I wonder how it is secured, or could anyone with a big enough transmitter reprogram it at will…
Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)
The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.
“Yeah, I always leave my car unlocked with the keys inside. I also always park it in the center of a lake.”
More like, below the lake.
Thanks for that link, cool stuff!
You may be interested in learning about its downlink: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
Lol.
Why is it only sending back dickbutt memes?
Its partially because there is only one set of antennas large enough to communicate with it, and that’s only sometimes. Its called the Deep space network and it is very secure because it’s used for many things, not just communicating with the Voyager probes.
Second, you’d have to have very very intimate knowledge of the hardware, and programming language to even begin to hack it. And the people who do have that knowledge are very very passionate about their probes.
So I guess technically the answer is yes. But practically, no.
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I think the security is adequately managed by the need for a massive transmitter as well as the question “what is there to gain via a hostile takeover and re-programming the probe?”
I bet there’s actual security of some kind going on, but those two points seem like a massive hurdle to clear just to mess with a deep space probe.
what is there to gain via a hostile takeover and re-programming the probe
“We did it for the lulz”.
They get doom to run on it.
Imagine playing with a 22 hour delay on frames.
OTS flashing.
Like OTA but with space rather than air.
OTV (void)
If we flash our phones here on Earth, we lose our warranty, wtf
Warranty never works anyway
**This also means that aliens can reprogram all of our satellites. **
Yes if they can track them in middle of space.
It’s impressive that we can still send data to the satellite. I mean you need to send the signal to the place where the satellite will be in 24 hours.
Nearly all such satellites would have highly directional antennas, so the aliens would have to be neat earth before they could do that. Voyager is not expecting a command signal from anywhere else but Earth. The signal would have to originate not more than a fraction of a degree from Earth from Voyager’s perspective.
So they just need to go behind it?
No, it doesn’t. Commands could be authenticated using a pre-shared secret. Even public cryptography existed prior to Voyager 1’s launch (by a year).
Based on the state of computer security at that time I would guess that’s unlikely, but then again it was the Cold War.
Anyway, just because it is possible it doesn’t mean anyone can do it.
you say that like aliens wouldn’t just acquire the hardware itself. If there are aliens, and they know about the probe, chances are they’re probably in a better position to fuck with it than we are. From a computing power angle (i.e. it’s easy to crack) as well as hardware level.
If they had a way to affect our technology in a meaningful way at interstellar distances we can assume their understanding of mathematics is significantly more advanced than ours.
If their understand of mathematics is that much more advanced we can assume that their knowledge of cryptography is also much more advanced.
They’d probably be able to crack our encryption fairly easily.
Wasn’t there a documentary about this?
Star Trek the Motion Picture
I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.
That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.
It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.
Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.
Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.
This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.
I mean, unironically, yeah.
It’s not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn’t moving on from outdated forms of communication, it’s that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it (and their searches are trash).
all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it
You’ve just discovered their business case. So many new businesses these days only insinuate themselves into an existing process in order to co-opt it and charge rents.
It’s not Slack’s fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they’re set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.
All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn’t have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.
Sorry, email is still better for all of those things. Except the wiki page, of course.
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memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it
uh, email is memos? email is so memos that ibm’s proprietary email management solution Lotus Notes calls the transaction “create memo” where outlook calls it “new message”.
and the topic is not up for further discussion.
bit rude, imo.
Even then, you get banned from Google for some reason, what then?
- Don’t use google as your email provider
- Keep backups of your email (you can do this on gmail, too)
Microsoft is 49.
fingers crossed!
They were a software for decades before they became an “internet company”.
And most microsoft products surely can run 50 years with no glitches.
Yeah. Technically I’m not talking about Microsoft, as their primary product is the OS and they are not purely Internet-based. IBM, of course, is much older than that and also has some Internet products, as does every software company.
In my statement “Internet company” means a company whose only product is SaaS on the Internet; i.e. someone who, if they went away, their product would disappear with them.
