The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan | Hacker News Reader

The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan

bloomberg.com

25 pointsjsoc81518 comments

GPS is american, Europeans have the Galileo system, and the russians have glonass. aren't those a backup plan

and many "GPS" chipsets actually read both GPS and GLONASS. In the future most systems will probably read at least 3 of the global systems (India and China are also deploying/planning on deploying their own systems).

If I'm not mistaken China has one in the works as well.

For some reason this comment collected a few down votes so here is a reference to the Chinese GPS system [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou_Navigation_Satellite_Sy...

Yes, but that wouldn't make for a satisfying headline.

The most insidious tactic on the ground is GPS spoofing, using malicious software to broadcast phony signals and fool the receiver on, say, an aircraft into thinking it’s somewhere, or somewhen, that it isn’t. Such methods “would certainly work against Ubers, Waymo’s self-driving cars, delivery drones from Amazon,” and more, says Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Happy to see the article discuss the problem of GPS jamming and spoofing. That could become an increasing threat, especially against self-driving cars.

Recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17539465

> hony signals and fool the receiver on, say, an aircraft into thinking it’s somewhere

I thought aviation didn’t rely on GPS for navigation?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system

They still need GPS for periodic correction.

Indeed. If anyone is interested in just how much GPS is used in our daily lives I recommend reading the book Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds by Greg Milner. It's a neat read on the development of GPS as well as other navigation throughout history.

Having long ago heard that most of the satellites were long past their intended 'expiration' dates, I'm still a little surprised to see articles like this appearing today.

As for your book rec, does it add much substance to his Time piece?[1]

[1] http://time.com/4309397/how-gps-is-messing-with-our-minds/

It's a good general-history book on GPS, he does go back to the theme of it's changing our minds (mentions the impressive sea navigation abilities of cultures that have traditionally lived on the water spread out over hundreds of small islands for example) and IIRC he touches on some of the people that have died, or nearly died, trusting GPS instead of common sense, but that's by no means the majority of the book.

It's been probably close to 2 years since I read it but I enjoyed the history aspects of it.

I was surprised to learn recently that GPS can be turned off by the government. I guess it makes sense, I just never thought of gps as inherently controlled by the government.

One of the largest reasons that we don't have highspeed wireless internet from satellites is that the spectrum is on the lower end of the US gov's use for old marine gps systems. It may interfere so they block the projects.

100ms or more ping time as we wait for the signal to travel thousands of miles into space and back would also have something to do with it.

For reference, round trip time to geostationary orbit is 240 ms. But that is 36 thousand km. Compare that to the ISS which orbits less than 500 km up, so the round trip time is less than 1.25 ms.

No communications satellites orbit at such low altitude, though.

GPS was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense for military use, full stop.

GPS was later opened up for non-military use in 1983 but the accuracy for non military users was intentionally and artificially limited until 2000.

Who do you think ran it and paid for it, though?

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