Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is knock out their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.
Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.
Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?
I think the general assumption is GPS is denied in most combat zones, it's constantly being jammed in and around Ukraine.
For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing.
Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation.
As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.
Actually it hasn't proliferated into civilian use because the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy.
I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business.
I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?
> the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy
Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost.
Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.
We also have visual navigation systems that can use satellite imagery to produce guidance packages. They will become increasingly less useful the longer the imagery goes without updates after a Kessler syndrome type event, though. Another strategy, which I believe the Ukrainians have been experimenting with, is scattering small radio beacons throughout the battlespace to provide a network of navigation aids.
In a true Kessler scenario where LEO is denied for an extended period of time, I expect a variation of that strategy is how we would replace GPS for most civilian use cases. Likely by using cell towers to triangulate, possibly enhanced with additional transmitters to improve accuracy and coverage. Pure cell tower triangulation would have much worse coverage than GPS, obviously especially in rural areas where cell service is often already poor, but also anywhere that getting a signal from multiple towers isn't easy or possible. Cell towers are never distant enough to use the relativity-based timing tricks GPS relies on, so multiple signals would be required to triangulate. We'd likely end up with substantially less precise positioning, maybe something more on the order of the 10-20m of error we used to see with GPS before the US stopped limiting civilian access to the deaccuratized version. Cell tower triangulation also obviously doesn't work for aviation or oceanic shipping, where trident-like inertial+stellar nav would probably be the only workable option.
I assume in that situation they would be targeted specifically with ASATs at the beginning of the conflict, with the denial of LEO then preventing us from launching replacement sats.
I’m sure we’ll go back to beacons [1] here in the UK
”Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet.
One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.”
Pretty sure the Spanish Armada was <150 total ships, of which only a small subset would be the big galleon things. (And then my knowledge hits a wall, idk what the difference between a galleon and ship-of-the-line/battleship is)
I'm not sure how much to trust the rest of that website.
Right, in future conflicts between major countries the satellites will be first casualties. The US military is aware of this and still trains personnel on analog navigation techniques. Inertial navigation works well for some missions and research is underway on alternative technologies. Civil airliners can still navigate without GPS, although this may reduce safety and increase workload.
We're also going to need a prompt launch capability to replace attrition losses. There should be warehouses full of spare navigation, reconnaissance, and communications satellites ready to mount on a reusable booster and launch within hours. Concerns have been raised over a "Kessler syndrome" due to orbital debris but in lower orbits with significant atmospheric drag this won't be a serious problem.
This is the easiest trick technique for figuring out vaguely north/south direction.
Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole.
In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North.
This reminds me of this scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when they're trying to figure out whether Hamlet knows a hawk from a handsaw by the direction of the wind.
IIRC, the Navy stopped teaching officers traditional ship navigation methods for awhile, until the series of incredibly stupid incidents drew attention to the lack of basic navigation and piloting skills, then curriculums were partly reverted. Not sure if things have improved much; probably too early to tell.
I doubt officers or crew would ever have to resort to a sextant, but that's besides the point. It's the type of thing that's integral to learning navigation theory and building tacit knowledge that's fundamental to the job.
George Friedman suggests that the reason Washington is going back to the moon is that it is easier to launch satellites into Earth orbit from the moon than from the Earth's surface.
You may be right, but if that happens the resultant space debris will serve as an additional terrible outcome of any major conflict.
We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault.
You pretty much have to do this to knock out starlink (or similar constellations in future). There's so many currently deployed and they can be launched with such cadence that knocking them all out isn't feasible.
That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?
Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Iran/US are going to be looked at as the precursors to WW3, the same way that the Sino-Japanese War, Spanish Civil War, and Sudetenland Crisis were the precursors to WW2 and the Russo-Japanese War, Moroccan Crisis, and Balkan Wars were the precursors to WW1.
You see a lot of real world stuff going on in Ukraine. They haven't knocked out GPS satellites but have local jammers. The missiles and the like can use a variety of alternative systems like inertial navigation and terrain matching. There are a couple of startups that make a box that can navigate with a camera looking down at the scenery for ~$1 or 2k.