I guess it is hard to imagine an internet company lasting that long mostly because the hasn’t been around that long, it’s only been 31 years since it went public. A year later Amazon was formed. I would bet money Amazon and Google easily make it to 50. Along with many many others. A small, not overly commercialized company like slack would be crazy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get gobbled up by a mega Corp as the enshitification continues.
Match group (owners of nearly every dating site and app) are very likely to endure 50 years, and they are, afaik, 100% internet company, plug it off and they disappear without a trace
Google is actually the sine qua non of what I’m talking about. I’ll concede that it’s possible Google as a corporate entity will still exist in 2048 (it was founded in 1998). But Google has undergone such a drastic and dystopian management change that it’s almost not even the same company now–
–but that isn’t relevant to what I’m actually talking about, which is the products. The proposition that Slack logs would still be around 50 years from now was what catalyzed my quip. Google kills everything it makes, usually quickly. Will we be able to look at Google Reader logs in 2048? Or–even closer to the target–Google Wave logs? Google Podcasts? Google Stadia? (I could go on.)
At the end of the day it was just a quip, but I fully expect the SaaS companies you currently think of as indestructible titans to be on the dustheap of history in 20 years, let alone 50.
I don’t think the actual logs on slack will go away. Just maybe hosted on a different server owned by a different corporation.
IBM is 100, but the Internet didn’t exist in 1924, so we’ll say the clock starts in 1989. I’m pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.
What does IBM even do anymore? I’m guessing they just support all of their legacy products that customers are locked into.
It’s basically an investment fund that runs the companies it invests in, like Alphabet, but with a bigger mix of real estate and finance investments thrown in.
What’s a company they invest in?
Themselves. I’m just saying internally they run it like an investment fund. Example: https://medium.com/design-ibm/area-631-what-i-learned-in-ibms-start-up-and-innovation-program-d87ed98f9549
Bought Red hat and is trying to lock down it’s users.
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To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/
They don’t use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/
That means “written in assembly” means “written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn’t document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke”.
They also released the source code of the Apollo 11 guidance computer. So if you want to fly to the moon, here is one part of how to do it.
Nice, now I just need a rocket and launchpad! Craigslist?
Commission one on fiverr or etsy.
I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?
Or do they have a simulator of it today - we’re talking about early 70’s hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I’ve read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).
I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I’m surely not saying I have better ideas - they’ve probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they’re doing.
They apparently didn’t have an emulator. The first thing I’d have done when working on a solution would have been to build one, but they seem to have pulled it off without.
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You sure? The smell off some of the corpses will have been terrible.
I’m not saying they’re all dead, but an intern at the time of launch would now be 70. Anybody who actually designed anything is… Well… The odds of them still being around are low.
IIRC, they did pull in a guy who had just started his career on the project.
I have a uncle who worked on Apollo writing machine code, and he is a spry, clear-headed 80-something-year-old.
Son of a bitch, I’m in.
do I hear heist movie?
takes long drag off cigarette “I’m too old for this shit”
100% they’ve got an emulator, they’ve had dedicated test environments since the moon landing for emulating disaster recovery scenarios since the moon landings, they’ve likely got at least one functioning hardware replica and very likely can spin up a hardware emulation as a virtual machine at will.
Source: I made this up, but I have a good understanding of systems admin and have a interest in space stuff so I’m pretty confident they would have this stuff at bare minimum
That’s my assumption too, but we’re talking about a different era, and I really have no idea how they approached validation and test/troubleshooting.
I’ve seen some test environments for manned missions, but that’s really for humans to validate what they’re doing.
V’ger was quick 'n dirty by comparison (with no criticism of the process or folks involved…they had one chance to get these missions out there).
The Hard Fork podcast had a pretty good episode recently where they interviewed one of the engineers on the project. They’d troubleshooted the spacecraft enough in the past that they weren’t starting from square one, but it still sounded pretty difficult.
There is an fascinating documentary about the team that sends the commands to Voyager 1 and 2 called It’s Quieter in the Twilight
Let’s hope the over-the-air update didn’t get Man-In-The-Middled…
Voyager is a boomer and could more easily be phished
Gen-X
Holy shit! I forgot that I’m old now and Gen-Xers are now super-old! Yuck! I regret reading your comment and now I’m mad at the internet for the rest of the day…
You can all go suck a butt
Suspect #1:
Still faster than the average Windows update.
