Computer crashed? You could blame forces beyond our solar system

When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don’t be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays may be your real foe, or rather the electrically charged particles they generate.

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IBM did a lot of the early reseach, down to sea level using memory chips as recall, measured both soft and hard failures

Tau.Neutrino said:

Computer crashed? You could blame forces beyond our solar system

When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don’t be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays may be your real foe, or rather the electrically charged particles they generate.

More…

Any computer in low Earth orbit has to be specifically hardened against cosmic rays. At least 999 times out of 1000, cosmic rays generate soft errors, changes that don’t affect anything other than the accuracy of results. The rest of the time they generate an error that causes a computer crash.

Military spec computers are also hardened against a number of factors, which makes them much less affected by cosmic rays than home computers.

There are also industrial spec computers, these are hardened primarily against temperature changes, so are able to operate successfully over a wider temperature range than home computers. Protection against temperature extremes also helps to protect against cosmic rays.

Most of these protection schemes involve using wider chunks of silicon in the transistors within the integrated circuits.

So, keeping in mind that cosmic rays can cause computers to crash, next time your computer crashes, blame …

… malware.