cryptography-group-cancels-election-results-after-official-loses-secret-key/

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/iacr-nullifies-election-because-of-lost-decryption-key.html