The location system in your phone often uses a resilient, non-GPS backup based on cataloguing the locations of WiFi routers. Not due to enemy action but your Starbucks having a building over it. There are two main systems, one from Google, one from Apple. It can make a noticable difference if you are playing something like Pokemon Go. The thingy can be in range with one system but not the other.
Knock out? no, best option is to have them all pre-hacked and send out spoofed data at the most desired times, especially if you knew what weapon systems were relying on them. Knocking out the satellites is like flipping the table in chess, you'd only do it if you were pretty sure you had no chance of winning because everyone else in the tournament won't like it. The duopoly-based cold war is over and those winner-take-all tactics were what drove USA policymakers to try so hard to get China to play on the world stage.
You could have the GPS constantly changing in the same way as time sensitive rolling key authenticators work. Without the base private key, you wouldn't be able to decode it in time. So it remains functional for those that need it but becomes useless, actively works against those without it.
There's technology now that matches local satellite/aerial images against the imagery that a drone or cruise missile sees to replace the GPS chip.
For fairly obvious reasons, militaries that have it would rather it stay in their hands, for fear of creating a non-state peer competitor that can do cheap long-range strikes on strategic targets.
It's fairly likely it'll fall into private hands anyway though, because anyone who can afford the prices for commercial satellite imagery could build such a thing.
> Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Once a stealth technology is integrated into civilian life, it's no longer stealth, and you lose the element of surprise if you have to use it in warfare. If somebody _does_ feel they have a clever secret work-around, the incentive is pretty high to keep it a secret.
Exactly, a notable time military tech has been deployed in public in full would be the TOR network. That was done to provide enough noise on the network to hide its purpose/make difficult to track.
GPS has relatively few satellites... but if in doubt, I think Starlink with its absurdly large fleet of satellites can be used as an alternative. Maybe not at a precision level good enough for precision farming, but good enough to roughly guide troops to where they need to go.
Modern cruise missiles and stuff like Storm Shadow, Taurus etc. already rely on sensor fusion - GPS, inertial navigation, radar, optics and probably a ton more to always keep track of the position.
Assuming Starlink is a no-show for whatever reason, airliners and ships will have to revert back to stationary navigation aids aka your good old light towers and radio beacons.
That's the thing, to take down any of the megaconstellations you need thousands of antisat weapons and that's just one constellation. Not sure about the competitors but at least for Starlink their laser links should provide ample fallback for ground stations going out of service.
The US military has been funding plenty of projects related to what it calls Alt-PNT, or "alternative position, navigation, and timing" systems. I imagine other nations have invested in this as well.
Which systems are actually getting deployed, and in what pieces of equipment? No idea, I imagine that's super duper classified.
There's a bunch of stuff for using terrain to figure out where you are [1], generally used for missiles and planes though, not sure if works well from a ground perspective.
On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war.
we don't use the word WAR anymore. it's uncouth. it's CONFLICT now. they'll call this the era of the Great International Technology Conflict or Technology Hostilities.
does anyone know what exactly they are jamming? if a satellite spies on cellular and wifi activity, can you directionally jam it on that spectrum without causing collateral?
if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image?
can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?
Most satellite signals are high frequency, but low power (it's amazing how little power you need for a LoS radio signal). So generally they're easy to overwhelm, especially as GPS receiving antennas tend to be multi-directional. GPS transmits on several fixed frequencies and is relatively bitrate, too. The military signals are apparently more robust, but full details are more scarce.
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.
The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
I have just decommed an old datacentre that we're moving out of and this is basically what my 30-year-old travel-worn farm truck Range Rover looks like right now.
Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
There’s been talk of Russia potentially attacking a NATO country within weeks. The way the media have coordinated in saying this leads me to believe this has come from intelligence and they’re trying to prepare us.
And that country would probably be Poland. Russian hardliners want to reunite the USSR of which Poland was a member state. Plus Poland is the greatest threat to Kaliningrad.
If you take a look back at history, literally everyone would disagree. A strong England has done unimaginable damage to almost every other society on the planet.
How are those vaccines, antibiotics, and antiseptics working out for your nation? How many people would be dead in “every other society” without them?
