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Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/spacex-now-fundamentally-an-infrastructure-company-senior-official-says/

For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with the development of newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence.

At last week's UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company's changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world's preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement.

"In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point," Dontchev said. "We're building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars."

Earlier this year, SpaceX acquired one of founder Elon Musk's other companies, xAI. SpaceX engineers were already using xAI's tools, Dontchev said, but in recent months, employees have really started to figure out how artificial intelligence can speed up their work.

"What's happened at SpaceX is we've really gone through a huge acceleration of adoption," Dontchev said. "Even just a year ago, we weren't adopting it that quickly, but really starting this year, we started to adopt it extremely rapidly. And the acceleration we have seen in our ability to do engineering is unlike anything I've ever seen at the company in my 16 years."

Tasks that would take SpaceX employees hours to days now take seconds to minutes, he said. And it's not just the engineers. Dontchev said the work of identifying foreign object debris, or FOD, in aerospace parts has been largely automated using the AI assistant Grok. This debris can cause catastrophic damage to engines and other spacecraft components.

"We've automated being able to detect FOD," he said. "We'll have an inspector go in and borescope a tube, and we find that humans are about 94 percent perfect (at) finding a piece of it. Grok analyzing the same video is 99.9 percent perfect."

SpaceX has also automated visual inspections of other hardware it produces, such as Starlink customer terminals, due to similar gains in accuracy. Dontchev said AI is now being used at every level of the company's operations.

"We've truly started to integrate it to where every single person, including the technicians and the technician leaders, are starting to use it in their day-to-day, and it's completely leveled the playing field and accelerated people's growth," he said.

Since SpaceX's founding in 2002, a community of spaceflight enthusiasts gravitated to the company because of Musk's vision for humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, beginning with the settlement of Mars. But concern has grown in this group that SpaceX is drifting away from that vision. Musk has recently made a hard pivot toward the deployment of orbital data centers, envisioning hundreds of thousands of solar-powered satellites providing computing services to users on Earth. Musk has largely stopped talking about sending humans to Mars, except in passing.

Dontchev insisted that human settlement and Mars remain part of the core of SpaceX's aspirations.

The FAA issued an extremely rare nationwide ground stop at all airports due to "extraordinary circumstances" and "reasons of safety."

The big picture: An air traffic control advisory posted Friday afternoon reads: "All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice."

"Inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis."

What they're saying: "The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers," the agency said in a statement.

"FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide updates."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House Friday evening that there's no indication of a "nefarious attack."

Also at:
    • https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/faa-orders-nationwide-ground-stop-departing-flights-reasons-safety-rcna609247
    • https://abcnews.com/US/nationwide-ground-stop-ordered-airports-faa/story?id=138121848
    • https://www.reuters.com/world/us/faa-issues-national-ground-stop-due-extraordinary-circumstance-reasons-safety-2026-11-13/

canopic jug writes:

curl developer, Daniel Stenberg, has written a blog post about 30 Years of Internet Transfers with curl.

The average internet connection speed of a normal household in Sweden, where I lived and I still live, in 1996 was 30 kbps. 30 kilobit per second. This was before v90 came and bumped the modems up to 56 kilobits. Ordinary mortals connected to the internet using modems over their single phone lines. Today, the average Swedish connection speed is 200 megabits/second.

Thirty years ago there were just 36 million global Internet users and 250,000 websites. Compared to the 6 or 7 billion users and 1 billion websites of today.

We used simpler protocols and while encrypted protocols like SSL existed, they were not used a lot and only for a few rare sites.

Daniel, now in his mid-50s, plans to continue working on curl for the foreseeable future.

