Russia has previously and frequently conducted (GPS) jamming exercises in the northern area, which has resulted in the same thing for pilots there.
EDIT: These things are more likely to happen in times of military exercises or similar activities. Right now there's lots of activity in the Baltic region - which is likely why things are happening.
Whenever there's large NATO exercises in Northern Norway, these things start happening.
Please don't just drop a link but elaborate a bit what your trying to say by posting that link.
Was expecting something interesting GPS jamming related, but the article doesn't even contain the word "GPS". You likely posted it to tell there are currently NATO exercises going on in northern Norway. Your post could have benefited from adding this bit of info.
The clear suggestion is that it is Russia doing it.
Other than as an f-u, I don’t understand why they would though. If I have an effective weapon (GPS spoofer), surely I don’t want to alert the enemy to it, lest they develop defences. So eg say NATO were overreliant on GPS, incidents of spoofing like this will cause them to rethink and reduce that reliance, or harden the system.
Suggesting Russians are playing a rational game here? I think the cover has been pulled on the Russian "master strategy".. it's literally a hierarchy of terror and lies, where everyone will do whatever it takes to please the irrational autocrat.
I have been spamming this lecture everywhere since the war started and again I think anyone who's still questioning the Russian operative reality should watch it:
I watched that evaluation yesterday and I think it is spot on and I second your recommendation. Many western officials (as most people) seem to be unable to put themselves into this different environment and framework of values. Knowing a lot about a country helps, but judging them by the values you'd have doesn't help you a bit.
Edit: Take the below with a grain of salt, this is one personal experience which can/should not be extrapolated from. There are good/bad people in all nations.
When I was 16 we were on vacation and played waterball in a pool against a russian family. When they realized we were winning (all members of my family were playing handball for life, so this was no wonder) they started to do things like pulling pants and punching underneath the water surface, scratching with the fingernails etc. They still lost.
Back then I could not understand why anyone would deploy such methods in a game during their vacation. For me personally, it would be entirely unpleasant and unenjoyable to envolve myself that much in a non-serious game. But maybe the answer is contained in that video: Maybe it is just much more normal to deploy the whole arsenal of what you can do in russian culture. I guess if you don't try everything and then loose you are seen as an idiot or as a weak person. I grew up in a culture where the rules of society are taken comparedly serious, so for me playing unfair is a sign of weakness (proof you cannot win by the rules).
Well, it might be so but what's the point in Russia pissing off Finland while a good chunk of its forces is dedicated to the war in Ukraine? They're irrational but surely going "Let's start a war on TWO fronts!" is a step too far even for them?
Russia generally acts rationally. It's just that the assumptions and axioms on top of which rationality is applied is different from the West and ― apparently ― not uncommonly delusional. This made it very hard for the West to believe what Russia was saying for years about Ukraine, for example.
Further, the explanations seem to differ whether they're addressed to Russians or to other countries. Russia's own population tends to get what they want to hear (which we often consider bizarre), and what the West gets doesn't matter much what (because the West has already proven they don't understand Russia even on the big things so why not lie about military training near Ukrainian border as well just to avoid any extra yet futile discourse?)
With delusions in the case of Ukraine I refer to the idea that Ukraine never was a real country and it has belonged to Russia all the time. This falls in line with the worldview of the ex-KGB grandpas from the Soviet era but there's a notable difference they don't seem to accept. Back in the Soviet times USSR had the (fire)power to keep their member states in line and practically own the local governments. There was nowhere to go and it wasn't until the USSR was disbanded that the small Eastern European countries could run away. And run away they did. But Ukraine and Belarus are so close to Russia that it can be easy to think of them as extensions of Russia if you assume you can retain control over the countries, both politically and ultimately militarily. But Russia is much weaker than USSR. Russia have Belarus because, to my understanding, their president basically sold his country to Russia to personally remain in "power" but Ukraine has been looking to West much more than to Mother Russia. And they overruled their Russian leaning president and replaced him with one who's much more open to the West. Here's where I think the delusion comes to play.
