ELI5 – Why hasn't Voyager I been "hacked" yet?

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4 points·thunderbong··9 comments

It has been, that’s why it’s working now. The problem for the average black hat is that the only people who have the Deep Space Network dish time required to send it new instructions (never mind the technical knowledge to reverse its hardware structure and programming model) already work for the JPL.

Those massive dishes that provide the Earth-side of the comms link are not connected to the internet. They were built decades before the internet was even a thing.

Because the devices that run the 1970s "WiFi"-standard are rather hard to come by.

Oh and the whole thing is written in assembler. So no native Javascript support.

TIL assembler [sic] is unhackable

<grin>

I'm sure he meant that it's all in assembly language for a system that hasn't been published anywhere for many decades.

I'll bet that the guys who are still working on the Voyagers and have any assembly language knowledge about the systems they use are all over 70.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=introduction-ass...

Was that the hardware/software used in the Voyagers?

That seems too 'heavy' for use in a bare-bones environment like space-craft.

The point is that you can call the language "assembly" or "assembler" and the hairsplitting difference the other person tried to make is nonsense.

How're you going to talk to it? It's unfathomably far away.

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