Questions Remain About Tense Moment Aboard ISS

June 9, 2026 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

Even if you’re not normally interested in what’s happening in low Earth orbit, you probably heard that last week NASA ordered its personnel aboard the International Space Station to button themselves up in the docked Dragon spacecraft and await further instructions should they need to make a hasty departure. Known as Safe Haven, this emergency procedure is performed whenever there’s an elevated risk of damage to the Station.

NASA has provided an update on what happened, but it arguably leaves more questions than answers. Usually, crews go to their Safe Haven because some bit of space junk has wandered to close to the orbiting complex, but this time it was because Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were getting ready to start cutting into the walls of the PrK transfer tunnel in an effort to address its persistent air leak.

After about an hour and a half, the Russians called off the effort and NASA gave their people the OK to leave the Dragon and return to their normal duties. NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens later posted on social media that the space agency would “look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks” in the future. There’s currently no word on what a future repair attempt may entail, or when it would be attempted.

This is one of those things were we might not hear the full story for some time, but it sure does sound like not only did the Russians want to do something that NASA didn’t think was safe, but that the whole thing was sprung on them at the last moment. To give you an idea of how serious Mission Control was taking the situation, they decided to cram five people into a Dragon capsule that only has four seats — it certainly would have made for one wild ride down to Earth if they were given the order to evacuate.

What do you want to bet there were some frantic international calls taking place while the astronauts were hiding out in their designated lifeboat?

Server racks branded with Internet Archive

News Sites Are Blocking Internet Archive Over AI Scraping Fears

June 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

Especially in this era of the Internet, the role of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has become increasingly essential as more and more web content vanishes into the ether or is surreptitiously altered to hide salient details. More recently a new worry has seemingly cropped up in the form of scraping of data for so-called AI systems, or at least that’s part of the excuses being offered for blocking the Wayback Machine’s web crawlers, with [Andrew Deck] and [Hanaa’ Tameez] of [Nieman Lab] detailing the impact and reasons provided.

Some news outlets like The Baltimore Banner insist that they’re only blocking the Wayback Machine crawlers because they are worried that LLM chatbots would otherwise ‘improperly cite’ the source of content, while outlets like The Atlantic have put a blanket anti-scraping policy in place. Meanwhile news outlets are generally happy to let paid commercial news archiving outlets like ProQuest and LexisNexis index their content, showing a potential financial incentive.

Whatever the reasons, the direct effect is that as content is modified or vanishes during for example a system migration, buy-out or bankruptcy, researchers who rely on the Wayback Machine are pretty much forced to rely on paid offerings by ProQuest and kin, without the pure archiving focus and free access to information. It will also leave big holes in what the Wayback Machine can cover in its archives, with news especially becoming very spotty.

Incidentally there’s an ongoing petition over at SaveTheArchive.com which people can sign.

Spy Tech: The GPS Numbers Station

June 8, 2026 by Al Williams 24 Comments

We’ve talked before about number stations — mysterious shortwave transmitters repeating numbers, presumably for clandestine purposes. But, of course, the mere fact that they are unusual makes them stand out. The best place to hide something is in plain sight. In the old days, a broadcaster might slip a fake news story in mentioning a name that has a secret meaning, for example. But according to [Steven Murdoch], the United States has an even more obvious hiding place for a numbers station: inside GPS.

Every L1 C/A navigation message is a 176-bit field known by the affectionate moniker: Subframe 4, Page 17. The GPS specification says it is for “special messages.” No one has disclosed what those messages might be.

[Murdoch] at University College London analyzed over 12 million GPS packets from 2007 to 2026, trying to understand what was in this field. You might think 176 bits isn’t much, and you are right. But the L1 C/A signal carries 50 bits per second, and each frame is 1,500 bits. As [Murdoch] points out: “every bit must earn its place.” Each subframe is 300 bits, so this mysterious signal is 12% of the subframe. It must be important to someone.

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Fixing The Failure Of The Reevo

June 8, 2026 by Ian Bos 41 Comments

There are a lot of traditional features of a bike that rarely change. The spokes, the chain, and the inability for it to take off like a rocket, to mention a few. None of these are features of the Reevo, a bike that tried, and mostly failed, to innovate the traditional electric bike. [Berm Peak], an individual with more time on two wheels than the entire Reevo team ever had, tried his hand at fixing the Reevo’s many problems.

