A couple of weeks back we featured a story (third item) about a chunk of space jetsam that tried to peacefully return to Earth, only to find a Florida family’s roof rudely in the way. The 700-gram cylinder of Inconel was all that was left of a 2,360-kg battery pack that was tossed overboard from the ISS back in 2021, the rest presumably turning into air pollution just as NASA had planned. But the surviving bit was a “Golden BB” that managed to slam through the roof and do a fair amount of damage. At the time it happened, the Otero family was just looking for NASA to cover the cost of repairs, but now they’re looking for a little more consideration. A lawsuit filed by their attorney seeks $80,000 to cover the cost of repairs as well as compensation for the “stress and impact” of the event. This also seems to be about setting a precedent, since the Space Liability Convention, an agreement to which the USA is party, would require the space agency to cover damages if the debris had done damage in another country. The Oteros think the SLC should apply to US properties as well, and while we can see their point, we’d advise them not to hold their breath. We suppose something like this had to happen eventually, and somehow we’re not surprised to see “Florida Man” in the headlines.

There was a little hubbub this week around the release of a study regarding the safety of autonomous vehicles relative to their meat-piloted counterparts. The headlines for the articles covering this varied widely and hilariously, ranging from autonomous vehicles only being able to drive in straight lines to AVs being safer than human-driven cars, full-stop. As always, one has to read past the headlines to get an idea of what’s really going on, or perhaps even brave reading the primary literature. From our reading of the abstract, it seems like the story is more nuanced. According to an analysis of crashes involving 35,000 human-driven vehicles and 2,100 vehicles with some level of automation, AVs with SAE Level 4 automation suffered fewer accidents across the board than those without any automation. Importantly, the accidents that Level 4 vehicles do suffer are more likely to occur when the vehicle is turning just before the accident, or during low-visibility conditions such as dawn or dusk. The study also compares Level 4 automation to Level 2, which has driver assistance features like lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control, and found that Level 2 actually beats Level 4 in clear driving conditions, but loses in rainy conditions and pretty much every other driving situation.

There’s a strange story coming out of New York regarding a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforcement action that seems a little shady. It regards a General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) repeater system used by the New York State GMRS Alliance. GMRS is sort of a “ham radio lite” system — there’s no testing required for a license, you just pay a fee — that uses the UHF band. Repeaters are allowed, but only under specific rules, and that appears to be where things have gone wrong for the club. The repeater system they used was a linked system, which connected geographically remote repeaters stretching from the far western part of the state near Buffalo all the way to Utica. It’s the linking that seems to have raised the FCC’s hackles, and understandably so because it seems to run counter to the GMRS rules in section 95. But it’s the method of notification that seems hinky here, as the repeater custodian was contacted by email. That’s not typical behavior for the FCC, who generally send enforcement notices by certified snail mail, or just dispense with the paper altogether and knock on your door. People seem to think this is all fake news, and it may well be, but then again, the email could just have been an informal heads-up preceding a formal notice. Either way, it’s bad news for the GMRS fans in upstate New York who used this system to keep in touch along Interstate 90, a long and lonely stretch of road that we know all too well.

Third time’s a charm? We’ll see when sunspot region AR3723 (née AR3697 née AR3664) makes a historic third pass around the Sun and potentially puts Earth in its crosshairs yet again. The region kicked up quite a ruckus on its first pass across the solar disk back in May with a series of X-class flares that produced stunning aurorae across almost all of North America. Pass number two saw the renamed region pass more or less quietly by, although it did launch an M-class flare on June 23 that caused radio blackouts in most of the North Atlantic basin. When AR3723 does peek out from behind the eastern limb of the Sun it’ll be a much-diminished version of its former Carrington-level glory, and will likely be given multiple designations thanks to fragmentation while it was hanging out on the backside. But it could still pack a punch, and even if this particular region doesn’t have much juice left, it sure seems like the Sun has plenty of surprises in store for the balance of Solar Cycle 25.

Somebody made a version of Conway’s Game of Life using nothing but checkboxes, which is very cool and you should check it out.

And finally, we’ve been doing an unexpected amount of automotive DIY repairs these days, meaning we spend a lot of time trolling around for parts. Here’s something we didn’t expect to see offered by a national retailer, but that we’d love to find a use for. If it ever comes back in stock we just might pick one up.

So you say you missed the Great Solar Storm of 2024 along with its attendant aurora? We feel you on that; the light pollution here was too much for decent viewing, and it had been too long a day to make a drive into the deep dark of the countryside survivable. But fear not — the sunspot that raised all the ruckus back at the beginning of May has survived the trip across the far side of the sun and will reappear in early June, mostly intact and ready for business. At least sunspot AR3664 seems like it’s still a force to be reckoned with, having cooked off an X-class flare last Tuesday just as it was coming around from the other side of the Sun. Whether 3664 will be able to stir up another G5 geomagnetic storm remains to be seen, but since it fired off an X-12 flare while it was around the backside, you never know. Your best bet to stay informed in these trying times is the indispensable Dr. Tamitha Skov.

Back here on our soon-to-be-incinerated planet, you know we’ve reached the peak of the AI hype curve when you see something like AI competitive thermal paste being hawked. That’s the marketing niche Cooler Master has staked out for its new Cyrofuze 5 thermal paste, which is supposed to somehow make your computer smarter by keeping it cooler? Or maybe not; it’s not really clear from Cooler Master’s Chinese website for the product what the AI advantages are, and sadly the Cryofuze 5 line doesn’t seem to be offered on the US site. Which is a shame, because the new smartening goo comes in six designer colors that for all the world look like a Bob Ross palette — it that alizarin crimson and phthalo blue? Who in their right mind wouldn’t want a chance to color coordinate their thermal grease while simultaneously making their machine more AI competitive?

