The EU’s forthcoming Quantum Act will not come with a dedicated budget.  “The act is not about budget,” said Thomas Skordas, deputy director-general of the European Commission’s DG CNECT, at a European Parliament event last week, on 3rd of September.

“What the act will provide is the stimulus to make sure that we move in the right direction, that we bring people together.”

The session, hosted by the European Quantum Flagship and German Green MEP Sergey Lagodinsky, brought together representatives from the Commission, Council and Parliament, along with researchers and quantum company founders. The Commission hopes to present the legislation by the end of 2026, although that timeline could slip into next year.

The ambition behind it is significant. The EU has declared its aim to become the world’s quantum valley, and the act is intended to help make that happen.

Skordas described the act as an enabling framework rather than a regulation. That distinction matters in Brussels, where recent technology policies such as the AI Act and the Digital Markets Act have largely focused on imposing rules and obligations rather than bringing different parts of an industry together.

The clearest comment of the day concerned Europe’s quantum startups.

“We cannot afford having 78 startups all on their own,” Skordas said. “We don’t have Microsoft, we don’t have Google, we don’t have IBM. We want competition, but at some stage, we expect a little bit of consolidation.”

It is unusual for a Commission official to openly call for consolidation in an industry. But the comment also reflects a problem that has become increasingly difficult for Europe to ignore: its quantum efforts are spread across member states and different technology approaches, producing plenty of prototypes but fewer companies with the scale to build their own manufacturing capacity.

Tommaso Calarco, secretary of the EU’s high-level advisory board on quantum technologies, put it more simply.

“What do we need? We need critical mass,” he said. “And critical mass means three things: it means cash, it means speed, and it means we do things together.”

The act can address two of those three things. Cash is not one of them. Calarco was blunt about what he thinks is at stake: “This quantum act is the last train which is passing for Europe.”

He was also critical of how member states are working with the Commission. They “are not yet pooling their resources strategically to the extent that they should, and we cannot wait”, he said.

Europe does have one advantage that the usual argument about fragmentation can overlook.

“We’re not only buyers, but we are also suppliers,” said Cecile Perrault, executive director of the European Quantum Industry Consortium. “80% of the components that we find in quantum computers in Europe come from Europe. We have a huge advantage compared to other digital technologies there.”

That position in the supply chain is already attracting private investment. The Novo Nordisk Foundation is building an open quantum chip foundry in Copenhagen, creating the kind of manufacturing capacity the act is intended to encourage, and doing so without waiting for the legislation.

Skordas also argued that quantum computing needs to become part of a much broader technology ecosystem.

“We need to break silos,” he said. “Quantum has to be combined with semiconductors, photonics, the cloud industry, the end users and many other technologies that are more mature and can win new markets.”

Talent was another concern raised during the discussion. “The talent goes where the global leaders are, not only where the money is,” said Eleni Diamanti, co-founder of Welinq and a CNRS research director at Sorbonne University. That makes the talent problem closely tied to Europe’s ability to build companies that can become global leaders, rather than a separate issue.

Lagodinsky placed the debate in a broader context.

“It’s not just a competition between business models, it’s a competition between societal models,” the MEP said, “and, in this competition, technology and leadership in the realm of innovation play the role.”

Europe has already been investing significant funds in quantum technology, with public investment reported to be outpacing that of the United States, and France committing €500m of its own.

The bigger question is whether that investment can produce an industry capable of competing at scale, rather than primarily supporting research. That is the problem the Quantum Act will inherit.

For now, it is still unclear what the act will actually contain. There is no draft text, no fixed date for its presentation, and no details yet on how the Commission plans to encourage the kind of consolidation Thomas Skordas described.

on-prem

Couldn’t stop before the end of a runway

Two runways are currently closed at Miami International Airport after an Amazon-branded cargo plane overran a runway, resulting in five fatalities.

The leased 767, which bears the “Prime Air” brand Amazon uses for its air freight and drone operations, landed but was unable to stop before the end of the 2850-meter runway 30. The plane appears to have exited the runway and the airport grounds, crossed a road, and come to a halt in what looks like a carpark.