Russia somehow thought it would be a simple matter to put Ukraine back in line to avoid them drifting too far into West. Like a father who had no trouble beating his son when he was a kid, the son is now a young adult and the father is much older and weaker, and it's necessary to realize the change. So far, Russia seems to be stuck with the idea that they can maintain control in Ukraine, even after a war. But Russia doesn't seem to be in any position to boss their neighbours around like USSR could.
Even if I ultimately believe that what Russia wanted was Crimea with their old naval city and a land route over there I think they figured why not just go for the whole Ukraine while they're at it, and for once reset the country with a government that makes things easier for Russia in the future. The old USSR could've done that but Russia can't, yet Russia acts as if they're still operating like in the times of USSR. To achieve a "reset" like that you need citizens who agree with you or who are so oppressed that they won't revolt. Russia has neither.
> Evaluation of Russia by Finnish Intelligence Colonel
I can't take this talk seriously. it's just a bunch of history bits used to explain and reinforce stereotypes about Russians. "Russians like strong leaders" because Russia was once invaded by mongols who also had strong leaders. Russians always think the leader is infallible because he gets his power from God. Then almost in the next sentence he says Russians hate Gorbachev because he ruined the Soviet Union. It's all just a bunch of shower thoughts. All it does it reinforces stereotypes and hate.
Even though plan A (rapid victory) appears to have failed, there is still a rational plan B: carve out the eastern and southern portions Putin wants, leave the rest of the country a smouldering ruin which will cost the west $1tn in aid to rebuild.
I started to watch it and it was indeed interesting, till it reached the point where the presenter claimed that Khodorkovsky was jailed because he stole too much. That's just plain false, and kind'a casts doubt on how expert is this expert. He was jailed for his political stance, that he didn't want to bow down to Putin. It's true that his first sentence for various tax dodging schemes in the 90s (that many at the time were involved in). Those were likely legal, but definitely immoral.
You start by "suggesting Russians are playing a rational game..." but literally the next sentence is condescending western rhetoric.
We don't know the strategy and the plan. We might, even maybe reasonably, deduce that Russian leadership thought that Ucrain would fall more quickly. And that some form of stable solution would be the result.
But most people don't only have one plan to reach a longer term strategic goal. So thinking of "the Russians" as rational players (and taking a lot of potentially missing information into account due to every body only hearing their own side's propaganda) we could at least ask ourselves, if the plan was to overthrow the Ucrain quickly, to probably secure the Donbas and also probably secure the water resources for the Crimean peninsula as a strategic necessity, what course of action remains for Putin now that at least the quickness of the action failed. While there are already people reporting that Russia secured most of the Donbas and the water resources for the Crimean. But how much is propaganda there, I don't know.
So Putin needs to appear as the winner in the end. At least internally. He needs to sell this to his power base and his own ego as well probably.
The west wants/needs to see the Ucrain at least as partial winner. And the sanctions to have worked (because that was sold as solution to the voters).
Can there be a way to end the killing, save thousands of lives and reach these goals? I don't know. But I would be at least hesitant to call Putin irrational. Maybe that is valid if one defines the criteria of evaluation up front. What defines 'rational'. Because I suggest that within Putin's worldview these actions make some forms of sense to him and. As said. From the outside perspective it might be reasonable to call it irrational. But that might not help the world in finding a way out. For that one needs to understand why it makes sense to Putin to act the way he does right now.
This must be how the allies felt in 1939 wondering what Germany’s master plan could possibly have been. Of course, they couldn’t have foreseen Hitler being a bumbling buffoon all along.
I think the crucial thing to understand is that current Russia isn’t just some “failed state” - it’s a crime syndicate that, due to historical mistake in 1990, was allowed to get its own country. See this thread for explanations: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1502673952572854278?s...
Here Putin was saying that Germany energy strategy was nuts and he was right. How stupid some leader could be to make her country dependent on outside countries for something as strategic as energy?
GPS jamming is not a secret technology, it’s something that you can expect in a war zone and it’s a technology you can buy on aliexpress.
GPS is actually a couple of different signals, and the general public gets the shitty one. The military has some additional protections and better receivers.
Feel this is somewhat an understatement, it's cryptographically signed and encrypted, as far as protection goes it's wandering onto an active battlefield naked vs being in a modern tank.
