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Posted on 10/16/2022 10:23:04 AM PDT by BenLurkin
When computers go wrong, we tend to assume it's just some software hiccup, a bit of bad programming. But ionising radiation, including rays of protons blasted towards us by the sun, can also be the cause. These incidents, called single-event upsets, are rare and it can be impossible to be sure that cosmic rays were involved in a specific malfunction because they leave no trace behind them.
And yet they have been singled out as the possible culprits behind numerous extraordinary cases of computer failure. From a vote-counting machine [?!?!} that added thousands of non-existent votes to a candidate's tally, to a commercial airliner that suddenly dropped hundreds of feet mid-flight, injuring dozens of passengers.
Plus, since giant ejections from the sun can sometimes send huge waves of particles towards Earth, what's called space weather, an unnerving prospect looms: we could see much more disruption to computers than we're used to during a massive geomagnetic storm in the future.
That such a thing can happen has been understood since at least the 1970s, when researchers showed that radiation from outer space could affect the computers on satellites. This radiation can take various forms and originate from a number of different sources, both inside and outside our Solar System. But here's what one scenario might look like: protons blasted towards Earth by the Sun smash into atoms in our atmosphere, releasing neutrons from the nuclei of those atoms. These high energy neutrons don't have a charge but they can go on to smash into other particles, triggering secondary radiation that does have a charge. Because bits in computer memory devices are sometimes stored as a tiny electrical charge, that secondary radiation now flying around can upend the bits, flipping them from one state to another, which changes the data.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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I’m not saying it’s aliens...
That is funny, sun spots stole the election form Trump??
Interesting. My Granddaughter is a Robotics and Control Engineering major at the USNA. I always reminder her KISS
Holy crap! It wasn't corruption, it was...Protons From Outer Space! Man, that'd make a heckuva horror movie title...
Space weather ping.
Network switch detect these soft bit errors and reset themselves internally. Externally it is observed as a few packets dropped.
“Network switch detect these soft bit errors and reset themselves internally. Externally it is observed as a few packets dropped.”
This is about errors inside computers, not network errors.
The materials used to make integrated circuits can also contribute to the problem, generating the occasional ionizing particle.
Actually the article addresses both, but regardless it’s the same problem.
Random cosmic rays elect Joe Biden.
Typical BBC crap
Amazin how these outerspace particles knew which voting computers to go to, at the same time, and to always remove votes from the same candidate and give them to the other candidate. The absolute ignorance and corruption of so called journalists and scientists is just astounding.
Looks like computers are too deterministic for some people who want to think that the results are sometimes random, and sometimes not. Maybe yes and maybe no. Maybe 1 and maybe 0, whenever someone needs to justify a major human error.
Nice try with the vote counting machines.
Random cosmic rays + “giant ejections from the sun”
There is another thread on FR that indicates voting machines expose administrator privileges to the Chinese manufacturers of the machines. Yet, cosmic rays made them all count against Trump. Sure, that just has to be the reason.
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