Galileo has optional cryptographic signatures of its navigational data. They embed the data into their broadcast. Can be used for free.
For receiving however, you can simply use a phased array antenna to gain directional information in addition to your magnitude. This allows you to ignore interferance that is coming from the ground (though not any from a jammer located above the device, or any reflections from the atmosphere). The effect of this is somewhat like a shotgun microphone.
Is there an example of a reputable (subjective, sure) news source having done this?
The article it published was a nationally syndicated piece, though. Maybe they thought somebody else was vetting?
I'd bet money this isn't the only place that has machine generated content. Proving exactly what is and isn't that would be a bit tricky.
[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/robo-journalism-good-n...
They have the same explanatory power as similar drivel written by humans, and you walk away feeling similarly uninformed.
For a while (until I got to lazy) I maintained a front page article that talked about everything going on in the blog linking to tag pages that should have (but didn't) enjoy the same love. It was challenging to have a single sentence describe a group of articles and string those sentences into an article that sufficiently hides the truth that the blog randomly rambled all over the place. There was a lack of urgency for new articles to appear (except from the rss feed) in stead the front page article revealed missing posts. You could compare it to a wiki (while html offers the same utility) but the blog had 3 clear levels and blog like articles that rarely got updated.
It had me spend some thoughts on the absurdity of putting a log file on the front page or attempting to massage that automation into something nice? Everyone is doing it so it must be right.
That's because journalists only have 2 modes of operation:
1) Destroy this person/institution/thing (whether rightly or wrongly)
2) Someone please write my copy for me
It's the same reason so many outlets are willing to uncritically republish corporate press releases with little to no editing.
I'd add a big reason outlet do that is because nobody gets sued for publishing a press release. Good journalism attracts lawsuits like nothing else (bad journalism can as well, but mostly just if you are lying).
This has additionally led to newspapers using the most passive voice possible. Instead of "Foo company dumps 10 tons of toxic waste into the public water" they'll headline it as "A mishap at a local business has resulted in some chemical spillage".
Since that was The Wall Street Journal, I don't know that the reason is fear of lawsuits. It could just be extreme business-friendliness, or Rupert Murdoch seeping in.
(2 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44025527
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
Nautical miles are used in this article by an aviation magazine presumably because they are the global standard for marine and aeronautical navigation, and have been since well before the metric system was a global standard. It is also worth noting that the US does not use nautical miles as a standard, they use statute miles.
FYI, nautical miles are a useful standard for global navigation since they are referenced to the size of the earth itself.
I remember, that Galileo went offline a few years ago for some days - and the joke was, no one noticed. So possible that today there are more regular users and possible that there are some advanced features of Galileo like the mentioned
"Galileo’s open service (civil-access) E1 signal incorporates public/private key encryption to digitally sign and authentify data"
But I think GPS falling behind Galileo would imply a bit more Galileo users, compared to GPS. Which would surprise me.
Like HAS (30cm precision after some integration time. Without additional correction data) and cryptographic verification of the transmitted GNSS data.
Which is fairly useless. The spoofed data can be legit data just selectively delayed by a couple of milliseconds and the receiver has no way to know.
Then also delay signals from other gnss providers to match.
I have witnessed this done in Iraq, so someone has already built the capability.
It relies on the fact the clients clock will have a few milliseconds of error so they'll be unable to detect it.
If the client had an atomic clock, this attack wouldn't be possible.
You'll have to make GPS more secure with or without geopolitical consequences for Russia, so why don't we focus on the actual topic of the article.
There will always be holes in technology that exist to be exploited for nefarious purposes. The best way to deal with it is to present strong consequences for those who would exploit them.
An example of the kind of unit confusion that could crash a Mars orbiter?
I thought we were talking about nanometers and square meters here for a second. But this only makes sense if "m²" means square miles and "nm" means nautical miles. How about at least using "mi" for miles to reduce confusion?
> There is a space between the numerical value and unit symbol, even when the value is used in an adjectival sense, except in the case of superscript units for plane angle.
You are mistaken. SI units and their numbers always have a space. For reference [1], [2].
[1] https://www.npl.co.uk/si-units cf. Numerical Notation
[2] https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html cf. #15
EDIT: Scooped ;)
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Apparently (I haven't had this happen personally, yet) many truckers install GPS jamming cigarette lighter accessories in their trucks when they want to mask their location from trucking companies that track them everywhere. That can wreak havoc on GPS receivers at facilities, especially if you have, say, a logistics building right next to a datacenter.
Now that I'm building a CCTV setup, I should see if I can connect the two and save images of the vehicles passing by when it happens.
I am not seeing anything about that in the Wikipedia article:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...
It sounds like the GPS was jammed, not spoofed. The aircraft had already shot some missed approaches at the destination airport before the event that caused the loss of the aircraft.
(I'll save you a click: They're Gold codes, long pseudorandom sequences with carefully chosen autocorrelation and cross-correlation properties. In CDMA parlance, chipping sequences. The exact same thing.)
It's almost like the designers thought of this.
This is one of those occasions when capitalisation really matters: "nm" (lowercase) is nanometer, the tiniest of scales. On the other hand, "NM" (uppercase) is nautical miles, used in aviation (because aviation is stuck in the age of sail, and measures distance in boat miles and speeds in boat miles per hour)
All Aviation literature will tell you to never spell it lowercase, and this is why. There's a lot of physics in aviation, and it's too easy to misread things. Always get your units right.
Navigation itself must "toughen up" and the seeds for that are being deployed to autonomous systems as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Instead of being dependent on a single data source, a toughened system would infer location from many sources: magnetometers, photogrammetry, inertial measurement, and other sources of radiation (ex star trackers). The article does cover some developments in these areas as a second line after advocating for breaking changes to the current radio-time system.
GPS jamming and spoofing will not abate anytime soon. The first line of defense is to crosscheck GPS PNT against inputs from other sensors. Parkinson advocates “deep integration,” or close coupling, of GPS sensors and inertial reference platforms, such as laser, fiberoptic gyros and microelectromechanical gyros and accelerometers, to flag obvious GPS signal interference.
Also, I read something on ITAR being relaxed specifically for CRPAs, this year, so maybe some of this is improving? ->
https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/20/first-fix-freeing-crpas-gps-wo...
Not directly related, but I also think its impressive that a major airliner could take a SAM hit, from what was likely a Pantsir-S1 (20KG of HE moving at Mach 2 is not something airlines usually design for) and still land with half the souls surviving. While not great, that is certainly far better than I expected and shows some excellent airmanship.
> […] launch an initiative to regain U.S. PNT leadership and ensure resilient, reliable PNT for critical infrastructure and the larger economy.
> GPS’s capabilities are now substantially inferior to those of China’s BeiDou. https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/recommendations/2023...
As long as an external signal for navigation is used, the problems of external signals will remain. INS doesn't suffer from this issue and is already used in planes, ships, cars and phones for years. Actually I miss INS in cycling computers, it could fix so many issues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system
jpm_sd•7h ago
https://insidegnss.com/crpas-to-be-removed-from-itar-list-op...
joecool1029•7h ago
Why not? I have a FLIR which is under export restrictions and you can buy from them, shit like this will have a card inside saying you can't sell to unfriendly nationals: https://www.amazon.com/FLIR-One-Thermal-Imager-Android/dp/B0...