Microsoft can’t even release a fix for Window’s recovery partition being too small to stage updates. I had to do it myself, fucking amateurs.
Can’t or won’t? The same issue exists for both windows 10 and 11, but they haven’t closed the ticket for windows 11… Typical bullshit. It’s not exactly planned obsolescence, but when a bug comes up like that they’re just gonna grab the opportunity to go “sry impossible, plz buy new products”
I didn’t know that. So the ticket is still open for 11 but there’s still no fix?
That is my understanding.
I can’t find the article that I read just yesterday, but this is somewhat the same story: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/03/microsoft_windows_recovery_environment/
Not to mention what a bitch that partition is when you need to shrink or increase the size of your windows partition. If you need to upgrade your storage, or resize to partition to make room for other operating systems, you have to follow like 20 steps of voodoo magic commands to do it.
Whoa learned that one at the weekend. Added a new nvme drive, cloned the old drive. I wanted to expand my linux partition, but it was at the start of the drive. So shifted all the windows stuff to the end and grew the Linux partition.
Thought I’d boot into windows to make sure it was okay, just in case (even though I’ve apparently not booted it in 3 years). BSOD. 2-3hrs later it was working again, I’m still not sure what fixed it of I’m honest, I seemed to just rerun the same bootrec commands and repair startup multiple times, but it works now, so yay!
Hiren’s Boot Cd has a handy tool that can fix that bsod. I’ve used it many times.
Jeez, I’ve just looked at the list of utilities, I’m not surprised, it’s got FireWire drivers for dos included. You’ve got to be pretty deep into the weeds at the point you need FireWire support in DOS from a recovery disk!
The possibility of a catastrophic fuck up is way too high to put this on the average Windows user.
Certainly better tested.
Well, they only had to test it for a single hardware deployment. Windows has to be tested for millions if not billions of deployments. Say what you want, but Microsoft testers are god like.
Windows? Hardware testing? Testing in general? LMAOOO
Yeah that’s what the updates are for haha
NASA should be in charge of Windows updates!
If they were it wouldn’t be Windows
Windows 13 update log:
Change kernel to Linux.
Build custom OS for astrophysics and space science applications.
happy rocket engineer noises
Now I’m curious. How would a NasaOS look like? Would it even be good for general use? Would they just focus on optimization? Could they finally beat Hannah Montana linux, the superior OS?
I think it would have a real time kernel running parallel to a linux kernel.
Users could interact with the linux kernel normally and schedule trusted real time tasks on the other. Maybe there is reduced security for added performance on those cores.In general use it would be a normal stable system with the allure of a performance mode that will break your system if you are not careful.
More stable, too.
Absolutely. The computers on Voyager hold the record for being the longest continuously running computer of all time.
People always underestimate the high level NASA works at. Everyone bitches and moans, especially Musk simps, about how long SLS took to make and its expense, but it worked right the first time. In the case of the Voyager spacecraft, they are working with tech so old, all the original engineers are retired or dead. NASA rocks.
I understand your point and completely agree that NASA has produced some amazing technological feats, but we could probably use a different example than the SLS to highlight their accomplishments. Even with supposedly repurposed rocket engines and technology from the Shuttle era, that project is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. If you want to highlight how amazing it is that SLS has actually flown with all the political manipulations associated with it, then I’d probably agree with you in that sense. This is no criticism of the engineers, but to completely ignore the issues of this project as a whole, not just financially related, seems to be a bit disingenuous.
Here’s a good article from Berger talking about what the Government Accountability Office thinks of the project: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable
The budget wasn’t really relevant to my point. And it did work correctly the first time.
All I’m saying is you could choose a better example, which NASA is full of them.
But lets say I built you a car that already came with an engine and some other important things, just to make it quicker and cheaper to get that car in your hands. Unfortunately, you want me to complete work on the car in five different states and use components from those areas. Guess what, the car is now about $5 million over budget and 5 years behind schedule. Not only that, but we encountered issues during the first test that are going to require more fixes ($$$) and more delays for the second test.