Thank the Brits for that.
How’s the modern world in general working out for your nation? Would it be better off in pre-industrialised times? Do you enjoy being clothed and well fed; do you enjoy travel via bike, car, train, or plane and not needing to do back-breaking manual labour; do you like clean water and sanitation? Do you like to kick back and watch the TV after a long day? Or, listen to radio? Or maybe you prefer to make a long distance call to a friend? Assuming of course that you like turbines for power generation from coal, gas, nuclear, wind, or waves.
Yep, all of the above require the Brits again… [1]
Do you feel any pangs of irony when posting your dislike of Brits via the world-wide web, on a Turing machine based computer, powered by an ARM chip? ;)
Do you like sport? Music? Literature… ok I’ll stop now …
Not really sure who we mean by "people". "People" will do business with the UK but that's not the same as "like" and "trust". If you mean regular people like from SEA that you have spoken to, yeah those people are generally nice and will act nice to your face. But many of them from those I have spoken to hold their grievances.
Not my experience at all in South Asia. Why would they act nice about the British to someone who is from their country (or a neighboring country)?
My experience is nationalists (and bigots, and especially ethnonationalists) do have greivances, and some westernised intellectuals have ideas about decolonisation etc., but most people do not
I am beginning to enjoy how deranged HN’s hatred of the British is. I try to explain to fellow Brits how much Americans in particular now hate us and it doesn’t register with them.
If they were to do something positive with it then it would be nice.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.
Nobody is pretending to build or defend anything positive in space. Efforts like Starlink are blatantly and publicly a synthetic aperature radar constellation for military use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
And in that respect, it was a deviation from the propaganda of previous eras, which did in fact frame efforts as building and defending positive things in space.
The V2, Cold War and original space race set the tone for anyone that was watching. After the Reykjavík Summit, it was clear that America had started down a nigh-irreversible path to commercialize, militarize and whitewash the space industry.
> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?
That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.
The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.
It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.
High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.
The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.
So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.
Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.
It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.
It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.
This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.
All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.
But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.
Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.
This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.
And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.
Any power.
Even the tiniest bit.
And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.
Which is why I think it is a stupid idea for a society to go cashless. They are just asking for a complete economic collapse if anything goes wrong with telecomms.
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.
At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.
All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
> All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.
A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services.
I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here.
I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.
I imagine that if all banking apps go down as a result of war then bank websites, credit cards, basically any other digital financial thing will also be down.
I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.
A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products.
So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.
At least I see them being used less often in stores. Also how on earth was he paying $200 for checks? You can get them for < $15. Here's a book with a fish on it, and a ledger, and a cover for under $25 https://www.checks.com/p/856/wonders-of-the-sea-checks
Man, don't get me started. However, business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. Also, why are you surprised that a bank has found a way to charge more fees?
No, the ~$200 fee was for the book ledger and blank checks. I have no idea what kind of monthly fees the bank was charging for the account. He was also getting raked over the coals on his merchant account to process credit cards because it was deemed a high risk business so most reputable places would not accept the business.
It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.
Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.
Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.
> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites.
Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.
Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website
That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.
It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.
Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"
The networks (including physical IP networking) that underpin banking require a very accurate source of time to function. This is frequently farmed out to GPS, rather than use local atomic clocks. This makes GPS (or rather GNSS) a single point of failure.
I'm surprised so few people on HN appear to be aware of this.
GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.
Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.
I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera?
They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?
Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.
Tap to pay is also doable with a credit/debit card, but paying via phone is a legitimately useful feature although also not remotely critical or something that would be world ending if it were disrupted.
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?
When I moved to the west coast, I was looking at the history and how cities like Burbank lived under a tarp cover that when viewed from the air looked nothing like the city/airport that they were covering. The fear of another Pearl Harbor like attack was that great. Plus, all of that cool shade while denying the enemy!!
If only that were true. The world would be a much better place if we only had to deal with waste caused by the military-industrial complex. But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat. They need to be aggressively confronted and contained in every domain, including space.
> But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat.
