Slashdot Mirror
GPS Jamming for $50
Anonymous writes "One of the newest hacker tools out there is a homemade GPS jammer. According to this article in Computerworld, such jammers can be built with $50 worth of electrical parts. Phrack has published a how-to aimed at inexpensive GPS-based navigation and "hidden tracking devices.""
In all seriousness, how much you want to bet the military thought about this long ago and has ways around it (different frequencies, etc.)
I suppose this device would be useful when hiring out from any US Car rental company, I don't know exactly which ones use the tracking though. Let's see how the "speeding" charges will be applied ;-)
Although I wonder how big the unit would have to be to be effective enough.. i.e. if it is as big as those old mobile phones (before the brick sized ones, more like a briefcase) then I doubt the average traveller would be bothered, but I suppose anyone who has come across any GPS tracking fines then they might like this quite a bit.
Just my $0.02
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Jammers can be defeated or made substantially less useful using beamforming. I would be stunned to find out that military users are not doing so.
If a beamforming receiver gets its position and orientation (yaw, pitch, roll), at any point in time, it can steer the sensitivity vectors of its antenna pattern to minimize the effect of jammers from then on. More sophisticated systems will probably also steer nulls right at the jammers.
I really don't understand what the fuss is all about. The military has surely had this technology for ages, along with every thinkable agency and "enemy". It's just a normal radio frequency jammer, one in the long line of other technical warfare devices, like radio jammers and EMP guns to wipe out magnetical data or stop a car. It doesn't take an electrical engineer to invent one (well, actually, it does :).
All organizations have this technology, but it's only when it falls in the hand of the "stupid" (uncontrolled/uncontrollable) individual that these organizations start making noise.
Devices like this are sure to be major headaches for the GPS dependent US Military in the future...I wonder how they would get around them?
Based on what I've heard, the military has ways of getting around that problem. I don't think it's a major threat to their ability to operate. What it does do is make it difficult for rental car companies to keep track of where you are and how fast you've gone. I will also block most commercial use of GPS technology for invasive purposes.
To address your suggestion of banning jamming technology, it would be much more effective to ban the abuse of GPS information on the part of those who wish to violate our privacy. Then people would feel no need to build devices that could throw airplanes off course.