Earth is under a shower of cosmic particles from the sun and beyond our solar system, which can cause problems affecting our phones and computers. That risk increases as microchip technology declines. Zap. The muscle in the chest is torn. Zap. And even. Marie Moe can see it. He could even see it. He looked down and the muscle on the left side of his sternum was shaking violently. Hold on to the sound of a strong heartbeat. The cybersecurity researcher was on the plane, about 20 minutes from its destination, Amsterdam, during takeoff. He was gripped by fear. He knew immediately that something was wrong with his pacemaker, a small medical device placed on his chest that uses electricity to stabilize his heart rate.

Could he have damaged one of the wires that connected the exercise equipment to his chest? Or separation? Moe told the crew, who immediately arranged for an ambulance to be ready and waiting for him at the airport. Had the flight continued from Amsterdam, the pilot would have made an emergency landing at another airport, he was told.

When Moe arrived at a nearby hospital, the doctors depended on him. The problem was quickly discovered by the operator. It’s a small computer. Data stored in the operator’s computer, which is critical to his work, has been corrupted.

For Moe, the main suspect that he thinks could trigger this disturbing event is cosmic rays from space: chains of subatomic particles that collide in the Earth’s atmosphere, are as the balls pile up on the pool table, one of them ends up working. his own. into a built-in computer that keeps him busy mid-flight. The theory is that, after his impact, he caused an electrical imbalance that changed computer memory – and eventually changed his understanding of life-saving technology forever.

When a computer goes wrong, we think it’s just a software glitch, a bad program. But ionizing radiation, including the proton radiation the sun throws at us, can also cause it. These events, called perturbations in one event, are rare, and it can be impossible to be sure that the cosmic rays are interfering with a particular object. for they left nothing. Even so, they have been identified as potential causes of many unique cases of computer failure. From a vote counting machine that added thousands of non-existent votes to a candidate’s tally, to a commercial plane that suddenly crashed hundreds of feet in mid-air, injuring many passengers

. As society becomes more and more dependent on digital technology, it is worth asking what dangers cosmic rays pose to our way of life. Not least because as it continues the miniaturization of microchip technology, the cost required to destroy data is constantly decreasing, which means that it is easier and easier for cosmic rays to have this effect. Also, given that large ejections from the sun can sometimes send large waves of that towards the Earth, known as atmospheric waves, the prospect is disturbing: we can see more disturbances in the computer than we are not sure about the time of the great geomagnetic tide. the future. .

Moe’s scary experience with his speedster happened in 2016. As soon as he was released from the hospital, he received a detailed explanation from the person who made him what happened. “That’s when I discovered little flips,” recalls Moe, who is now a senior consultant at Internet security firm Mandiant. In the memory of a computer processor, data is stored as bits, often called “ones and zeros”. But the report explained that some of those pages had been altered or reversed, altering the data and causing software errors. Think of it like hitting the wrong end of the rocker on a long line of light bulbs. Part of the room will remain dark. In this case, the error prompted the pacer to go into “rescue mode,” Moe says, and he began to beat his heart at its default 70 beats per minute and increased heart rate. He explains: “That’s what caused the discomfort. To fix it, the paramedic had to reset the device to the hospital’s factory settings and reprogram the settings to fit Moe’s heart. But the report doesn’t draw clear conclusions about why these points turned in the first place. However, one event that has been mentioned is cosmic radiation. “It’s hard to be 100% sure,” Moe says. “I have no further explanation to give you.”

In a much-discussed incident, a 2008 Qantas Airways flight over Western Australia plunged 200 feet in 10 minutes, injuring several passengers on board.

It has been understood that such a thing can happen since at least the 1970s, when researchers showed that radiation from space can affect computers and satellites. This radiation can be in different forms and come from many different places, both inside and outside our solar system. But this is what the situation might look like: Protons blasted to Earth by the Sun shatter atoms in our atmosphere, releasing neutrons from the nuclei of the three. These high-energy neutrons have no charge, but they can fall on other particles, resulting in secondary radiation with a charge. Because bits in computer memory devices are sometimes stored as small electrical charges, the two radiations that circulate the current can flip each other, causing them to flip from one state to another. to another, which changes the data.

Solar radiation increases in space, mainly because our atmosphere helps protect us from much of it. For example, people who travel by plane are more exposed to this radiation than people on the ground, which is why pilots have a limited amount of time in the air each month. But if that chaos and confusion was what caused Moe’s pacemaker problem, it must have been a rare event, he pointed out. He added, “The benefits of having someone act quickly outweigh the risks.” “I feel more confident in trusting my device because I know it has a backup in case something goes wrong with the code.”

But the effects of cosmic rays on other computers could, in theory, be catastrophic. In a much-discussed incident, a 2008 Qantas Airways flight over Western Australia plunged 200 feet in 10 minutes, injuring dozens of passengers on board – many of whom were unseated or strapped in. them at that time. Many injured their legs while others hit their heads in the room, for example. A child who was wearing a seat belt was shaken so badly that he hurt his stomach.

An investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Agency found that before the plane’s misbehavior occurred, incorrect computer data contained in its contents had been twisted around the corner of the plane. This caused the two automatic coincidences. As for what actually triggered this sequence of events, the report says, “There is insufficient evidence to determine whether [a computer data altering agent] could have triggered the failure mode” – meaning it still will be possible. In contrast, all the other factors that could trigger those who were analyzed by the researchers were “very unlikely” and the same group as “unlikely”. 카지노사이트

There is also the case of a voting machine in Belgium in 2003 that gave a politician 4,096 more votes. Some have suggested that this is also due to ionizing radiation disrupting computers.

What about the runner – the one trying to complete the video game in record time – who got a terrible bug in Super Mario 64 in 2013? To the surprise of the player, Mario suddenly went up to the top phone in the game, the action ended up being a little bit in the code that determines the position, in 3D, of the mustachioed character at any time. Analysis revealed a few explanations for this behavior, called surface deflection, so the possibility of particles involved in the game cartridge came up in the discussion of what happened. Recently, in April 2022, Travis Long, a software engineer at Mozilla, published a blog in which he explained that the company’s large telemetry data is constantly collected from users of the Firefox web browser when some have unexplained errors. the sequence of individual pages is restored. Long said that recent disasters were related to small faults that coincided with geomagnetic storms. “I began to wonder if we could have detected Earth events from these same problems with our telemetry data,” he wrote.

Whether ionizing radiation is behind them or not, we can meet other sites while browsing the Internet. In 2010, a cybersecurity researcher named Artem Dinaburg, who now works for a company aptly named Trail of Bits, realized this. It registered a few domain names as popular domains but with wrong characters in the url. Take “bbc.com” for example. If you make a mistake, you can accidentally enter “bbx.com”, where the “x” is next to the “c” on an English computer keyboard. A small error is different. This means that at least one of the binary codes representing each character in “bbc.com” is incorrect. In binary, the letter “b” is “01100010” while “c” is “01100011”. If you change just one bit, say the last part of the code for “c”, changing it from 1 to 0, then it will become “b” and you will end up with “bbb.com” instead.

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