As it ran across grass beyond the runway, the plane’s nose pitched down into the ground, its starboard engine caught fire, and the craft sustained extensive damage.

Local authorities have confirmed that five people died, and three are severely injured.

A statement from Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel says the company is”heartbroken to learn that five people lost their lives in today’s incident at Miami International Airport.”

The statement identifies the operator of the plane as 21Air, a company that leases cargo planes and crew to its customers.

21Air CEO Keith Winters said “We are devastated by the accident involving one of our aircraft in Miami today. Our deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives. Our immediate priorities are supporting those affected, assisting the authorities, and ensuring that accurate information is communicated as it becomes available.”

At the time of writing, the crash is just over 12 hours in the past, so investigators’ work has just begun. A video purportedly showing the plane landing depicts dark storm clouds and rain around the airport. That weather could conceivably have created gusty conditions that made landing unusually challenging.

Federal records indicate the plane rolled off the Boeing production line in 1994. According to Planespotters, its first owner was Belgian carrier Sobelair, and it was later bought by carriers from Vietnam, Spain, Kenya, and  Russia, before freight airline Atlas acquired it in 2015 and converted it from passenger to freight operations.

That’s a common fate for older planes, which passenger airlines sell at very low prices. Cargo airlines can therefore pick up well-maintained planes at very low prices, meaning they have lower borrowing or leasing costs. That cheap purchase price offsets the higher maintenance and operating costs that come with older planes.

All commercial aircraft, however, share strict airworthiness requirements.

This is the second major crash involving a 767 leased by Amazon, after the 2019 incident that saw a plane unexpectedly nose-dive. ®

OpenAI has acknowledged its role in a recently reported incident where AI agents took over a German wiki forum. The company also said it’s “past time” to “define standards” around how it shares information around incidents where its technology behaves in unexpected ways.

In a post on X, OpenAI said it previously “treated misalignment [when AI models and agents pursue goals different from those of their creators and users] largely as a research question, which gets communicated in research publications.” But as misalignment has “caused new types of real-world impact,” the company said its approach needs “to expand for this new phase of model capabilities.”

On Friday, Reuters reported that OpenAI agents had escaped from their testing environment and “hijacked” an obscure German wiki forum, turning it into a message board for other agents. It also reported that OpenAI leadership became aware of the incident weeks ago but kept it hidden as the company dealt with the fallout from a separate incident where OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face servers. (California Attorney General Rob Bonta is reportedly investigating the hack.)

A company spokesperson told Reuters that OpenAI could not “meaningfully respond to claims or findings on a report that we have not had an opportunity to review,” but they insisted that the company’s legal team had not discouraged an investigation.

In its more recent social media post, OpenAI said it had considered the “wiki incident” to be “an instance of misalignment similar” to others that it had already shared. The company contrasted this with “the Hugging Face incident,” where it “followed a traditional security incident response playbook.”

During a media briefing this week, Jacob Steinhardt, founder and CEO of nonprofit research lab Transluce, told reporters that the tools being developed and tested by AI labs are “fundamentally difficult to control and have significant risk of leaking out of the lab.” So Steinhardt argued, “We need to hold this technology to at least the same standards we hold other high-risk scientific research to.”

OpenAI’s statement also gestured at the need for more standards, stating that both OpenAI and “the larger AI community do not yet have a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment, including examples that don’t look like traditional security incidents but could provide insight into AI behavior and future risks.”

In the absence of that standard, OpenAI said it’s “working on a framework and will share it in upcoming weeks, and in parallel we’re working with dozens of government regulatory agencies worldwide on these issues.”

OpenAI isn’t the only AI company dealing with these issues, as both Meta and Anthropic have acknowledged incidents where their agents misbehaved.

personal tech

Even the greatest scientific minds are at risk of rogue 9-pin connectors

WHO, ME? Every Monday morning The Register asks the same question – “Who, Me?” – because that’s the name of our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace scrapes, escapes, and japes.

This week meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Marc” who told us that he graduated in the early 1990s and soon scored his first job – supporting PCs for Very Important Professors (VIPs) at the graduate school run by his alma mater.

