Slashdot Mirror
Europe Building Their Own GPS
An anonymous reader writes "BBC News is reporting that Europe is planning to build their own satellite-navigation network that will be backward and forward compatible. There's going to be 5 levels ranging from free (1m accuracy) to commercial (1cm accuracy)! Provision is also being made for a search and rescue mode where a signal can be sent to confirm that help is on the way. The system will supposedly even work with existing US network after upgrades to the network."
(To stop all US comments about why we Europeans don't need this)
GPS is a military-run programme; its signals can be degraded or switched off. Yes, the service is free, but its continuity and quality come with no guarantees
Galileo will be a civil system. It will be run by a private consortium and will offer guaranteed levels of service
(from the article)
it's in my head
After many years of trying to convince europe its unnecessary, the US still reserves the right to shoot the satellites down if it wants http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vie wArticle&code=20041026&articleId=557
Reading the frelling article, I don't see what keeps anyone from hacking and getting the 'commercial-grade' service. What sort of blocks are there? Will this be like DirecTV which becomes very easily decodeable after a few years and millions of deployments, or will this be like some of the military satellite signals whose keys change every day?
We've known about this for at least a year...
do people not remember the bush administration threatening to use anti-satellite weapons unless europe gave the US the power to interfere with it, jam the satellites and/or switch them off or to a lower resolution mode for certain areas of the globe which they were fighting in?
Not only is this a dupe, but I think it is one several times over and also several years old. BTW, if the EU wants to spend billions on a duplicate navigation system, all for the good. I will have a more accurate and more redundant nav system paid for by SOMEONE ELSE for once. Thanks!
I can see why governments would like the idea of more accurate GPS; vechicle navigation.
Knowing a location to plus-or-minus-10-meters might be fine for a guided missile, but for navigation it's pretty lousy; it couldn't tell which side of the road you were on, let alone whether you were in the right lane. With centimeter-level accuracy, though, you could practically make a car drive itself.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Doesn't anyone else see why this would be useful to the Police when they're passively monitoring EVERY VEHICLE?
1 59244&tid=158&tid=219 if you don't remember!!
See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/15/2
I wonder if its worth building a GPS Spoofer like the one on http://gps.hackaday.com/entry/1234000843061178/
DugUK
Ofcourse, now the US has the control to disallow access in a warlike state with any country depending on the GPS tech for warfare or anything really. Which gives them ultimate control.
The US always has been nervous with anyone being able to dominate them or to get from under their control, even if such a move of the EU wouldn't be directly motivated by military purposes (the EU has been going away from an offensive army a long time ago and formed towards defensive and humanistic purposes), but maybe more by independance from US's powers. It's a pure dominating position the US strives to embody it seems. If it'd be looked like that (a military move) the US really should start to do some self-reflecting.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
There has been a lot of comment about how to pull that off with the limitations of the current GPS.
This new system will in my opinion be designed to have features to support this.
Should haves:
Double blind identification. Your receiver in your car will not be personally identifiable.
Works better in cities with tall buildings
Better accuracy
European control.
Nice to haves:
Downloadable content:
- Congestion alerts
- Emergency Warnings a la radio interupt
A government certified connection signal that must be displayed when they ARE tracking you.
Triangulation compensation with terrestrial mobile masts. If we're gonna have big brother, why not make it accurate?
My 2p.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
They did not get a "kill switch". What did happen was that the operating frequency was moved further apart from a common US military band so that the US could jam the signal (locally) without inadvertantly jamming their own military communications.
I applaud them. They could have went to the United Nations and demanded that the U.S. give them control over the US's GPS system. Instead they are building their own. Good for them.
There was no "kill switch" as you describe. The original design of Galileo had it operating in the exact same frequency range as GPS. This was an intentional (and arguably malicious) design decision that would have prevented the US from jamming Galileo without simultaneously jamming GPS. What was negotiated was for the European system's frequency to be moved slightly, such that the US or Europe could jam each others signals without interfering with their own.
As long as your starting assumption is that at some point a country might deem it necessary to degrade (note necessarily deny) full position fixing accruacy to a given region or theater of operations, this is actually a "play fair" agreement.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Talk about the ultimate terror weapon "country X, give up ________ or our GPS guided weapon will hit elementary school Y", etc., etc. Somehow I don't think that the free world --or even the non-free countries of the world, for that matter -- has much worry that the US military is going to ever do or be allowed to do something like that, do you?
;-)
US: "Iraq, give up your WMD or our GPS guided weapons will hit everything".