Previously:
(2025) Curl Project Founder Snaps over Deluge of Time-Sucking AI Slop Bug Reports
(2024) cURL User Survey 2024 Analysis
(2024) The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence
(2023) "cURL", the URL Code That Can, Marks 25 Years of Transfers
(2018) HTTP/3 Explained: A Work in Progress
(2018) Daniel Stenberg, Author of cURL and libcurl, Denied US Visit Again
(2018) Twenty Years of cURL on March 20, 2018
(2018) Reducing Year 2038 Problems in curl

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

The Register says:

Microsoft's massive M365 outage stretches past 12 hours as its fixes keep failing

https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/11/13/microsofts-massive-m365-outage-stretches-past-12-hours-as-its-fixes-keep-failing/5309609

In Australia, they're calling it the "Microsoft long weekend" – an outage so pervasive it's just about made Friday a write-off at organizations which rely on Redmond's online services, especially Exchange Online.

As The Register reported yesterday, the outage started on Thursday at around 18:00 UTC and saw Microsoft 365 users unable to access email, attend Teams meetings, use cloud PCs, consult Copilot, or enjoy full access to another 15 hosted services.

As of 04:11 UTC, the company said it could find "no indication this is the result of malicious activity." An update time-stamped 05:46 UTC stated "As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident."

It's also the top story on BBC, in the UK at least:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t

[this last URL may not be very persistent, its the BBC's "live updates" feed. I don't know whether it exists outside UK.]

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/voyager-1-passes-one-light-day/

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is on track to set another historic record as its mission approaches the half-century mark. On Nov. 18 at 5:16 a.m. ET, the probe will reach a distance of one light-day from Earth, a journey of nearly five decades that places it farther from our planet than any human-made object in history.

It's quite an accomplishment for a spacecraft built in the mid-1970s One light-day is the distance that light travels in a single day at the speed of light, which is approximately 186,282 miles per second. That translates to 25.9 billion kilometers or about 16.1 billion miles in a single day. At an average human walking speed of 3 mph, it would take a human 612,015 years to walk that distance.

Fortunately, Voyager 1 has been traveling a bit faster than that. It currently zips along the cosmos at a steady 37,763 mph, a speed it achieved in 1980 after a gravity-assisted Saturn flyby. It has been flying at that speed ever since.

The milestone comes 14 years after its previous one, when Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the point where the sun's heliosphere ends, and entered interstellar space. It's also 28 years after passing Pioneer 10 to become the human-made object that has traveled the farthest into space.

The historic milestone isn't without its drama. Voyager 1 has been in space for nearly half a century, and in that time, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has done everything it can to extend the life of Voyager 1. That includes troubleshooting issues, performing maintenance and shutting down various systems to save power and extend the spacecraft's life-span.

Several of those efforts took place in 2026. The team running Voyager 1 spent weeks shutting down three devices and powering on three low-power alternatives to reduce overall power usage. This initiative, which was internally called The Big Bang, was also performed on Voyager 2. The transition was completed in early September, giving Voyager 1 more time with its dwindling power supply while also keeping it warm enough to continue operating in the frigid conditions of interstellar space. 

It was a tricky maneuver that required the team to simultaneously turn multiple instruments on and off. The difficulty of the maneuver was amplified by the fact that it took almost a full day for any signal to reach Voyager and another full day for Voyager to send a signal back, with hours of downtime while the spacecraft performed the operations. 

All of this took place several months after Voyager 1 experienced a sudden drop in power, which necessitated shutting off one of its three remaining instruments still in operation. Voyager 1 now has only two instruments still in operation.

Making it a whole light-day away from Earth is likely going to be Voyager 1's final milestone while it still has enough power to communicate with Earth. Voyager 1 is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators. They are essentially nuclear-powered batteries that generate energy by converting the steady heat from decaying plutonium-238. 

When Voyager 1 first launched, its radioisotope thermoelectric generators produced about 470 watts of power. But plutonium-238 doesn't last forever, and after 50 years in space, the RTGs now produce about 215 watts of power, with an average loss of about 4 watts per year. Most of that power is used to keep Voyager 1 up and running, which is why NASA has shut down eight of the 10 instruments that Voyager had when it launched.