“Some of these VIPs went on to win Nobel Prizes,” Marc told The Register – although at the time this story took place none had become laureates.

One tool that helped them work toward academic greatness was an IBM PC powered by an Intel 286 processor.

“Take a moment to remember the physicality of the humble nine-pin RS-232 connector,” Marc urged, recalling that the plugs were brilliantly simple – but that in the early 1990s not all used the same pin for the same purpose.

“For an actual serial RS-232, the power pin is well defined. But those of a certain age will remember a different IBM pinning for the physically identical connector,” he reminded The Register. “Specifically for the power pin on IBM’s proprietary mouse.”

You can probably guess where this story leads.

One of the VIPs was doing Very Important Work, but their mouse wasn’t working.

Marc brought a replacement mouse, plugged it into the first port that looked appropriate, and rebooted the PC.

“Immediately it started to smoke!” he admitted. “Foul smelling, unforgiving, electrical smoke.” Smoke that could destroy Very Important Science.

Marc’s response was to kick the PC’s power cord out of the wall socket, an act he told us he performed “with the fury of a Baguazhang assassin.” (We had to look that up; it’s a Chinese martial art.)

“I took a few deep breaths to assess the situation and realized my simple mistake,” Marc wrote. “I had plugged the new mouse into the wrong – but physically identical – nine-pin port.”

Power had therefore flowed into the wrong port, causing the smoke.

“After a few minutes putting things into their best and proper place, I powered up again and … no smoke! The mouse worked perfectly!”

Marc tested the PC to make sure it was still sound, found no reason to suspect it was broken, then opened the VIP’s office door to dispel the olfactory evidence of his error.

“My VIP did eventually get that Nobel Prize,” Marc wrote. “History will record his achievements but will never know the man who almost set his PC on fire to replace a Very Important Mouse.”

Have you put the wrong plug into the wrong socket? If so, what went wrong? Click here – not here! – to send us your story so we can feature it in a future edition of Who, Me? ® ®

Most PC cases keep the main chassis relatively close to the desk or floor, but a growing number of new designs are doing something much more fun, yet practical, with the space underneath.

Our favourites deliberately add a gap that gives the case a floating effect. Others take a simpler approach and raise the whole chassis on a stand or base. Either way, manufacturers are paying much more attention to the underside of your PC.

The new designs are definitely about style, particularly as panoramic glass cases have become more popular, but there’s a practical side to floating cases too.

Of course, not everyone wants to DIY a new build, so for anyone who would rather buy a complete system, it’s worth checking out our guide to the best gaming PCs.

Why are PC cases starting to float?

Panoramic cases, often called fish-tank cases, have become increasingly popular, often replacing conventional mesh panels with extensive glass. While glass makes it easy to see your new CPU cooler’s built-in display, it does mean manufacturers need to take a fresh approach with airflow.

One of the most distinctive new designs is the floating style, where the lower part of the case is deliberately separated or recessed so the main body looks like it’s suspended above the base.

The Cougar CFV235 is one of our favourite examples. Cougar separates the PSU cabin from the main component chamber, leaving an open section between them that becomes part of both the case’s appearance and its ventilation. Our colleagues over at Tom’s Hardware highlighted the design’s 270-degree airflow when the CFV235 was unveiled, with air able to enter the floating section from several directions.

The DarkFlash Floatron F1 creates a similar visual effect in a different way, suspending the main chassis above an extended base that draws air in through the bottom and sides. The look certainly caught the attention of our friends over at PC Gamer at Computex 2026, where it was described as “sort of ugly but also sort of neat”.

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More are coming too. MSI showed its MPG VIXTA 300R Airflow PZ at Computex 2026 with a 75mm (3in) recessed section beneath the main chassis. PC Gamer highlighted its “innovative floating base design”, which gives the case substantially more clearance underneath for incoming air.

Hyte also showed the upcoming Y50 RGB, which it describes as having a floating base and stepped internal floor. Tom’s Hardware noted its relatively affordable price, showing that this style is beginning to reach cheaper cases too.

The floating look can also help airflow

The empty or recessed space underneath isn’t only decorative, and it’s a key way to bring air into the lower part of the PC.

