Enlarge / A Voyager space probe in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1977. (credit: Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Getty Images )

Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft.

Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers on November 14. For nearly four months, NASA knew Voyager 1 was still alive—it continued to broadcast a steady signal—but could not decipher anything it was saying.

Confirming their hypothesis, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California confirmed a small portion of corrupted memory caused the problem. The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing.

Enlarge / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Jim Carrey in one of his most powerful dramatic roles. (credit: Focus Features)

Last week, the 2004 cult classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind marked its 20th anniversary, prompting many people to revisit the surreal sci-fi psychological drama about two ex-lovers who erase their memories of each other—only to find themselves falling in love all over again. Eternal Sunshine was a box office success and earned almost universal praise upon its release. It's still a critical favorite today and remains one of star Jim Carrey's most powerful and emotionally resonant dramatic roles. What better time for a rewatch and in-depth discussion of the film's themes of memory, personal identity, love, and loss?

(Spoilers for the 2004 film below.)

Director Michel Gondry and co-writer Pierre Bismuth first came up with the concept for the film in 1998, based on a conversation Bismuth had with a female friend who, when he asked, said she would absolutely erase her boyfriend from her memory if she could. They brought on Charlie Kaufman to write the script, and the three men went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for their efforts. The title alludes to a 1717 poem by Alexander Pope, " Eloisa to Abelard ," based on the tragic love between medieval philosopher Peter Abelard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil and their differing perspectives on what happened between them when they exchanged letters later in life. These are the most relevant lines:

Enlarge / Samsung shared this rendering of a CAMM ahead of the publishing of the CAMM2 standard in September. (credit: Samsung )

Of all the PC-related things to come out of CES this year, my favorite wasn't Nvidia's graphics cards or AMD's newest Ryzens or Intel's iterative processor refreshes or any one of the oddball PC concept designs or anything to do with the mad dash to cram generative AI into everything.

No, of all things, the thing that I liked the most was this Crucial-branded memory module spotted by Tom's Hardware. If it looks a little strange to you, it's because it uses the Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) standard—rather than being a standard stick of RAM that you insert into a slot on your motherboard, it lies flat against the board where metal contacts on the board and the CAMM module can make contact with one another.

CAMM memory has been on my radar for a while, since it first cropped up in a handful of Dell laptops. Mistakenly identified at the time as a proprietary type of RAM that would give Dell an excuse to charge more for it, Dell has been pushing for the standardization of CAMM modules for a couple of years now, and JEDEC (the organization that handles all current computer memory standards) formally finalized the spec last month .

Enlarge / The front of a 128GB Dell CAMM. (credit: Dell)

Move over, SO-DIMM. A new type of memory module has been made official, and backers like Dell are hoping that it eventually replaces SO-DIMM (small outline dual in-line memory module) entirely.

This month, JEDEC, a semiconductor engineering trade organization, announced that it had published the JESD318: Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM2) standard, as spotted by Tom's Hardware .

CAMM2 was originally introduced as CAMM via Dell, which has been pushing for standardization since it announced the technology at CES 2022. Dell released the only laptops with CAMM in 2022, the Dell Precision 7670 and 7770 workstations.

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In 2015, researchers reported a surprising discovery that stoked industry-wide security concerns—an attack called RowHammer that could corrupt, modify, or steal sensitive data when a simple user-level application repeatedly accessed certain regions of DDR memory chips. In the coming years, memory chipmakers scrambled to develop defenses that prevented the attack, mainly by limiting the number of times programs could open and close the targeted chip regions in a given time.

Recently, researchers devised a new method for creating the same types of RowHammer-induced bitflips even on the newest generation of chips, known as DDR4, that have the RowHammer mitigations built into them. Known as RowPress, the new attack works not by “hammering” carefully selected regions repeatedly, but instead by leaving them open for longer periods than normal. Bitflips refer to the phenomenon of bits represented as ones change to zeros and vice versa.

Further amplifying the vulnerability of DDR4 chips to read-disturbance attacks—the generic term for inducing bitflips through abnormal accesses to memory chips—RowPress bitflips can be enhanced by combining them with RowHammer accesses. Curiously, raising the temperature of the chip also intensifies the effect.