It's also something air defense teams would use to try to redirect missles (make them miss their mark because they have to rely on less effective navigation matters)
On the other hand, radio transmission is relatively easy to locate, and ham radio operators do it for fun ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting ) ... so it should't be that hard to find a source.
> GPS spoofer), surely I don’t want to alert the enemy to it, lest they develop defences
What normally happens is the GPS stops working and then you lose your satnav, so you dont know where you are going until you reset the satnav and even then it might not work. This is why Streetview logged all the wifi it could find and uses wifi to roughly place a phone in an area to make the gps locating algorithms faster.
Now it could be a way to get a jet to fly over enemy territory, but it could also be an excuse to false flag. Russia's Satnav is better around the north and south pole, the US is better around the equator from what I understand.
With the fog of war, its impossible for most people to know who is telling the truth, in much the same way its impossible to tell if a multivitamin contains what is claimed on the bottle, or some cheese has been aged for several years and not several months.
Society is constructed in such a way to be dependent on others and have to trust others which means you can be manipulated by more knowledgeable persons.
> Society is constructed in such a way to be dependent on others and have to trust others which means you can be manipulated by more knowledgeable persons.
I would describe it as co-dependence in order to be able to have a combined knowledge base greater than any single person could contain. You make it sound like a weakness rather than a strength!
I cannot explain how floating points work, but I can explain how linear regression works. This scales up millions of times as people rely on expertise differentials and not first principals.
If I were a NATO commander, I'd love to make sure the troops know how to do their basic shit even without GPS. It is entirely plausible that (in a major conflict) the GPS would be either jammed or destroyed, and I wouldn't like to be caught with my pants down.
However, if I were a NATO commander, I'd have trouble using GPS jammers near my training grounds, as it would cause interference to the civilians, who would loudly complain.
I think if I were a NATO commander, I'd pay Russians to jam the GPS for me.
> If I have an effective weapon (GPS spoofer), surely I don’t want to alert the enemy to it, lest they develop defences.
Russia has done this for the past 10 or so years. They invaded EU airspace. They executed many cyber attacks. This is strategy. They test to see if their competence works, they test to see what the reaction is, and they sharpen their knives, get better at it.
GPS spoofing has been used for years. It's no secret that Russia (and other countries) have that capability. The system is being hardened with M-code, although that technology isn't widely deployed yet.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-145
If your adversary does not have mitigation or retaliation readily available to them it doesn’t seem that unusual. It’s a pretty normal show of force then right?
Obviously there are time asymmetries between discovering a problem, developing a fix and deploying the fix.
Depending on the details it may require significant hardware upgrades.
In the real world outside of software everything is not solvable through a simple patch.
Last if you believe NATO is prepared for a real conflict I suggest you compare with how much of the world including institutions meant to keep us safe responded to Covid: denial, lies, misinformation, and hysteria.
In all honesty, we don't know anything about anything. Did the jamming really happen, did Russia do it, etc?
There are in fact reasons why anti-Russian countries would undertake this themselves, or even just make up the story. The reasons being that it drums up support for their cause, draws lines that people have to be on one side or another, etc.
Ultimately, this is an epistemological question - what do we know? And the only things one can say one knows, is stuff you have personally verified. After that, you are believing and trusting - the news, the footage, your governments, etc.
Is trusting those sources really an acceptable basis for any autonomous individual to proceed?
> Is trusting those sources really an acceptable basis for any autonomous individual to proceed?
You yourself are awefully fond of basing elaborate narratives on dubious sources, which is fine, but why then stoop to high-school debate club level gaslighting like "Ultimately, this is an epistemological question - what do we know? And the only things one can say one knows, is stuff you have personally verified.", unless this is satire?
Ham radio operators find RF sources for fun [0], so every time i hear something like this, I get skeptical when governments act as if they can't find out who did or atleast where from (is it coming from a drone in the air, from russia, or from a nearby parking lot [1]
> GPS spoofing is hard to stop because the signal the satellites emit from low-Earth orbit to potentially add encryption and certificates cannot be changed.
