By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Cars

The number of subprime auto borrowers at least 60 days past due on their loans has hit 6.56 percent, the highest level in the history of data collection from Fitch, going back to 1994. It’s a sign that a couple of concerning trends — inflation pinching consumers, a slowing economy, but mostly high costs for cars and trucks in general — have converged. This comes as the Fed Bank of New York found that the percentage of all auto loans in serious delinquency is up to 3 percent.

Claire Ballentine, Bloomberg

Botnet

A new botnet on the scene is smashing records out the gate. Eleven11bot appeared in late February with a few massive denial-of-service attacks that rocked the charts. The botnet has some 30,000 devices in its thrall, mostly webcams and video recorders, about a quarter in the United States. It is delivering volumetric DDoS attacks that consume all available bandwidth in a targeted network, which is slightly different than your standard exhaustion DDoS which tries to overexert the computing resources of a server. Eleven11bot managed to launch a 6.5 terabits per second attack on February 27, which beat the previous record (set in January) at 5.6 terabits per second.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

SANS

NASA wants to send people to Mars within the next 15 years, and much of the intervening time will be spent troubleshooting the difficulties inherent in that task. A weird one is spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS), a phenomenon that emerges in the microgravity of space where important parts of the eye become wrinkled or shifted during long missions. It’s usually found in people doing a six-month stint on the ISS, but a trip to Mars is going to be nine months there and nine months back. Given that about two-thirds of astronauts on missions to the ISS experience changes in visual acuity, it’s potentially a serious issue. Once back on Earth, the condition invariably clears up in about 12 months, and NASA sends astronauts to space with various pairs of glasses to anticipate eyesight changes. There’s going to be a study with 16 astronauts over several missions on a regimen of vitamins that NASA thinks might be the ticket to reducing the risk of developing SANS.

Neil Savage, Scientific American

Dhaka

Bangladesh is home to a massive garment business that employs 3 million people, responsible for 77 percent of the country’s $50 billion in exports. The business requires lots of human labor, but with rising competition from Vietnam, Cambodia and new tech, the industry is trying to automate or semi-automate lots of those jobs. Given how big the industry is for employment, even that has political ramifications since so many people within the country rely on those jobs. According to a survey of 20 factories in Dhaka, the largest factories are expected to eliminate 22 percent of their workforce through semi-automated machines. Even the job is changing for those who will remain employed; one new system called a “Nidle” is short for “No idle,” and obsessively monitors how many pieces are sewn per hour, and how many minutes the worker is idle.

Jesmin Papri, Rest of World

The Catalog

According to data from Luminate, 50 percent of song plays from all on-demand audio streaming services were of songs five years or older. Only a little more than a quarter of all music plays come from songs released in the past year and a half. The health of the music business relies on older catalogs producing money well after the band stops playing, but there comes a point when the old stuff is crowding out the new stuff. In some genres, like rock, they’re weighed down by ghost music; about 75 percent of rock music listened to in 2024 was at least five years old. And it’s not just all from The Beatles; in 2024, 49.6 percent of music plays were from the 2020s, but 29.9 percent were from the 2010s and 10.4 percent were from the 2000s. This means that about 90 percent of music was from the new millennium, at least.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Balloon

The Tethered Aerostat Radar System — consisting of an upper chamber full of helium and a low chamber full of pressurized air — is generally used to detect low-altitude aircraft, but the System found itself rapidly becoming one after a storm. Texas was rocked by some rough winds, apparently rough enough to dislodge the anchor of a large balloon used by Customs and Border Protection to surveil the airspace. The balloon was then blown about 600 miles to the north, eventually crashing about 30 miles east of Dallas, creating a small scene.

The Associated Press

Bobbleheads

Funko, which hawks uniquely stylized bobbleheads of all manner of pop culture ephemera, has begun to pull out of a rough patch, pulling off a 1 percent increase in sales and moving $293.8 million worth of product. The good news for Funko is that the company has managed to move less and less of that product through the discount, clearance and closeout channels. These sales had become a bit of a brand issue after several years of overloaded inventory and piles and piles of products for IP that nobody really wanted to buy.

James Zahn, The Toybook

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