Hackaday Links: October 17

While doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of …. Links: October 17, 2026. Granted, she was standing there for long enough that the police were eventually called, but still.

Previous reporting indicates that Carolyn Marvin has a history of blocking delivery robots as a form of protest, but this is the first time law enforcement got involved. We’re not lawyers here so we can’t say for sure whether or not blocking the progress of a robot engaged in commercial operation actually violates any laws. But we do know that refusing a lawful request from a police officer will get you in trouble, and that seems to be what Marvin was actually charged with when she refused to move.

From a robot stopped in its tracks to one that keeps on trucking, NASA is reporting that the odometer on the Perseverance Mars rover recently ticked over to 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers). That might not seem like a lot, but it officially makes it the most traveled rover in the solar system, breaking the record set by Opportunity at 28.06 miles (45.16 km). One might expect that the Curiosity rover would hold the distance record as it had been rolling around on the surface for more than a decade before Perseverance dropped into the neighborhood, but the different scientific missions of the two nearly identical rovers have taken them on very different courses.