Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Monday, May 13th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Well, it looks like my worries about solar weather being a threat to technology wasn't just in my head.

Ask farmers.

Square space to go private, Raspberry Pie to go public, question mark.

Weimo is setting some impressive records and the new type of deal Apple and the other

streamers want to offer Hollywood. Here's what you miss today in the world of

Tech.

Did you enjoy the Northern Lights show we got this weekend? I'll tell you who did not,

farmers. And I'm leaning with this because we've done long reads about this very thing happening for several years now is one of the biggest black swan dangers out there a bad solar storm that could knock out anything electronic

Well small taste of how that could happen as U.S. farmers have had to halt their

planting operations after the solar storm broke critical GPS and precision farming

functionality in tractors and other equipment.

Quoting 404 media, one chain of John Deer Dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of

some of the systems used by tractors are extremely compromised in their words and that farmers who

planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to

harvest according to text messages obtained by 404 media and an update posted by the dealership.

The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions,

which experts have been warning about for years.

All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because

of the solar storm. Kevin Kenny, a farmer in Nebraska told me, no GPS. We're right in the middle of

corn planting. I'll bet the commodity market spike Monday end quote.

Specifically some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline.

...