No, they do not. Attacking nato is suicidal behavior. Pretending like the war with ukraine is "expansionist" in intent instead of establishing a sphere of influence is just disingenuous. Was it stupid? Yes. Does it mean Russia is going to invade poland? Fuck no. Stop reading propaganda. You're smarter than your leaders. Act like it!
Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is knock out their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.
Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.
Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?
I think the general assumption is GPS is denied in most combat zones, it's constantly being jammed in and around Ukraine.
For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing.
Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation.
As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.
Actually it hasn't proliferated into civilian use because the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy.
I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business.
I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?
> the military industrial complex has captured pretty much anything with real accuracy
Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost.
Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.
We also have visual navigation systems that can use satellite imagery to produce guidance packages. They will become increasingly less useful the longer the imagery goes without updates after a Kessler syndrome type event, though. Another strategy, which I believe the Ukrainians have been experimenting with, is scattering small radio beacons throughout the battlespace to provide a network of navigation aids.
In a true Kessler scenario where LEO is denied for an extended period of time, I expect a variation of that strategy is how we would replace GPS for most civilian use cases. Likely by using cell towers to triangulate, possibly enhanced with additional transmitters to improve accuracy and coverage. Pure cell tower triangulation would have much worse coverage than GPS, obviously especially in rural areas where cell service is often already poor, but also anywhere that getting a signal from multiple towers isn't easy or possible. Cell towers are never distant enough to use the relativity-based timing tricks GPS relies on, so multiple signals would be required to triangulate. We'd likely end up with substantially less precise positioning, maybe something more on the order of the 10-20m of error we used to see with GPS before the US stopped limiting civilian access to the deaccuratized version. Cell tower triangulation also obviously doesn't work for aviation or oceanic shipping, where trident-like inertial+stellar nav would probably be the only workable option.
Luckily, GNSS satellites sit in MEO with sufficient altitude between the various systems. GPS would survive a Kessler Syndrome.
I assume in that situation they would be targeted specifically with ASATs at the beginning of the conflict, with the denial of LEO then preventing us from launching replacement sats.
GPS is generally jammed close to the target, to varying degrees. For intermediate guidance out of range of jammers it works fairly well
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM for localization by matching altimeter measurements to a terrain map
I’m sure we’ll go back to beacons [1] here in the UK
”Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet.
One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.”
[1] https://www.paintersforstal.co.uk/news/the-history-of-beacon...
150 battleships?
Pretty sure the Spanish Armada was <150 total ships, of which only a small subset would be the big galleon things. (And then my knowledge hits a wall, idk what the difference between a galleon and ship-of-the-line/battleship is)
I'm not sure how much to trust the rest of that website.
I think it was around 130, but yeah, perhaps a better source was needed. The beacons were real though!
I think you mean Sir Francis Drake.
They’re not my words, but yes, you are correct.
Right, in future conflicts between major countries the satellites will be first casualties. The US military is aware of this and still trains personnel on analog navigation techniques. Inertial navigation works well for some missions and research is underway on alternative technologies. Civil airliners can still navigate without GPS, although this may reduce safety and increase workload.
https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-military-nail...
We're also going to need a prompt launch capability to replace attrition losses. There should be warehouses full of spare navigation, reconnaissance, and communications satellites ready to mount on a reusable booster and launch within hours. Concerns have been raised over a "Kessler syndrome" due to orbital debris but in lower orbits with significant atmospheric drag this won't be a serious problem.
Reminds me of in the Avengers - SHIELD couldn't navigate the helicarrier, and Nick Fury said "Is the sun setting? Then put it on our left!"
This is the easiest trick technique for figuring out vaguely north/south direction.
Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole.
In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North.
EDIT : The Wikihow article shows it better.
https://www.wikihow.com/Use-an-Analog-Watch-as-a-Compass
It is an old Army/SAS trick for keeping baring without a compass.
This reminds me of this scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when they're trying to figure out whether Hamlet knows a hawk from a handsaw by the direction of the wind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0erXl4pwQ
IIRC, the Navy stopped teaching officers traditional ship navigation methods for awhile, until the series of incredibly stupid incidents drew attention to the lack of basic navigation and piloting skills, then curriculums were partly reverted. Not sure if things have improved much; probably too early to tell.
