Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

https://hackaday.com/...

They don't use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

That means "written in assembly" means "written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn't document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke".

I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?

Or do they have a simulator of it today - we're talking about early 70's hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I've read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).

I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I'm surely not saying I have better ideas - they've probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they're doing.

And you explained all of that WITHOUT THE OBNOXIOUS GODDAMNS and FUCKIN SCIENCE AMIRITEs

Finally I can put some take into this. I've worked in memory testing for years and I'll tell you that it's actually pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time. So much so that what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells. We add more memory cells than we might activate at any given time. When shit goes awry, we can reprogram the memory controller to remap the used memory cells so that the bad cells are mapped out and unused ones are mapped in. We don't probe memory cells typically unless we're doing some type of in depth failure analysis. usually we just run a series of algorithms that test each cell and identify which ones aren't responding correctly, then map those out.

None of this is to diminish the engineering challenges that they faced, just to help give an appreciation for the technical mechanisms we've improved over the last few decades

Is there a Voyager 1, uh...emulator or something? Like something NASA would use to test the new programming on before hitting send?

Huh. If it survives a few years more, it's a lightday away.

They have spare Voyager on Earth for debugging

EDIT: or not

More stable, too.

Microsoft can't even release a fix for Window's recovery partition being too small to stage updates. I had to do it myself, fucking amateurs.

NASA should be in charge of Windows updates!

Certainly better tested.

Heh. Years ago during an interview I was explaining how important it is to verify a system before putting it into orbit. If one found problems in orbit, you usually can’t fix it. My interviewer said, “Why not just send up the space shuttle to fix it?”

Well…

The pale blue dot photo always makes me tear up. We're so small and insignificant in such a grand universe and I'm crushed that I can't explore it.

Or activate Skynet.

they almost certainly have a hardware spare, or at the very least, an accurately simulated version of it, because again, this is 50 year old hardware. So it's pretty easy to just simulate it.

But yeah they are almost certainly pulling some really fucked QA on this shit.

As someone who recently switched from AWS to Azure I feel your pain.

Best part is when you finally have a working solution, Microsoft sends you an email that it's being deprecated.

As a teenager I experienced a power outage while I was updating my bios.

Guess what happened?

I’m still bitter about it.

I updated mine a couple of weeks ago. I was actually really anxious as It went through the process, but it worked fine, at first...
Then I found out Microsoft considered it a new computer and deactivated windows. (And that's when I found out they deleted upgrade licences from windows 7 & 8 back in September)

Buy spare flash chip

I prefer the sequel Star Trek: the motion picture.

And yeah, I'm calling it V'Ger from now on

Have my upvote.

Why haven't we been doing this already? I'm with you, let's make this happen!

From what I read there was damage to the memory in certain places so they've had to move the code into spare places in memory.

It's an astounding feat tbh.

The vaginer

OTV (void)

Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.

I think the security is adequately managed by the need for a massive transmitter as well as the question "what is there to gain via a hostile takeover and re-programming the probe?"

I bet there's actual security of some kind going on, but those two points seem like a massive hurdle to clear just to mess with a deep space probe.

You may be interested in learning about its downlink: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

Lol.

Why is it only sending back dickbutt memes?

Its partially because there is only one set of antennas large enough to communicate with it, and that's only sometimes. Its called the Deep space network and it is very secure because it's used for many things, not just communicating with the Voyager probes.

Second, you'd have to have very very intimate knowledge of the hardware, and programming language to even begin to hack it. And the people who do have that knowledge are very very passionate about their probes.

So I guess technically the answer is yes. But practically, no.

No yeah, it's like that plus the thing is a light day away, and on top of that malfunctioning on a hardware level. Incredible

Say that to corporate. I'm perfectly willing (eager, even) to write actually good software, but I'm forced to work within a budget and on top of the pile of despair we call "tech stack". Everything is about 20 orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be, nobody has time to do anything properly and everything is always kind of burning.

Yes if they can track them in middle of space.

It's impressive that we can still send data to the satellite. I mean you need to send the signal to the place where the satellite will be in 24 hours.

No, it doesn't. Commands could be authenticated using a pre-shared secret. Even public cryptography existed prior to Voyager 1's launch (by a year).

Based on the state of computer security at that time I would guess that's unlikely, but then again it was the Cold War.

Anyway, just because it is possible it doesn't mean anyone can do it.

Nearly all such satellites would have highly directional antennas, so the aliens would have to be neat earth before they could do that. Voyager is not expecting a command signal from anywhere else but Earth. The signal would have to originate not more than a fraction of a degree from Earth from Voyager's perspective.

Wasn't there a documentary about this?

Suspect #1:

Voyager is a boomer and could more easily be phished

My friend, just let the memes flow. You do not need to understand or gatekeep.

Sony has agreed to remove psn requirements for pc users now