Why ? I thought the military GPS signals were encrypted. They could make a new GPS version on a new frequency with at least crypto signed messages.
We can’t have such a flaw on the protocol forever.
> I thought the military GPS signals were encrypted
I'm sure this is true in the sense that general publications use "encrypted" to mean, "There was some sort of cryptographic stuff involved and it went over my head" rather than actually encrypted. Like they do when they tell you that the passwords stolen in a breach were "encrypted with bcrypt" for example.
The key thing to pay attention to here is that unlike say, TLS, this is not a conversation. A GPS receiver is just that, a receiver passively observing the signals. You would usually "bend" GPS by relaying signals from somewhere or somewhen else, and the passive receiver concludes that it must be where the signals it is receiving seem to suggest it is.
Take an easy scenario, imagine I'm in a warehouse that has been designed as a Faraday cage. You've fit a handful of transmitters to the warehouse, and you play back a recording of GPS signals received three weeks ago in the desert outside Las Vegas.
How does my GPS receiver know (using some hypothetical "encrypted military signal") that it isn't in fact near Las Vegas three weeks ago? That's what the signals seem to suggest and there is literally no contradictory data available.
I do know the basics of GPS but not much further than this.
Wouldn't it be possible to embed a clock in a GPS receiver that gets used when decrypting the packets it receives? So instead of just receiving a encrypted packet and trusting it, it'll decrypt it and check when the message was from and if the slew is more than ~1 minute or whatever, then it is probably forged.
That would at least prevent the scenario that you're describing, but since I don't know enough about GPS, it probably introduces other problems.
Receivers and transmitters are synchronized in time, before they are used.
So if the timestamp of the signal deviates of GPS's internal clock, GPS receiver knows it.
Now for commercial receivers, they assume their internal clock is wrong, and set their own time to new GSP time.
Not sure what military GPS receivers do, but I imagine, they kind of thought about this, and just ignore signals that have timestamps that differ too much.
This probably means that they need pretty accurate internal clock.
Another way to encrypt a signal is to just have an encrypted sequence going on.
If you get a sequence you have already seen something is wrong. Think of it as hash+salt or something similar.
My Casio watch normally syncs six times a day from the DCF77 transmitter in Frankfurt. In freak weather it may occasionally skip a sync or two, but otherwise it has been rock steady through more than two years of operation. Until about five days ago. Every attempt has failed since then.
Meanwhile, two wallclocks have been sitting with flashing sync-icon for a couple of days, but now seem to be online again. Presumably, they have much larger antennae than my Casio.
Someone knowledgeable, please explain to me: Is the signal potentially being tinkered with, or is this just a strange coincidence?
Bought any cheap electronics recently?
Your neighbors new phone carger from aliexpress is a more likely reason than jamming or other intentional interference on 77.5kHz.
Take a look at Adalm Pluto or USRP B200/ B210 boards to generate GPS signal. If you want to use Pluto, you need a better clock crystal (lower ppm) for GPS usage.
You will need current almanac data and the spoofing generator software on rPI.
Also, if you want more fun and learn about GPS signals, you can use gnss-sdr open source software GPS/GNSS signal decoder.
This article focuses on US military GPS tests in US and airline safety mainly, but does mention similar tests happening in Europe and China. Regarding these latter it does not name who is doing the jamming.
It would be annoying but far from chaos for a few reasons
- Its pretty easy to detect. Similar problems come up occasionally, often due to drivers jamming their companies’ remote monitoring.
- The time services in any well operated network will operate well within tolerance for very extended periods without this signal (some bigger ones don’t use GPS time at all for reasons like this) Time labs offer their own signals.
Readit News
EDIT: These things are more likely to happen in times of military exercises or similar activities. Right now there's lots of activity in the Baltic region - which is likely why things are happening.
Whenever there's large NATO exercises in Northern Norway, these things start happening.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_192351.htm
Was expecting something interesting GPS jamming related, but the article doesn't even contain the word "GPS". You likely posted it to tell there are currently NATO exercises going on in northern Norway. Your post could have benefited from adding this bit of info.
