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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

My guess would be scientific experiments where they need to correlate or sequence data over large regions. Things like correlating gravitational waves with radio signals and gamma ray bursts.

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those are GPS based too. You typically would have a circuit you trained off off 1PPS and hopefully had a 10 or so satellites in view.

You can get 50ns with this. Of course, you would verify at NIST.

GPS could be blocked easily, and AFAIK even given corrupted inputs. And HFT could possibly benefit from blocking or corrupting competitors GPS.

Deploying a GPS jammer in civilized territory is a great way to go to prison.

It's not like foreign adversaries care.

The parent was saying HFT firms would do this to other HFT firms. They would care about doing this kind of thing - it’s not a white collar crime. And foreign adversaries would care about doing this during peacetime, especially for very unclear benefit.

Would it actually go so far?

Would the police actually try to investigate from where came the jammer? Might the competing firm possibly even finance an investigation themselves privately? And if so, would the police then accept the evidence?

People have done far more evil things for money.

The victim firm would definitely notice, they’d tell the FCC, and their investigators will show up with a device that literally points them to wherever the jammer is. If you do this for stupid, silly reasons you will get fined[1], if you do it in commission of another crime you will probably get made an example of. It doesn’t matter how evil you are, it’s hilariously easy to get caught doing this.

[1]: https://www.nj.com/news/2013/08/man_fined_32000_for_blocking...

We are talking about the UK, not the US. And the jammer will most likely be tucked away in some closet with no hint as to how it got there.

Where were we talking about the UK? All anyone said in this message chain was HFT (and NIST).

Sorry, you are correct. As soon as the subject of HFT came up I was thinking about London and the things they do to reduce latency to the exchanges in North America. It's too late to edit or remove my previous message.

> “Mr. Bojczak claimed that he installed and operated the jamming device in his company-supplied vehicle to block the GPS … system that his employer installed in the vehicle,” the FCC decision stated.

I'm not surprised that somebody would try and do this. However it is just so stupid at every level.

Next to Newark Airport too. He’s lucky they didn’t throw the book at him - they could’ve hit him for reckless endangerment.

> ...and hopefully had a 10 or so satellites in view.

I believe you'll need 12 GPS sats in view to gain incremental accuracy improvement over 8.

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