At its current rate of usage and decay, Voyager 1 is expected to shut down its final science instrument in the 2030s and will eventually lose communication with Earth in 2036 due to insufficient power to send back a radio signal. 

The same fate is expected for Voyager 2, Voyager 1's twin, which has also spent half a century in space. While it is labeled the sequel, Voyager 2 actually launched 16 days before Voyager 1, and the two have spent nearly identical amounts of time traversing the cosmos. Thanks to its slower speed and trajectory, it likely won’t reach the one light-day distance until after its instruments shut down.

Thanks to the vastness of space, Voyager 1 will lose all of its power before it hits its next milestone, which is the beginning of the Oort Cloud, a vast, icy shell of comets at the edge of our solar system. It'll take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to make it there.

Thanks to the near-perfect vacuum of outer space, Voyager 1 will continue to fly at its current speed even after it shuts down entirely. So it'll still hit that milestone; it just won't be able to phone home to tell us about it.

Original Submission

Arthur t Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2307769/116-underwater-drone-swarm-world-record-china/

Researchers have set a record for the largest swarm of underwater drones in history. Officially recognized by Guinness World Records, the trial saw 116 TH-618 drones deployed in a 164 ft by 65 ft pool, where they autonomously executed a series of formations and maneuvers. (For comparison, and Olympic-sized swimming pool is approximately 164 ft by 82 ft.)

The August 2026 test has strong ties to the People's Republic of China's military pipeline. It was conducted by researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University, an institution designated by the US government as a developer of technologies for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The university conducted the experiment in conjunction with Xi'an Tianhe Maritime Technologies, a subsidiary of defense contractor Xian Tianhe Defense Technology.

According to the South China Morning Post, the university said that developing submersible drone swarms "has always been a core challenge in the global field of underwater intelligent equipment. This time, the stable navigation of a cluster of hundreds of vehicles represents a breakthrough in the large-scale coordinated navigation of underwater unmanned systems."

The record-setting day could prove a major milestone in the PLA's development of autonomous drone swarms — an increasingly vital point of emphasis in the Eastern power's military buildup. Currently the world's largest navy, the PLA Navy (PLAN) is largely made up of smaller nimble ships designed to patrol the contested littoral waters of the South China Sea. And while the nation has commissioned three aircraft carriers in the last decade and a half, its fleet still lags behind the United States in total fire power.

Some believe drones could close this gap and enable PLA's increasingly expansive naval ambitions. Others worry the proliferation of drones will lower the threshold for naval engagements at a a time when naval intelligence is already beset with uncertainty.

The test's TH-618 drones resemble long pipes equipped with four propellers and a camera. Roughly 2 ft long and half a foot wide, the 11lb drones have a range of just over 18 miles and can operate continuously for roughly 8 hours. To navigate, the drones use smartphone cameras attached to the front, allowing AI systems to adjust routes in real time to respond to underwater disturbances and collisions. According to the university [Website in Chinese --Ed], the drones can autonomously conduct complex maneuvers like terrain tracking, landmark recognition, vertical lift, depth and speed control and hovering in water using multi-degree-of freedom thrusters.

Underwater drone navigation is exceedingly complex when compared to its aerial counterpart because developers cannot utilize wireless communications or satellite positioning and navigation systems for course calibration. Low visibility and high water pressure further complicate subsurface coordination. Drones must rely on an amalgamation of underwater sensing, subsurface target detection and acoustic communication to autonomously respond to their irregular operating environment. Coordinating these efforts is another challenge altogether.

The culmination of over two decades of research, this record-breaking exercise could represent a major leap in AI-powered underwater navigation technologies. Over roughly 34 minutes, the drones relied solely on visual data to autonomously navigate around the pool, covering over 1,600 feet without human intervention. In creating a miniaturized submersible capable of coordinating autonomous responses to environmental stimuli, researchers at NWPU may have taken a step towards a new era of subsurface research, intelligence gathering and warfare.

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