Other than as an f-u, I don’t understand why they would though. If I have an effective weapon (GPS spoofer), surely I don’t want to alert the enemy to it, lest they develop defences. So eg say NATO were overreliant on GPS, incidents of spoofing like this will cause them to rethink and reduce that reliance, or harden the system.
I have been spamming this lecture everywhere since the war started and again I think anyone who's still questioning the Russian operative reality should watch it:
Evaluation of Russia by Finnish Intelligence Colonel (subtitles) | December 3, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
Edit: Take the below with a grain of salt, this is one personal experience which can/should not be extrapolated from. There are good/bad people in all nations.
When I was 16 we were on vacation and played waterball in a pool against a russian family. When they realized we were winning (all members of my family were playing handball for life, so this was no wonder) they started to do things like pulling pants and punching underneath the water surface, scratching with the fingernails etc. They still lost.
Back then I could not understand why anyone would deploy such methods in a game during their vacation. For me personally, it would be entirely unpleasant and unenjoyable to envolve myself that much in a non-serious game. But maybe the answer is contained in that video: Maybe it is just much more normal to deploy the whole arsenal of what you can do in russian culture. I guess if you don't try everything and then loose you are seen as an idiot or as a weak person. I grew up in a culture where the rules of society are taken comparedly serious, so for me playing unfair is a sign of weakness (proof you cannot win by the rules).
https://ghostbin.com/tjYA8/raw
(Somewhat amusingly, Pastebin refused to accept it due to "objectionable content")
Further, the explanations seem to differ whether they're addressed to Russians or to other countries. Russia's own population tends to get what they want to hear (which we often consider bizarre), and what the West gets doesn't matter much what (because the West has already proven they don't understand Russia even on the big things so why not lie about military training near Ukrainian border as well just to avoid any extra yet futile discourse?)
With delusions in the case of Ukraine I refer to the idea that Ukraine never was a real country and it has belonged to Russia all the time. This falls in line with the worldview of the ex-KGB grandpas from the Soviet era but there's a notable difference they don't seem to accept. Back in the Soviet times USSR had the (fire)power to keep their member states in line and practically own the local governments. There was nowhere to go and it wasn't until the USSR was disbanded that the small Eastern European countries could run away. And run away they did. But Ukraine and Belarus are so close to Russia that it can be easy to think of them as extensions of Russia if you assume you can retain control over the countries, both politically and ultimately militarily. But Russia is much weaker than USSR. Russia have Belarus because, to my understanding, their president basically sold his country to Russia to personally remain in "power" but Ukraine has been looking to West much more than to Mother Russia. And they overruled their Russian leaning president and replaced him with one who's much more open to the West. Here's where I think the delusion comes to play.
Russia somehow thought it would be a simple matter to put Ukraine back in line to avoid them drifting too far into West. Like a father who had no trouble beating his son when he was a kid, the son is now a young adult and the father is much older and weaker, and it's necessary to realize the change. So far, Russia seems to be stuck with the idea that they can maintain control in Ukraine, even after a war. But Russia doesn't seem to be in any position to boss their neighbours around like USSR could.
Even if I ultimately believe that what Russia wanted was Crimea with their old naval city and a land route over there I think they figured why not just go for the whole Ukraine while they're at it, and for once reset the country with a government that makes things easier for Russia in the future. The old USSR could've done that but Russia can't, yet Russia acts as if they're still operating like in the times of USSR. To achieve a "reset" like that you need citizens who agree with you or who are so oppressed that they won't revolt. Russia has neither.
I can't take this talk seriously. it's just a bunch of history bits used to explain and reinforce stereotypes about Russians. "Russians like strong leaders" because Russia was once invaded by mongols who also had strong leaders. Russians always think the leader is infallible because he gets his power from God. Then almost in the next sentence he says Russians hate Gorbachev because he ruined the Soviet Union. It's all just a bunch of shower thoughts. All it does it reinforces stereotypes and hate.
We don't know the strategy and the plan. We might, even maybe reasonably, deduce that Russian leadership thought that Ucrain would fall more quickly. And that some form of stable solution would be the result.
