GPS Needs to Toughen Up, or Get Trampled Down
82 comments
·May 18, 2025SoftTalker
joe_guy
> Newspapers are publishing AI hallucinated news
Is there an example of a reputable (subjective, sure) news source having done this?
wahern
The likely example on most people's minds in the most recent news cycle would be the Chicago Sun-Times: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-rea...
The article it published was a nationally syndicated piece, though. Maybe they thought somebody else was vetting?
lowbatt
the latest thing I've seen: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-rea...
cogman10
At least in the case of stocks, even before LLMs entered the scene, stock articles were being written by machines rather than journalists. [1]
I'd bet money this isn't the only place that has machine generated content. Proving exactly what is and isn't that would be a bit tricky.
[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/robo-journalism-good-n...
6510
Almost all index pages are zero effort machine generated pages. I'm not entirely sure about it being an effect over time but Newspapers use to have tiny articles summarizing page 12 which later(?) became "more on page 12".
For a while (until I got to lazy) I maintained a front page article that talked about everything going on in the blog linking to tag pages that should have (but didn't) enjoy the same love. It was challenging to have a single sentence describe a group of articles and string those sentences into an article that sufficiently hides the truth that the blog randomly rambled all over the place. There was a lack of urgency for new articles to appear (except from the rss feed) in stead the front page article revealed missing posts. You could compare it to a wiki (while html offers the same utility) but the blog had 3 clear levels and blog like articles that rarely got updated.
It had me spend some thoughts on the absurdity of putting a log file on the front page or attempting to massage that automation into something nice? Everyone is doing it so it must be right.
vkou
It seems perfectly appropriate for machines to write 'Stock X goes down as Y happens' articles.
They have the same explanatory power as similar drivel written by humans, and you walk away feeling similarly uninformed.
jaoane
You probably read too many news articles that were written to put you in a state of despair about the present and the future. Mass media and social media want you to feel miserable; don't let them.
bluGill
That has always been the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism was a problem in the 1890s.
HideousKojima
And even earlier. Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1807:
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
lifestyleguru
The reason is that everything is nearshored and outsourced, where starting from age 35 they stop responding to your CV. Then everyone are hired on some form of "1 person company" B2B basis where software professional has no power to push back.
mistrial9
catastrophic thinking is a mental state.. what you say is true but not new to many.. constructive engagement is called for in this age of precision and network
HideousKojima
>Newspapers are publishing AI hallucinated news and don't understand why their editors aren't catching it.
That's because journalists only have 2 modes of operation:
1) Destroy this person/institution/thing (whether rightly or wrongly)
2) Someone please write my copy for me
It's the same reason so many outlets are willing to uncritically republish corporate press releases with little to no editing.
cogman10
> It's the same reason so many outlets are willing to uncritically republish corporate press releases with little to no editing.
I'd add a big reason outlet do that is because nobody gets sued for publishing a press release. Good journalism attracts lawsuits like nothing else (bad journalism can as well, but mostly just if you are lying).
This has additionally led to newspapers using the most passive voice possible. Instead of "Foo company dumps 10 tons of toxic waste into the public water" they'll headline it as "A mishap at a local business has resulted in some chemical spillage".
neilv
> Those concerns intensified this week with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase disclosing that as many as 97,000 customers have had their personal information stolen, including addresses and balance snapshots.
Since that was The Wall Street Journal, I don't know that the reason is fear of lawsuits. It could just be extreme business-friendliness, or Rupert Murdoch seeping in.
(2 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44025527
mock-possum
I mean there’s also 3) doggedly run down ever thread of information connected to the subject of their interest until they’re able to compose a piece that exhaustively describes the entire thing and leads the audience to the same conclusion and knowledge that they’ve worked so hard to accumulate.
lupusreal
Books are much better for that than newspapers. Usually journalists who do that sort of thing end up turning it into a book, because that fits the scope of their work better.
HideousKojima
That's just 1)
JohnMakin
but what if we can get that down to 5 seconds?
gibibit
"A single 1-kW jammer can take down GPS for a 300-nm radius.[...] A CRPA can shrink the effective radius of the 1-kW jammer to 3 nm. The jammer’s area of effectiveness is slashed from 280,000 m² to 28 m²."
An example of the kind of unit confusion that could crash a Mars orbiter?