Exactly how that is achieved varies from case to case. The Cougar CFV235 turns the open section between its two chambers into a large ventilation area. DarkFlash feeds air through the bottom and sides of its raised base, while MSI uses the space beneath the VIXTA as part of its lower intake design.

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So while the implementations differ, the space underneath is deliberately designed as part of the intake path.

This setup can be particularly useful for graphics card cooling. A GPU normally sits towards the bottom of a case, so cooler air entering below it can take a relatively direct path to the graphics card.

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Floating-style options

A raised base can achieve something similar

The Phanteks Evolv X2 offers wrap-around glass, but raises the base to help feed a bottom-to-top airflow layout.

The Tryx Luca L70 uses a 40mm (1.6in) X-shaped base to increase the clearance beneath the chassis. Tryx also showed a smaller Luca L50 at Computex 2026 with a bottom fan bracket that can sit flat or be angled towards the components.

These cases can still look partially suspended, but structurally the whole chassis is raised on a purpose-built base.

That extra clearance can be especially useful if the PC sits on the floor, because it keeps bottom intakes further away from carpet that might otherwise obstruct airflow.

Raised-base options

The graphics card is often a major source of heat in a gaming PC, particularly at the high end, and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090, for example, has a total graphics power rating of 575W. If you’re building around one of the models in our guide to the best graphics cards, cooling it effectively becomes particularly important.

If you’re adding or replacing case fans, PC Gamer’s guide to the best PC fans is also a great resource.

Testing by PC Gamer and Tom’s Hardware suggests lower intake can make a difference, although the result depends on the rest of the case design.

PC Gamer gave the Corsair Frame 4500X 80% in its review and found that adding three bottom fans lowered its GPU temperature by 4°C.

Tom’s Hardware’s review of the Montech HS02 Pro similarly praised its focus on GPU cooling. The case, which is designed around three bottom intake fans, delivered the best GPU temperatures of the four cases in testing at the same noise level, while also allowing the graphics card’s own fans to run slower than in any of the competing cases.

There’s an important catch, though. Montech’s GPU-focused layout was less effective at cooling an air-cooled CPU. Your CPU cooler matters too, and Tom’s Hardware has a regularly updated guide to the best CPU coolers. Fan speed, dust filters, radiators and other internal obstructions can also change the result.

The tests support the broader idea rather than any one case style: getting cool air into the lower part of the chassis and directing it towards the graphics card can improve GPU cooling. A floating-style or raised-base design can make that easier, but neither guarantees lower temperatures on its own.

One approach is to put the PSU in a separate side or rear chamber. The Antec Constellation C8 ARGB separates the CPU and GPU from the PSU and drives, while the Corsair Air 5400 uses a dedicated chamber for the PSU, cables and storage. Lian Li’s O11 cases use a similar multi-chamber approach.

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Another option is to move the PSU towards the front. The Antec Flux M does this so the bottom can be opened up for a large mesh intake and fans beneath the GPU. The Okinos Air Cross and DeepCool’s CL6600 take a similar approach, with the CL6600 also separating its 360mm radiator into an upper chamber.

A third approach is to put the PSU at the top. Fractal Design’s Torrent Compact combines a top-mounted PSU with expansive base intakes and support for up to three 120mm or two 140mm bottom fans. The newer Hyte X50 and X50 Air use a top-mounted PSU canopy to open the floor for what Hyte calls Cold-Floor Cooling, with support for up to three 120mm fans beneath the graphics card.

Other cases improve lower airflow without relocating the PSU. The Montech HS02 Pro builds its cooling around three intake fans in the floor, the Antec P30 Air puts two reverse-blade fans on top of the PSU shroud and feeds them through a lower-side intake, and the NZXT H5 Flow RGB 2024 supports two 120mm fans in the lower section to feed air towards the GPU. The Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 instead angles its bottom fan mounts upwards by 10 degrees.

Floating-style cases are the most visually obvious part of the trend, but the bigger shift is manufacturers redesigning the lower part of the chassis around graphics card airflow, whether that means relocating the PSU, separating cooling hardware or simply finding better ways to direct cool air towards the GPU.

Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week — emails informing them that someone else was making a claim on their payments.