But most people don't only have one plan to reach a longer term strategic goal. So thinking of "the Russians" as rational players (and taking a lot of potentially missing information into account due to every body only hearing their own side's propaganda) we could at least ask ourselves, if the plan was to overthrow the Ucrain quickly, to probably secure the Donbas and also probably secure the water resources for the Crimean peninsula as a strategic necessity, what course of action remains for Putin now that at least the quickness of the action failed. While there are already people reporting that Russia secured most of the Donbas and the water resources for the Crimean. But how much is propaganda there, I don't know.
So Putin needs to appear as the winner in the end. At least internally. He needs to sell this to his power base and his own ego as well probably.
The west wants/needs to see the Ucrain at least as partial winner. And the sanctions to have worked (because that was sold as solution to the voters).
Can there be a way to end the killing, save thousands of lives and reach these goals? I don't know. But I would be at least hesitant to call Putin irrational. Maybe that is valid if one defines the criteria of evaluation up front. What defines 'rational'. Because I suggest that within Putin's worldview these actions make some forms of sense to him and. As said. From the outside perspective it might be reasonable to call it irrational. But that might not help the world in finding a way out. For that one needs to understand why it makes sense to Putin to act the way he does right now.
Dead Comment
Putin behavior makes lots of sense. In fact way more sense that European leaders for example.
For example: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Putin-German-nuc...
There is a video of that more than ten years ago.
Here Putin was saying that Germany energy strategy was nuts and he was right. How stupid some leader could be to make her country dependent on outside countries for something as strategic as energy?
Putin told everybody what he thought about Ukraine. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
Even the "I will push the nuclear button because I have nothing to loose" is pretty rational. It worked wonders multiple times.
Just because he is our enemy now does not mean he is stupid. He is not.
GPS is actually a couple of different signals, and the general public gets the shitty one. The military has some additional protections and better receivers.
Feel this is somewhat an understatement, it's cryptographically signed and encrypted, as far as protection goes it's wandering onto an active battlefield naked vs being in a modern tank.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-acc...
It's also something air defense teams would use to try to redirect missles (make them miss their mark because they have to rely on less effective navigation matters)
On the other hand, radio transmission is relatively easy to locate, and ham radio operators do it for fun ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting ) ... so it should't be that hard to find a source.
What normally happens is the GPS stops working and then you lose your satnav, so you dont know where you are going until you reset the satnav and even then it might not work. This is why Streetview logged all the wifi it could find and uses wifi to roughly place a phone in an area to make the gps locating algorithms faster.
Now it could be a way to get a jet to fly over enemy territory, but it could also be an excuse to false flag. Russia's Satnav is better around the north and south pole, the US is better around the equator from what I understand.
With the fog of war, its impossible for most people to know who is telling the truth, in much the same way its impossible to tell if a multivitamin contains what is claimed on the bottle, or some cheese has been aged for several years and not several months.
Society is constructed in such a way to be dependent on others and have to trust others which means you can be manipulated by more knowledgeable persons.
In other words we are all pawns.
I would describe it as co-dependence in order to be able to have a combined knowledge base greater than any single person could contain. You make it sound like a weakness rather than a strength!
I cannot explain how floating points work, but I can explain how linear regression works. This scales up millions of times as people rely on expertise differentials and not first principals.
I am both pawn and player.
If you think it is difficult or tricky being dependent on others and trusting others, I'd suggest the contrary is much worse.
If I were a NATO commander, I'd love to make sure the troops know how to do their basic shit even without GPS. It is entirely plausible that (in a major conflict) the GPS would be either jammed or destroyed, and I wouldn't like to be caught with my pants down.
However, if I were a NATO commander, I'd have trouble using GPS jammers near my training grounds, as it would cause interference to the civilians, who would loudly complain.
I think if I were a NATO commander, I'd pay Russians to jam the GPS for me.
Russia has done this for the past 10 or so years. They invaded EU airspace. They executed many cyber attacks. This is strategy. They test to see if their competence works, they test to see what the reaction is, and they sharpen their knives, get better at it.
That already happened, a long time ago.
> lest they develop defences
That already happened, Starlink.
Depending on the details it may require significant hardware upgrades.