Speaking of AI, we’ve covered a lot of interactions between humans and autonomous vehicles in this column, with most of them tending toward the violent. But we’ve finally got a more heartwarming interaction to report, where a pedestrian helped a stuck delivery vehicle out of a tough spot. The truck, which is really only a little bigger than those munchie-delivering robots that ply college campuses, maneuvered itself onto a driveway sporting a pair of speed bumps spaced almost exactly as far apart as the vehicle’s wheelbase. The front wheels made it over the first bump, but when it came time to climb both obstacles at the same time, the poor little truck just couldn’t manage it. The fact that the bumps were a significant fraction of the wheel diameter on the tiny truck likely didn’t help, but thankfully a pedestrian took pity and gave the little fella a push. The bot’s rear wheels seemed to be having trouble clearing the last bump, too; the video cuts off too soon to tell, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Victim blame is generally in bad form, but if you don’t even bother to change the default password, can you really call a cyberattack a “break-in”? That’s the question we have after learning of an alarming increase in cyberattacks against public infrastructure in the US, including public water supplies in Pennsylvania and Texas. While the separate attacks resulted in no damage to the physical plants, the article links to a report listing some attacks that did result in damage, including an intentional release of 800,000 liters of sewage in Australia in 2000.

And finally, speaking of cybersecurity, if you’ve ever procrastinated on keeping your OS patched, what happened when a Windows XP machine was put online with no protection should spur you into action. YouTuber Eric Parker put an XP machine on the raw internet — no router, no firewall, and no anti-malware software. It only took about ten minutes for the first signs of infection to appear, and things went downhill pretty fast from there. Parker notes that the same setup on a Windows 7 machine resulted in no major malware infections after several hours, which should be a gut punch to those who fought so long against updating from XP.

If there was one question we heard most often this week, it was “Did you see it?” With “it” referring to the stunning display of aurora borealis — and australis, we assume — on and off for several days. The major outburst here in North America was actually late last week, with aurora extending as far south as Puerto Rico on the night of the tenth. We here in North Idaho were well-situated for prime viewing, but alas, light pollution made things a bit tame without a short drive from the city lights. Totally worth it:

Hat tip to Tom Maloney for the pics. That last one is very reminiscent of what we saw back in 1989 with the geomagnetic storm that knocked Québec’s grid offline, except then the colors were shifted much more toward the red end of the spectrum back then.

Despite this being the strongest solar storm in almost 20 years, the damage was nearly non-existent, with reports limited to minor power grid disturbances and some GPS and satellite outages. Starlink service was reportedly impacted, but luckily no satellites deorbited, a distinct possibility for recently launched satellites still in lower orbits due to increased atmospheric drag. Still, it feels like we dodged a cosmic bullet here, and if you have any doubt about that, check this out — it’s a comparison of the sunspot group that just got us with the Carrington Event sunspots from 1859. What a difference a few degrees of latitude makes.

From the “Not Everything Needs to be IoT” files comes a story about the perils of security as an afterthought. The condensed version: tech journalist Kevin Purdy’s new home came with a Rinnai tankless water heater. He hooked up the Rinnai Control-R WiFi module to control the appliance remotely from a smartphone app, and as any good home automation geek would, eventually tried integrating it into Home Assistant. But then he discovered that for an early version of Control-R, there was absolutely no security on the company’s cloud service, making it possible to control any connected Rinnai water heater knowing nothing more than the user’s email address. No auth tokens, no passwords, nothing. Rinnai seems to have added authentication to their newer Rinnai Central system, but the whole story is worth a read, not least for the weaselly responses from Rinnai through a PR firm.

If you thought Clippy, the annoying animated desktop assistant from the bad old days of Microsoft Office 97, had died a well-deserved death in obscurity, think again. Clippy is back, this time as a wise-cracking assistant in an open-source tool called Winpilot, which is designed to eliminate bloatware and turn off annoying defaults in Windows 11. The irony of including an icon of annoyance in an application designed to make your user experience less annoying is rich indeed. It’s not really clear how Winpilot’s author, Belmin Hasanovic, is getting away with using Clippy; we’d have thought Microsoft would protect their IP a little more vigorously, especially when it says things like, “You know something, champ? This is bullsh*t. I started this gig in ’97. My ultimate goal was to take over Bill Gates job.”

The list of announced talks for HOPE XV keeps growing. It’s hard to say how many talks were added since last week, but it looks like a lot. Better get your proposals in soon if you want to have a chance at a talk.

And finally, we’ve featured the work of Montana wheelwright Dave Engels before, specifically the process of shrink-fitting iron tires onto the massive wooden wheels he builds for things like timber carts and borax wagons. The whole thing is a ballet of fire, steel, wood, smoke, steam, and people, and never fails to entertain. But giant wheels aren’t the only thing Engels works on, and some of the smaller wheels have pretty interesting processes behind them too. Fitting rubber tires to cart wheels is a perfect example, and one with a lot of surprises. We had no idea that these tires have steel wires running through them, to keep them firmly seated on the wooden wheel, which also has a shrink-fit steel rim. The machine that tensions the wires while compressing the rubber is fascinatingly complex, too. We were also taken by the parallels between this machine and a modern tire machine, as well as the clear lineage between solid rubber buggy wheels and modern pneumatic tires.