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The sun has "flipped upside down", with its north and south poles reversed to reach the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, Nasa has said. Now, the magnetic fields will once again started moving in opposite directions to begin the completion of the 22 year long process which will culminate in the poles switching once again."A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event," said Nasa’s Dr. Tony Phillips."The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the 'heliosphere') extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space."

This is a fundamental problem for nations that aren't interested in exposing their traffic to American observation, whether they're engaged in nefarious activities or not. Long term, the problem could lead to the construction of digital firewalls, in which the United States is effectively isolated behind protective nodes built by local governments to scrub and redirect traffic away from potential capture points. This is directly in opposition to the central concept of the Internet, which is a dynamic structure capable of responding to outages or damage by routing around the problem.

In all cases the asymmetry was tiny, but consistent, like flipping a not-quite-fair coin. “The scale of the asymmetry is as though we flip 20,000 coins again and again, and on average, 10,003 of them land on heads while 9,997 land on tails,” says Dreiling.