I thought we were talking about nanometers and square meters here for a second. But this only makes sense if "m²" means square miles and "nm" means nautical miles. How about at least using "mi" for miles to reduce confusion?
lbourdages
Well, nautical miles are the standard unit in the context of aviation, so I don't think it's all that bad. "mi" refers to a different unit.
gibibit
True, "nm" initially seemed to be nautical miles, but then this square meters thing appeared. The point is that "m" should be meters, but "mi" would be a more customary abbreviation for miles in the U.S.
lupusreal
They shouldn't have switched from nautical miles to miles. The area should have been expressed in square nautical miles.
out_of_protocol
mile and nautical mile are not the same so it still doesn't make any sense
null
SAI_Peregrinus
Agreed, though there's a space between the number & the unit which generally indicates non-SI units (SI should never have a space). The switch from nautical to statute miles is still really weird though.
fenced_load
Are you sure? NIST says there should be a space:
> There is a space between the numerical value and unit symbol, even when the value is used in an adjectival sense, except in the case of superscript units for plane angle.
Propelloni
> SI should never have a space
You are mistaken. SI units and their numbers always have a space. For reference [1], [2].
[1] https://www.npl.co.uk/si-units cf. Numerical Notation
[2] https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html cf. #15
EDIT: Scooped ;)
ak1ng
That's nonsense. There is a space between the number and the unit in SI.
dpifke
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
plandis
For anyone as confused as I was, this article uses nm to mean nautical miles not nanometers.
geerlingguy
Oof, especially regarding GPS, nm (nanometer) and ns (nanosecond) are frequently used units of measurement. Nautical miles seems like it'd be more of a seafaring term?
alnwlsn
It's good for anything that goes a good distance over the (spherical) earth's surface. 1 nautical mile is just 1/60th of a degree around.
ryandrake
Slight technical nit-pick: 1 nautical mile is 1/60th of a degree of latitude only, since the distance represented by angular longitudes varies depending on where you are on earth.
mananaysiempre
With single-digit precision like the article (appropriately) uses: 4×10⁴ km ≈ Earth’s circumference.
rlpb
Aeronautical navigation also uses nautical miles. And as the article says: "A quarter century ago, the primary use for GPS was aviation and marine navigation".
BenjiWiebe
I wish I had your GPS receiver if you associate nanometers with GPS. ;-)
jajko
Its an US article, dont expect much. Anything but metric system is the mantra and people's egos won't allow any change
dghlsakjg
Maybe don't bag on an entire country without examining your own prejudices.
Nautical miles are used in this article by an aviation magazine presumably because they are the global standard for marine and aeronautical navigation, and have been since well before the metric system was a global standard. It is also worth noting that the US does not use nautical miles as a standard, they use statute miles.
FYI, nautical miles are a useful standard for global navigation since they are referenced to the size of the earth itself.
geerlingguy
GPS jamming is certainly a fun problem to deal with... I've been getting into GPS for timing data, and especially if you're building a global network or coordinated system using GPS as the time source, you have to account for it if you care at all about time stability.
Apparently (I haven't had this happen personally, yet) many truckers install GPS jamming cigarette lighter accessories in their trucks when they want to mask their location from trucking companies that track them everywhere. That can wreak havoc on GPS receivers at facilities, especially if you have, say, a logistics building right next to a datacenter.
myself248
I live on a main road and I've seen my JAMIND pop positive a number of times.
Now that I'm building a CCTV setup, I should see if I can connect the two and save images of the vehicles passing by when it happens.
lenerdenator
Alternatively, we could start providing real geopolitical consequences for the Russians doing the trampling.
null
groby_b
"The Russians" is a copout, though, if you can buy a GPS jammer for 50 bucks. It's commonly used e.g. by truckers who'd prefer their corporate liege lord don't track them every second they exist.
You'll have to make GPS more secure with or without geopolitical consequences for Russia, so why don't we focus on the actual topic of the article.
lenerdenator
Truckers have been doing that for a while. It's become a serious threat to the safety of those using GPS only for the last few years when the Russians started doing it for entire regions.
There will always be holes in technology that exist to be exploited for nefarious purposes. The best way to deal with it is to present strong consequences for those who would exploit them.
testing22321
As always, Zoidberg says “why not both?”
upofadown
>One of the deadliest GPS L1 civil signal interference events occurred on Dec. 25. On that date, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190, was lured off course while enroute from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia.
I am not seeing anything about that in the Wikipedia article:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...