In this situation, you’re saying it’s great, it ran correctly the first time because it went down the road and back, and budgets and timelines don’t matter. I’m saying ehhhh, not really - we’re over budget by millions, delayed by years, and there were issues, even though we repurposed stuff that was in a car that actually ran a few years back. It’s great we built the car, but the project itself isn’t something that I would showcase as my best work.
I think they’re saying intellectually the work is amazing.
Ignoring all other factors they do shit right
Damn impressive as hell . Also on a completely unrelated note how is this a meme ? Not saying i mind it being here because i do like it just saying maybe not the /c/ ? I don’t mind either way .
My friend, just let the memes flow. You do not need to understand or gatekeep.
Wait gatekeep ? Which part of my comment looks like i wanna gatekeep anything ?
And the IT support service can’t even fix a computer problem of an customer 20 km away.
My understanding is that they sent V’Ger a command to do “something,” and then the gibberish it was sending changed, and that was the “here’s everything” signal.
And yeah, I’m calling it V’Ger from now on.
From what I read there was damage to the memory in certain places so they’ve had to move the code into spare places in memory.
It’s an astounding feat tbh.
One specific chip had damaged memory
The vaginer
And yeah, I’m calling it V’Ger from now on
Have my upvote.
Why haven’t we been doing this already? I’m with you, let’s make this happen!
Only so long as we ensure we keep a stable humpback whale population. I don’t wanna be the guy that has to figure out how to make a temporal slingshot maneuver work.
This seems to be positive news on that front.
Are we really gonna have to have a time travel based Star Trek Movie for all the species out there to manage to get around to fixing climate change?
Stop trying to make V’ger happen! Its not going to happen!
They specifically sent it a command to send a full memory dump after it went haywire. It wasn’t a fluke.
Sure - I didn’t know what “something” was. And what I’d read was that someone had to figure out that they were receiving a full memory dump, which suggested to me that they hadn’t specifically asked for that.
When I hear what they did, I was blown away. A 50 year old computer (that was probably designed a decade before launching) and the geniuses that built that put in the facility to completely reprogram it a light-day away.
Keep in mind too these guys are writing and reading in like assembly or some precursor to it.
I can only imagine the number of checks and rechecks they probably go through before they press the “send” button. Especially now.
This is nothing like my loosey goosey programming where I just hit compile or download and just wait to see if my change works the way I expect…
they almost certainly have a hardware spare, or at the very least, an accurately simulated version of it, because again, this is 50 year old hardware. So it’s pretty easy to just simulate it.
But yeah they are almost certainly pulling some really fucked QA on this shit.
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NASA has claimed to have never written a bug in a shipped piece of code from what i can recall off the top of my head.
Great documentary on the Voyager team: It’s quieter in the twilight
I prefer the sequel Star Trek: the motion picture.
V’ger 2: 2patch2furious
Bu… but there… there already was a Star Trek Voyager?
SWEs have new standards now, and i think we should hold them to it. Considering how shit most modern websites are these days. I think it’s only going to be beneficial.
Say that to corporate. I’m perfectly willing (eager, even) to write actually good software, but I’m forced to work within a budget and on top of the pile of despair we call “tech stack”. Everything is about 20 orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be, nobody has time to do anything properly and everything is always kind of burning.
username checks out
I wont even upgrade the BIOS on my motherboard because im afraid of bricking it.
Buy spare flash chip
As a teenager I experienced a power outage while I was updating my bios.
Guess what happened?
I’m still bitter about it.
You can negate that risk by getting a UPS. You should get a UPS in any case imo since even a shitty one lets you at least save your work and shutdown properly if your electricity drops.
Oh yeah, I learned that lesson.
I got a big mean one these days.
I updated mine a couple of weeks ago. I was actually really anxious as It went through the process, but it worked fine, at first…
Then I found out Microsoft considered it a new computer and deactivated windows. (And that’s when I found out they deleted upgrade licences from windows 7 & 8 back in September)That’s Microsoft in a nutshell for ya.
Posting from Linux then?
Well, a “free” OS anyway.