I doubt officers or crew would ever have to resort to a sextant, but that's besides the point. It's the type of thing that's integral to learning navigation theory and building tacit knowledge that's fundamental to the job.
EDIT: 2016 article discussing restoration of traditional navigation instruction: https://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-bac...
Are they still using iPads to control the ship?
George Friedman suggests that the reason Washington is going back to the moon is that it is easier to launch satellites into Earth orbit from the moon than from the Earth's surface.
The truth was the first casualty.
You may be right, but if that happens the resultant space debris will serve as an additional terrible outcome of any major conflict.
We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
You pretty much have to do this to knock out starlink (or similar constellations in future). There's so many currently deployed and they can be launched with such cadence that knocking them all out isn't feasible.
> Presumably when World War 3 kicks off
That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?
Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Iran/US are going to be looked at as the precursors to WW3, the same way that the Sino-Japanese War, Spanish Civil War, and Sudetenland Crisis were the precursors to WW2 and the Russo-Japanese War, Moroccan Crisis, and Balkan Wars were the precursors to WW1.
Fiona Hill has said some time back that she believes we are already fighting World War 3 with Russia.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/10/...
We aren't there yet but one can definitely see the run up in action.
You see a lot of real world stuff going on in Ukraine. They haven't knocked out GPS satellites but have local jammers. The missiles and the like can use a variety of alternative systems like inertial navigation and terrain matching. There are a couple of startups that make a box that can navigate with a camera looking down at the scenery for ~$1 or 2k.
There are also about half a dozen rival GPS like satellite systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Simi...
The location system in your phone often uses a resilient, non-GPS backup based on cataloguing the locations of WiFi routers. Not due to enemy action but your Starbucks having a building over it. There are two main systems, one from Google, one from Apple. It can make a noticable difference if you are playing something like Pokemon Go. The thingy can be in range with one system but not the other.
Knock out? no, best option is to have them all pre-hacked and send out spoofed data at the most desired times, especially if you knew what weapon systems were relying on them. Knocking out the satellites is like flipping the table in chess, you'd only do it if you were pretty sure you had no chance of winning because everyone else in the tournament won't like it. The duopoly-based cold war is over and those winner-take-all tactics were what drove USA policymakers to try so hard to get China to play on the world stage.
You could have the GPS constantly changing in the same way as time sensitive rolling key authenticators work. Without the base private key, you wouldn't be able to decode it in time. So it remains functional for those that need it but becomes useless, actively works against those without it.
There's technology now that matches local satellite/aerial images against the imagery that a drone or cruise missile sees to replace the GPS chip.
For fairly obvious reasons, militaries that have it would rather it stay in their hands, for fear of creating a non-state peer competitor that can do cheap long-range strikes on strategic targets.
It's fairly likely it'll fall into private hands anyway though, because anyone who can afford the prices for commercial satellite imagery could build such a thing.
So long as the targeted area is limited, you only need imagery data for set routes/areas and can keep local data pools reasonable.
Can already see the poor headlines of "Snapdragon chips used to bomb schools!"
> Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Once a stealth technology is integrated into civilian life, it's no longer stealth, and you lose the element of surprise if you have to use it in warfare. If somebody _does_ feel they have a clever secret work-around, the incentive is pretty high to keep it a secret.
Exactly, a notable time military tech has been deployed in public in full would be the TOR network. That was done to provide enough noise on the network to hide its purpose/make difficult to track.
GPS has relatively few satellites... but if in doubt, I think Starlink with its absurdly large fleet of satellites can be used as an alternative. Maybe not at a precision level good enough for precision farming, but good enough to roughly guide troops to where they need to go.
Modern cruise missiles and stuff like Storm Shadow, Taurus etc. already rely on sensor fusion - GPS, inertial navigation, radar, optics and probably a ton more to always keep track of the position.
Assuming Starlink is a no-show for whatever reason, airliners and ships will have to revert back to stationary navigation aids aka your good old light towers and radio beacons.
I works assume if/when something really kicks off the starlink and starshield networks would be high priority targets.