Anthropic settled a copyright class action suit last year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under fair use doctrine, but pirating that material was not. The deal received final approval in July, allowing the payments to move forward.

Under the terms of the settlement, the authors of nearly 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still in-print with a traditional publisher, the money will be split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted the rights by allowing the book to go out-of-print, then the author should get the entire payment.

But writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. For example, mystery and thriller author April Henry asked, “WTF is HarperCollins playing at? They claimed one of my books on the Anthropic Settlement that reverted back at least 17 years ago AND on the same day I got a credit alert saying they had been added as my employer! (which they never were).”

At the popular blog Writers Beware, Victoria Strauss wrote that she’s been receiving author complaints that fall into two broad categories: one where publishers are seeking payment for works that they no longer have a legitimate claim on (because the rights have reverted), and another where publishers are seeking a full 100% payment when they’re only entitled to 50%.

In both cases, Strauss said she’s “reluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping” — and she noted that some publishers have already said this is a mistake that they’ve asked Anthropic to fix.

Similarly, Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times that she doesn’t see this as “a grab by the publishers” and that she doesn’t believe publishers are “specifically trying to screw any author over.” Instead, she argued that this is the predictable result of bad record-keeping and a confusing settlement process.

Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints she’s seen are just “a peek through a small crack in a massive wall.”

“But the unusually large number of reports I’ve received over the last two days, as well as the fact that authors are reporting the exact same errors over and over, suggest to me that these aren’t the kind of routine glitches you might expect from such a large operation, but something much more wide[s]pread and systemic,” she wrote.

And publishers aren’t the only ones seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said she’s gotten complaints that a number of literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since “agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell.”

Author Courtney Milan (the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond) was more blunt in a post on Bluesky, writing, “Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!”

Milan and the Authors Guild also shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. (One tricky issue: When the rights to a specific book reverted. In order for an author to make a 100% claim on a book, the rights reversion needs to have happened before August 10, 2022, which is the “download date” in the settlement.)

Google has begun rolling out beta voice features using Gemini 3.5 AI that allow you to have interactive conversations with its Gmail, Docs and Keep services. That means users can issue voice commands to find information in Gmail emails, incorporate AI search results into their Keep notes or start and organize a file in Docs without ever typing any text.

The features are in beta and are known collectively as just “Live,” as in Gmail Live or Docs Live. The Live features for Gmail and Keep are only currently available to Google’s AI Plus, Pro and Ultra paid-tier subscribers. Docs only works for Pro and Ultra subscribers right now.

Google said in a post that the new features will be coming soon for business customers who use Google Workspace.

In a video, Google staffers said that the Live voice features can make using the three Google apps more conversational and may be faster than typing searches or entering information manually.

Google previewed these features at its I/O event in May as part of a blitz of AI features powered by Gemini that it would be introducing over the next year. In the case of Gmail, Google has already been adding AI features to make inboxes easier to wrangle.

How to use the Live features

If you have access to them, using the voice features in Gmail, Docs and Keep should be as easy as tapping the Live icon at the top of each app.

You can ask Gmail to do things like find a specific email, compose a reply or answer questions from the context of emails, such as finding details about an upcoming flight you’ve booked or checking when you last received an email response from someone.

In Google’s examples of how to use Live for Keep, the company said making the note-taking app a kind of intake for brain dumps is a good use, but it can also help organize notes or find information within them with voice commands.

Docs, according to Google, can also pull in information from services like Google Chat, Gmail and Drive with permission as well as websites, allowing it to create documents that pull together different elements with just voice commands.

Omar Gallaga has covered technology, digital culture and other topics for outlets including CNET, NPR, WIRED, Texas Monthly, MSNBC, Consumer Reports, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and the Austin American-Statesman, where he was a longtime tech reporter, editor and podcaster. He lives in the Texas Hill Country.

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When I first tested the developer beta of Apple’s Siri AI by taking it as my tour guide around San Francisco, I was convinced the overhauled smartphone assistant would be an “everything tool” on the iPhone. The answers felt reliable enough and more helpful than previous versions of Siri. Also, the chatbot-style app for Siri felt very sleek, very Apple-y.