It sounds like the GPS was jammed, not spoofed. The aircraft had already shot some missed approaches at the destination airport before the event that caused the loss of the aircraft.
psunavy03
Not surprising that a layperson (i.e. a reporter or Wikipedia editor) would not understand the difference between jamming and spoofing.
lukan
"GPS is falling behind Galileo and Beidou as the preeminent GNSS"
I remember, that Galileo went offline a few years ago for some days - and the joke was, no one noticed. So possible that today there are more regular users and possible that there are some advanced features of Galileo like the mentioned
"Galileo’s open service (civil-access) E1 signal incorporates public/private key encryption to digitally sign and authentify data"
But I think GPS falling behind Galileo would imply a bit more Galileo users, compared to GPS. Which would surprise me.
beastcatdog
They introduced a few useful features that are unique and decided to offer them for free.
Like HAS (30cm precision after some integration time. Without additional correction data) and cryptographic verification of the transmitted GNSS data.
bluGill
A number of "GPS" receives also received Galileo and Beidou. They then combine all the data to figure out the correct position. Likely the GPS chip in your phone will do more than one system. Any one system alone can provide a position (sort of - Japan has a system that only covers the area around Japan) so the loss of one isn't a problem.
londons_explore
> Galileo’s open service (civil-access) E1 signal incorporates public/private key encryption to digitally sign and authentify data
Which is fairly useless. The spoofed data can be legit data just selectively delayed by a couple of milliseconds and the receiver has no way to know.
rlpb
Is that actually true here? Satellite constellations move in complicated ways, so a receiver should be able to detect "impossible" configurations if the stream from only one satellite is delayed. If they are all delayed, then wouldn't that also cause the receiver's position to fail to resolve?
londons_explore
An attacker can receive all streams, delay the data from each satellite a variable amount, then retransmit them all again to appear to be in a different location.
Then also delay signals from other gnss providers to match.
I have witnessed this done in Iraq, so someone has already built the capability.
SteveNuts
Is that some sort of a replay attack? If so why isn't the timestamp embedded in the encrypted payload
londons_explore
It is.
It relies on the fact the clients clock will have a few milliseconds of error so they'll be unable to detect it.
If the client had an atomic clock, this attack wouldn't be possible.
AcerbicZero
It does seem that if next-gen GPS tech isn't already being tested/deployed then we've managed to already begin falling behind. GPS III just isn't anywhere near as useful in a non-permissive environment
Also, I read something on ITAR being relaxed specifically for CRPAs, this year, so maybe some of this is improving? ->
https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/20/first-fix-freeing-crpas-gps-wo...
Not directly related, but I also think its impressive that a major airliner could take a SAM hit, from what was likely a Pantsir-S1 (20KG of HE moving at Mach 2 is not something airlines usually design for) and still land with half the souls surviving. While not great, that is certainly far better than I expected and shows some excellent airmanship.
redserk
We’ve been falling behind. I wish this was taken more seriously.
> […] launch an initiative to regain U.S. PNT leadership and ensure resilient, reliable PNT for critical infrastructure and the larger economy.
> GPS’s capabilities are now substantially inferior to those of China’s BeiDou. https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/recommendations/2023...
beastcatdog
> Goward says Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory suspects that China’s Beidou can mimic and spoof both GPS and Galileo signals.
Galileo has optional cryptographic signatures of its navigational data. They embed the data into their broadcast. Can be used for free.
quadhome
Galileo’s open service (civil-access) E1 signal incorporates public/private key encryption to digitally sign and authentify data. False Galileo signals from malicious forces are easily detected and rejected by GNSS receivers because they lack encryption watermarks. The feature, called Open Service-Navigation Message Authentication (OS-NMA), has been fully operational since August 2023.
SAI_Peregrinus
It's still vulnerable to replay attacks, even with signed navigation data.
causality0
Wouldn't that require them to match the timestamp somehow?
dghlsakjg
The receiver derives the time from the signal itself.
ho_schi
I did a Ctrl+F and it doesn't mention once Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)[1]?
As long as an external signal for navigation is used, the problems of external signals will remain. INS doesn't suffer from this issue and is already used in planes, ships, cars and phones for years. Actually I miss INS in cycling computers, it could fix so many issues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system
malwrar
INS accumulates error over time, all of such systems require absolute position fixes (often via GPS) at regular intervals to remain accurate.
user1747844067
Here is an example of how GPS jamming/spoofing affects Strava tracks in Russia. https://www.strava.com/activities/14539835271
conradev
There is also Xona (https://spacenews.com/u-s-air-force-to-explore-xona-spaces-c...), a privately funded LEO constellation for PNT
It feels like we are on the tipping point of a total technology collapse. Newspapers are publishing AI hallucinated news and don't understand why their editors aren't catching it. GPS and mobile communications are subject to jamming/spoofing. Public utilities are subject to hacking. Air traffic control is teetering on the edge of a cliff. And our best technical minds are working on keeping teenagers addicted to 15 second dopamine hits.