(I’m mildly curious what their ground stations in Central Europe look like from this perspective).
That's the thing, to take down any of the megaconstellations you need thousands of antisat weapons and that's just one constellation. Not sure about the competitors but at least for Starlink their laser links should provide ample fallback for ground stations going out of service.
Just a few destroyed satellites would likely produce enough debris to take out everything else in orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
Maps, compass, and celestial navigation.
you can see from russia's response to losing starlink, that the answer is sending people out to die bringing a radio repeater to put into a tree
The US military has been funding plenty of projects related to what it calls Alt-PNT, or "alternative position, navigation, and timing" systems. I imagine other nations have invested in this as well.
Which systems are actually getting deployed, and in what pieces of equipment? No idea, I imagine that's super duper classified.
A few months back Vertisium did a decent run down on how Russians are testing GPS blocking satellites over Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
We may have enough satellite imagery to build visual place recognition system. Geoguesst but for tanks
There's a bunch of stuff for using terrain to figure out where you are [1], generally used for missiles and planes though, not sure if works well from a ground perspective.
On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
[2] https://www.gps.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/CGSICMeeting...
I’d assume one of the things you’d do in anticipation of a war of space-denial scale it bomb your own landscapes a bit for this reason.
That and cut undersea cables. Russia has been messing around with them for a while now.
They are actively training for shit, it sure looks like. Same with other sabotage acts all over Europe in the last couple of years.
Doesn't make any sense to have merchants dragging anchor in active war. These actions are meeting their goals, not serving as preparation.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-allies-foil-russia...
Yeah I know I'm talking about it being training for war time anchor dragging.
It's entirely clear that they cut cables and intend to cut more. It's not training, it's current aggression.
> It's not training, it's current aggression.
Or both.
Plausible deniability, it's what Russia has done long before the little freen men invaded Ukraine in 2014.
Its like directly addressing a compulsive liar. They know, that we know what they are doing but they will never admit it to us.
> why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
https://shop.osmaps.com/
we don't use the word WAR anymore. it's uncouth. it's CONFLICT now. they'll call this the era of the Great International Technology Conflict or Technology Hostilities.
We prefer the terms, spice diplomacy, proactive landscaping, aggressive cultural exchange or unplanned synergy meeting.
Didn’t Apple do something with triangulation of known WiFi hotspots in the days before the iPhone had GPS?
> Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark?
... Star navigation, INS, magnetic navigation...
But nothing like we have today.
And conventional recon folks on the ground with target-illuminating lasers..?
I mean if you have a phone you can just use the cell towers..
In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.
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I prefer domestic free-range artisan game theory.
It’s probably trying to disrupt the Russian GPS jamming satellites.
Veritasium did a video on it recently https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA
Vaguely related, apparently the Chinese have built a 20GW microwave weapon maybe to take out the Starlinks when they invade Taiwan. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3342443/chin...
I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.
Someone tell that to DDOS
nothing to see here; orbit on
UK is under russian attack. same with canada, germany, sweden, etc.
I think military should offer solution that is reasonable instead of finding problem and jamming everything.
does anyone know what exactly they are jamming? if a satellite spies on cellular and wifi activity, can you directionally jam it on that spectrum without causing collateral?
if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image?
can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?
Most satellite signals are high frequency, but low power (it's amazing how little power you need for a LoS radio signal). So generally they're easy to overwhelm, especially as GPS receiving antennas tend to be multi-directional. GPS transmits on several fixed frequencies and is relatively bitrate, too. The military signals are apparently more robust, but full details are more scarce.
the article mentions that satellites are being jammed as they move above Britain, what does GPS have to do with it?
GPS jamming is for recievers.
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
this should end well
or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.
U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.
The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere
I have just decommed an old datacentre that we're moving out of and this is basically what my 30-year-old travel-worn farm truck Range Rover looks like right now.
The hard part is getting an IO card with built-in hardware decelerator
Been there, done that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
If they're heavy enough, it doubles as a space fountain.
railgun microSD
but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
What's crazier is that there was a similar system to retrieve people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...