In the real world outside of software everything is not solvable through a simple patch.
Last if you believe NATO is prepared for a real conflict I suggest you compare with how much of the world including institutions meant to keep us safe responded to Covid: denial, lies, misinformation, and hysteria.
There are in fact reasons why anti-Russian countries would undertake this themselves, or even just make up the story. The reasons being that it drums up support for their cause, draws lines that people have to be on one side or another, etc.
Ultimately, this is an epistemological question - what do we know? And the only things one can say one knows, is stuff you have personally verified. After that, you are believing and trusting - the news, the footage, your governments, etc.
Is trusting those sources really an acceptable basis for any autonomous individual to proceed?
You yourself are awefully fond of basing elaborate narratives on dubious sources, which is fine, but why then stoop to high-school debate club level gaslighting like "Ultimately, this is an epistemological question - what do we know? And the only things one can say one knows, is stuff you have personally verified.", unless this is satire?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting
[1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-acc...
Yes, we may not know everything, but we are more informed than the Russian/Chinese population in general.
Why ? I thought the military GPS signals were encrypted. They could make a new GPS version on a new frequency with at least crypto signed messages.
We can’t have such a flaw on the protocol forever.
I'm sure this is true in the sense that general publications use "encrypted" to mean, "There was some sort of cryptographic stuff involved and it went over my head" rather than actually encrypted. Like they do when they tell you that the passwords stolen in a breach were "encrypted with bcrypt" for example.
The key thing to pay attention to here is that unlike say, TLS, this is not a conversation. A GPS receiver is just that, a receiver passively observing the signals. You would usually "bend" GPS by relaying signals from somewhere or somewhen else, and the passive receiver concludes that it must be where the signals it is receiving seem to suggest it is.
Take an easy scenario, imagine I'm in a warehouse that has been designed as a Faraday cage. You've fit a handful of transmitters to the warehouse, and you play back a recording of GPS signals received three weeks ago in the desert outside Las Vegas.
How does my GPS receiver know (using some hypothetical "encrypted military signal") that it isn't in fact near Las Vegas three weeks ago? That's what the signals seem to suggest and there is literally no contradictory data available.
Ie sign the current data package plus the current time. Receivers ignore everything with an incorrect timestamp and/or wrong signature.
Now you only have to make sure that you don't lose your private keys.
Wouldn't it be possible to embed a clock in a GPS receiver that gets used when decrypting the packets it receives? So instead of just receiving a encrypted packet and trusting it, it'll decrypt it and check when the message was from and if the slew is more than ~1 minute or whatever, then it is probably forged.
That would at least prevent the scenario that you're describing, but since I don't know enough about GPS, it probably introduces other problems.
So if the timestamp of the signal deviates of GPS's internal clock, GPS receiver knows it.
Now for commercial receivers, they assume their internal clock is wrong, and set their own time to new GSP time.
Not sure what military GPS receivers do, but I imagine, they kind of thought about this, and just ignore signals that have timestamps that differ too much. This probably means that they need pretty accurate internal clock.
Another way to encrypt a signal is to just have an encrypted sequence going on. If you get a sequence you have already seen something is wrong. Think of it as hash+salt or something similar.
Meanwhile, two wallclocks have been sitting with flashing sync-icon for a couple of days, but now seem to be online again. Presumably, they have much larger antennae than my Casio.
Someone knowledgeable, please explain to me: Is the signal potentially being tinkered with, or is this just a strange coincidence?
Bought any cheap electronics recently? Your neighbors new phone carger from aliexpress is a more likely reason than jamming or other intentional interference on 77.5kHz.
This is interesting. Someone knows if I can spoof GPS signals using my Raspberry Pi -- plus maybe some SDR hat or add-on?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-thre...
- Its pretty easy to detect. Similar problems come up occasionally, often due to drivers jamming their companies’ remote monitoring.
- The time services in any well operated network will operate well within tolerance for very extended periods without this signal (some bigger ones don’t use GPS time at all for reasons like this) Time labs offer their own signals.
Maybe some extreme HFTs doing arbitrage between markets
It's easy, cheap and precise.