[Berm Peak] has had a go at the Reevo before, but this time he had to go a lot deeper. Before any real work could be done on the Reevo, the controller needed to be jailbroken since the only way to use most features required an app that wasn’t available. Surprisingly, the controller boards were found to be well labeled, and with some trial and error, the protocols could be reverse-engineered.

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Microsoft Claims 20 Second Qubits

June 4, 2026 by Al Williams 19 Comments

While it might seem that your computer malfunctions every few minutes, the reality is that modern computers are usually quite robust. Not so much for quantum computers, where qubit life is often measured in milliseconds. Now, the company claims to have qubits that last for about 20 seconds.

For example, Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip, which, incidentally, was mired in controversy, provided 8 qubits that were stable very briefly. This second-generation chip provides 12 qubits that average 20-second lifespans.

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Texas Instruments Changes The NE5532 And Others Into Incompatible Versions

June 3, 2026 by Maya Posch 48 Comments

First introduced in 1979 by Signetics, the NE5532 was a pretty spiffy dual op-amp for the time with low noise and low distortion. Over the years it has become a standard part that showed up in countless audio products, and has become a so-called jellybean generic component with Texas Instruments (TI) being one of countless manufacturers.

It being such a standard, multi-sourced part makes it thus even more puzzling that TI has now decided to completely overhaul this IC in a way that makes it incompatible with even the original Signetics NE5532. These changes are covered in detail by [Dave] of EEVblog as his mind is pretty much blown at such an incomprehensible change.

The changes entail an entirely different manufacturing process and a big change in specifications, while making no change to the part number. In revision K of the TI datasheet these changes are first seen, with some specifications changed for the better, like a higher unity gain bandwidth by 2 MHz, but a much slower slew rate.

Although the 5532 op-amps are multi-sourced, there are good reasons to just stick with manufacturers like TI, as that means receiving a product change notification (PCN) when anything changes. In the PCN related to this op-amp a change to process node is noted, along with other changes, but no reasoning.

Among the other big changes are a reduction in the supply voltage from 22 V to 18 V, and a halving of the ESD protection from 2 kV to 1 kV. Although it might be slightly more efficient on the new process node this way, it clearly comes with a lot of trade-offs that make it an overall worse op-amp, while also being incompatible with the same op-amp from other manufacturers.

In the video [Dave] goes through the datasheets of this jellybean part of other manufacturers, showing that they still have the original 1980s specifications. Only one exception here was the NE5532DR from Shenzhen HuaXuanYang Electronics, whose supply rail voltage is also 18 V for some reason, along with a similar internal transistor configuration that reduces the ESD resistance.

In addition to the NE5532 op-amp, it seems that TI also took an axe to the OPA134 op-amp, by removing its offset trim feature and listing the pins as ‘NC’, with a warning to not connect these pins and also worsening other specifications. This makes these similar jellybean parts incompatible, with no change to the part number. Worse is that it continues with the LMH6518, whose changes [Dave] argues might even kill oscilloscopes as they are commonly found in those.

Meanwhile the LM317M also got an overhaul, but here TI opted to give it a new part name, calling it the LM317MQ with at first glance no major degradations in the specifications, but instead some actual improvements. This makes it even more puzzling why TI didn’t give the other ICs a new part number to differentiate them from the jellybean part.

Until there’s some clarification from the side of TI, it might be a good idea to source these parts from a manufacturer that is not TI, especially when replacing these ICs in older devices.

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Lost Version Of Amiga Unix Suddenly Reappears

May 25, 2026 by Julian Scheffers 10 Comments

Some of you may know there’s a version of UNIX for the Commodore Amiga, aptly called Amiga Unix or AMIX. There is an almost complete record of versions from 1.0 to 2.03, but 2.02 was lost media–until [Forgotten Computer] found it on an old Amiga.

It starts with an auction held for the 40 year anniversary of the Free Software Foundation where, by just one second, the highest bidder was too late. What do you do first with an artifact as valuable as an old FSF computer? You image the hard drive. Then you make several copies, including on different computers–after all, you wouldn’t want to lose the data on it. Preservation secured, the natural next thing is to boot it–and that’s when we see the magic 2.02c version number.
According to thorough digging by [Forgotten Computer], this version was–until now–lost.

In the video after the break, [Forgotten Computer] goes over what Amiga Unix is, the discovery process, and explores what’s on the disk–including FSF staples like GCC, G++ and core utilities like GNU less.
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