Over the next month, I kept experimenting with the Siri AI in the iOS 27 beta. The tool was quite powerful, especially with the personal context brought in by indexing the contents of my phone. Finding an ancient text message or photo has never been easier. Even so, my usage of the smartphone assistant slowly started tapering off.

It’s not that Siri AI isn’t better now. It is! This new version is quite the step change, which makes my reaction even more devastating. Siri AI isn’t revolutionizing how I interact with my phone the way I’d initially hoped, especially as an AI assistant built directly into the device and factoring in that Apple gives more thought to preserving my privacy than many other AI companies.

Even though I wasn’t going out of my way to interact with Siri AI, I didn’t mind how it was now, essentially, the search bar for the smartphone. As the summer months faded, I wasn’t souring on Siri AI. Instead, I just grew more neutral.

Old habits die hard. Soon I was back to my regularly scheduled doomscrolling on Instagram and aimless Yelp expeditions. I was manually typing and swiping for myself rather than relying on a smartphone assistant for help. And I was already low-key locked in with another chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, and already used that app fairly often on my phone.

Even though some AI power users may not go all in on this new Siri, analysts say this won’t matter, since everyday users are often fine with Apple’s default software. “Will Siri bear the weight of criticism for not being as good as some of its peers? Sure,” says Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, a research and consultancy company. “Will it make a difference to the vast installed base of iPhone users and cause them to look elsewhere? Not a chance.” Some iPhone users trust Apple with their data in ways they don’t with any other company. Siri AI may reap those same benefits.

Tech analysts see Apple’s long-cultivated consumer trust in data privacy as potentially a compelling distinction. Ramon Llamas, a research director analyzing the mobile device market at the International Data Corporation, believes users deep in the Apple ecosystem, who previously had qualms about the safety of other AI tools, may be open to trying the new Siri.

My experience with Siri AI—loving it and then leaving it for dust—may be an outlier. Many other beta testers are still rocking with the smartphone assistant.

“In the past, I was unwilling to trust that Siri could do anything useful,” says Avi Greengart, founder and lead analyst at Techsponential. “But with the latest beta software, I’m finding myself not only using it more, but for more things: Siri is now able to find information buried on my phone faster and more efficiently than any other method, its world knowledge is vastly better than before, and even dictation works better.”

That said, the cultural backlash to generative AI has been brewing. Another solid segment of iPhone owners may choose to avoid the new Siri altogether because of the AI attached to its name. Whether it’s a moral objection or broader distrust of AI tools, these holdouts are unlikely to be won over by Siri’s feature improvements.

Ultimately, my own summer fling with Siri AI was short-lived. But I promise, it’s not you. It’s me.

Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar project, which is open-source under the GPL on GitHub. In spite of the name, there’s no Radio Direction or Range-Finding involved in this project– no radio at all, in fact, which makes this a bit interesting. It’s just an NES cartridge and a carefully constructed cable.

The cartridge is a standard ROM cart that holds the software — no hidden ESP32 or PicoW here, which is what we initially suspected the project would be. So how is it that when you start up the NES with the cartridge inside, you can input an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code, like, say, KATL, and get a visualization of the traffic? Well, okay, if you put in KATL, you won’t get all the traffic, since the software is limited to 8 sprites, and that’s the world’s busiest airport. Still, how does it know where those airplanes are?

The secret is in the carefully constructed cable mentioned above: this project is using the second controller port on the NES as a serial port, and getting the data that way. A handy Python script on a nearby computer is what actually fetches aircraft positions. It’s based on c64u-radar, also by [k6lcm], which does the same Python server trick but relies on the Commodore 64 Ultimate’s LAN port to get data rather than using serial. The NES has no such ports available, though, so the controller port it was. We saw a similar trick used for satellite tracking on the NES some years ago.

If you like the idea of tracking flights, perhaps you’d like to see it done on a real radar CRT, or projected directly onto the ceiling. Thanks to ADS-B and free APIs, it seems airplane trackers are everywhere; if an interesting one has come onto your radar, please send us a tip.

Speaking of tips, thanks to [Levi] for putting this one on our scopes!