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Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
Neutrinos
Gravitational waves
illudium q-36 space modulator
I mean isn't space X testing satellites with sat to sat lasers?
In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.
More than testing. That is their primary on-orbit link method for Starlink satellites as of 2.5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...
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For the love of God, nobody wants to invade the United Kingdom. What is this for?
There’s been talk of Russia potentially attacking a NATO country within weeks. The way the media have coordinated in saying this leads me to believe this has come from intelligence and they’re trying to prepare us.
And that country would probably be Poland. Russian hardliners want to reunite the USSR of which Poland was a member state. Plus Poland is the greatest threat to Kaliningrad.
> reunite the USSR of which Poland was a member state
It wasn't. Poland was formally independent country, but practically under control of Moscow.
one step closer to star wars
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Its OK for the UK to be strong
If you take a look back at history, literally everyone would disagree. A strong England has done unimaginable damage to almost every other society on the planet.
Any strong empire, nation or person in power has.
With great power yadda yadda
How are those vaccines, antibiotics, and antiseptics working out for your nation? How many people would be dead in “every other society” without them?
Thank the Brits for that.
How’s the modern world in general working out for your nation? Would it be better off in pre-industrialised times? Do you enjoy being clothed and well fed; do you enjoy travel via bike, car, train, or plane and not needing to do back-breaking manual labour; do you like clean water and sanitation? Do you like to kick back and watch the TV after a long day? Or, listen to radio? Or maybe you prefer to make a long distance call to a friend? Assuming of course that you like turbines for power generation from coal, gas, nuclear, wind, or waves.
Yep, all of the above require the Brits again… [1]
Do you feel any pangs of irony when posting your dislike of Brits via the world-wide web, on a Turing machine based computer, powered by an ARM chip? ;)
Do you like sport? Music? Literature… ok I’ll stop now …
[1] https://youtu.be/DcZQS4LBugk
Really, what kind of damage? Granted their cuisine isn’t the best, but it’s hardly damaging.
England is not the UK.
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
Not really sure who we mean by "people". "People" will do business with the UK but that's not the same as "like" and "trust". If you mean regular people like from SEA that you have spoken to, yeah those people are generally nice and will act nice to your face. But many of them from those I have spoken to hold their grievances.
Not my experience at all in South Asia. Why would they act nice about the British to someone who is from their country (or a neighboring country)?
My experience is nationalists (and bigots, and especially ethnonationalists) do have greivances, and some westernised intellectuals have ideas about decolonisation etc., but most people do not
I don't think we'd rather be speaking French right now.
Yes, we would actually
Let me clarify.
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
Famously excluding Portugal.
I am beginning to enjoy how deranged HN’s hatred of the British is. I try to explain to fellow Brits how much Americans in particular now hate us and it doesn’t register with them.
And also, all lives matter.
But the meaning of a statement is not solely determined by the words in it.
If they were to do something positive with it then it would be nice.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.
Nobody is pretending to build or defend anything positive in space. Efforts like Starlink are blatantly and publicly a synthetic aperature radar constellation for military use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
And in that respect, it was a deviation from the propaganda of previous eras, which did in fact frame efforts as building and defending positive things in space.
The V2, Cold War and original space race set the tone for anyone that was watching. After the Reykjavík Summit, it was clear that America had started down a nigh-irreversible path to commercialize, militarize and whitewash the space industry.
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> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?
That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.
The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.
I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..
It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.
High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.
The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.
You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.
So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
Digital banking might be unavoidable but what did your app do that you couldn't have possibly done via your banks website?
You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.
Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.
It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.
It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.
This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.
All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.
But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.
Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.
This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.
And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.
Any power.
Even the tiniest bit.
And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.
You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.
It's OK. You can talk about things tangential to the main thread. It happens all the time on HN. And I'm not blaming you for anything.
My frustration is likely just showing, on this specific topic.
> Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
Is it usual for companies in the UK to just not pay their employees?
Which is why I think it is a stupid idea for a society to go cashless. They are just asking for a complete economic collapse if anything goes wrong with telecomms.
If anything goes wrong with telecoms, no-one will be able to take money out of a cash machine anyway
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?
We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.
Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems.
If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.
I didn't realise only people at war used cash
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At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.
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All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.
All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
> All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.
A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
Also, cool username =)
> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.
I imagine that if all banking apps go down as a result of war then bank websites, credit cards, basically any other digital financial thing will also be down.
Do people write cheques in the UK?
I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.
> when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now.
I'm guessing you'd walk into your bank and ask for one. You can probably order one from their app somewhere.
I’m older (not in UK, in EU) and cheques are something weird from old movies. Never seen one in real life and concept is really strange.
A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products.
So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.
At least I see them being used less often in stores. Also how on earth was he paying $200 for checks? You can get them for < $15. Here's a book with a fish on it, and a ledger, and a cover for under $25 https://www.checks.com/p/856/wonders-of-the-sea-checks
Man, don't get me started. However, business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. Also, why are you surprised that a bank has found a way to charge more fees?
Check processing I think, not writing them
No, the ~$200 fee was for the book ledger and blank checks. I have no idea what kind of monthly fees the bank was charging for the account. He was also getting raked over the coals on his merchant account to process credit cards because it was deemed a high risk business so most reputable places would not accept the business.
There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.
No
Or checks?
Certainly not spelt (or spelled) like that.
Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.
It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.
Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.
There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.
Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.
not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables
Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.
https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website
Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.
I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"
That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.
That’s beyond about 90% of the population.
It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.
In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.
Trolley tokens for me. I just keep a couple of quid in my car for supermarkets that need a coin for the trolley
I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.
Why does a banking app require GPS?
- The UK is an island nation
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).
I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.
Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"
Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links.
Also isn't GPS always wireless ?
> Why does a banking app require GPS?
The networks (including physical IP networking) that underpin banking require a very accurate source of time to function. This is frequently farmed out to GPS, rather than use local atomic clocks. This makes GPS (or rather GNSS) a single point of failure.
I'm surprised so few people on HN appear to be aware of this.
GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.
I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
Data collection and targeted advertising
To track you
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It doesn't. They're making shit up.
Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.
I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera?
They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cutting-edge-timing-techn...
The US has ROCkN https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/robust-optical-clock... but that seems to be just for military use
Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
Is there something on your banking app that you couldn't do by browsing to your banks website?
Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.
Tap to pay is also doable with a credit/debit card, but paying via phone is a legitimately useful feature although also not remotely critical or something that would be world ending if it were disrupted.
I work for a UK fintech that is bank-adjacent, the backend for the apps and the website are the same.
Not a strange thing at all. London sees itself as the competitor for the finance capital of the world. Why would you think it's strange?
If banking went down we'd have a hell of a time. It's not like I keep 6 months rent in cash on me.
How do you not think banking apps are useful?
The UK's largest export is banking (i.e. money laundering).
Hate to break this to you, but not all banking is money laundering. Not even all banking in the UK. Not even all banking exported from the UK.
You don't need another country to export your ordinary banking.
TIL my banking app goes via satellite internet /s
I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...
has UK declared war on someone already?
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?
Because that is one of the methods used to verify that everyone is complying with treaties, such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties.
Unfortunately it's a little too late for that, those treaties are effectively dead anyway. Not a good situation but that is our reality.
When I moved to the west coast, I was looking at the history and how cities like Burbank lived under a tarp cover that when viewed from the air looked nothing like the city/airport that they were covering. The fear of another Pearl Harbor like attack was that great. Plus, all of that cool shade while denying the enemy!!
It's a waste of money for no benefit to anyone but the military and its industrial parasites?
If only that were true. The world would be a much better place if we only had to deal with waste caused by the military-industrial complex. But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat. They need to be aggressively confronted and contained in every domain, including space.
> But the unfortunate reality is that a desperate and expansionist Russia represents a serious threat.
No, they do not. Attacking nato is suicidal behavior. Pretending like the war with ukraine is "expansionist" in intent instead of establishing a sphere of influence is just disingenuous. Was it stupid? Yes. Does it mean Russia is going to invade poland? Fuck no. Stop reading propaganda. You're smarter than your leaders. Act like it!