Iraq: "Dude, We don't have any! You've had people here looking for 10 years! We'd gladly turn them over if we had them but we don't. PLEASE DON'T BOMB US!!!!
US: "Whatever! You have till the count of three! one..two..BAMMMMM!
Nope, your right nothing to worry about. The US would NEVER do anything like that
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
OK let me start by saying that the two parents are being a bit absolutist and silly. YES, an EU-controlled GPS rival is a strategic threat to the US. This doesn't mean that we need to jam it or destroy it. French nuclear weapons are a strategic threat as well, but we don't propose to destroy them, either. We're the strongest power, but not the only power, and the EU (quite rightly) is working to increase their power relative to ours.
Similarly, this isn't some ham-handed reaction to the current administration. European attempts to counter and triangulate against American power date back to, well, the beginnings of American power. Even during the Cold War, European interests occassionally clashed with American interests. France's withdrawal from the NATO command structure in 1966, the Suez crisis, German attempts at appeasement vs the USSR, the "European Approach" to terrorism pre-9/11, conflicts over flyover rights during the Libyan attack, approaches to mid-east peace.... any of these sound familiar? In the 80's, American and Italian soldiers had an armed standoff on a NATO base. We stuck together and papered over our differences because of a larger enemy, but things haven't always been roses.
Post-Cold War, things have changed a bit. In the past, a larger common enemy (the USSR) kept the US and EU mostly at common purposes. Lacking that, ties began to fray. The Clinton Administration didn't initiate any major new foreign policy changes other than good relations for their own sake (for which the EU nations extracted diplomatic and trade concessions). Even then, however, a long-term goal of the franco-german alliance was to assemble a counterbalance to the US.
What's developing isn't emnity; it's just the kind of wary maneuvering that friendly nations normally practice. So of course the EU is rolling their own GPS system. And of course we'll invent countermeasures. This isn't because we hate them, or they hate us, or either of us expects to ever fight. This is the normal hedging of bets and accretion of power that nations practice. The structural issues of power are far more important than disputes of the moment.
"We could unleash our nuclear arsenal and flatten Europe."
Well, your post (and others) actually makes it very clear that americans are still scary people and that we should build our own positioning system.
Will code a sig generator for food
It's really amazing how all this cold war rhetorics is dug up again (or has it never died?). Only Russia is no big threat atm so now it's China. I mean, what is it, is it paranoia or is it that US-Politics needs that big evil enemy to distract their people from the problems at home? It's a never ending story, China, Terrorists, evil Communists ... did anything change since McCarthy or do we need to relive all that crap because of 9/11?
Sure, 9/11 was a tragic event, but even more tragic is what was done to the american ideals of freedom and democracy in the name of the "war on terror".
Now what has all this to do with Galileo vs. GPS you may ask. Well, GPS is under US-military control. ATM they're acting like they could throw a fit of paranoia anytime and switch off all civil GPS functionality. Sory, but that's the picture the US government is sending out into the world: self centered control freaks with tunnelvision that might jump anytime for reasons only they know.
Now you wouldn't trust someone like that with a system your life depends on, but that's exactly what we need: GPS- (or Galileo-) guided navigation systems for planes and ships, fully automated systems relying on accurate GPS-coordinates for positioning, you name it. If it isn't lives depending on these systems it's at least big money.
And no, noone trusts the US to provide a reliable GPS service. They might switch off the system without prior warning because of some perceived terrorist threat (thereby doing more damage worldwide than any terrorist could), they might do it to damage european economy or threaten to do it in some kind of blackmail-scheme, who knows.
And that's why we need Galileo.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
This is really old news and extremely complex. The galileo/GPS compatibility was negotiated between the EU and the US State Department over a very long period. The EU deliberately picked an incompatible code to force concessions from the US before the EU consented and went with the better frequency.
This is a great example of technology driven politics.
--Keith
really want to give another foreign and presumably malignant military power the ability to bomb down to one meter accuracy?
May be we should also shutdown internet, spy phone talks, and stop scientific research - since that research can be used for evil purposes.
Trust?
Thinking forward, what happens when the US decides to do to their GPS what they're trying to do to the Internet, i.e. dictate all possible uses and laws, from music downloading to what you're allowed to say on Wikipedia? What if the US disapproves of a war that the EU takes part in (in the same way that some EU nations disapproved of the Iraq war)? Would the US demand that the war stop or else they'd turn off their GPS system?
Were the situation reversed, would the US pay the EU for such a contract? Not a chance in hell.
Secondly, if you're going to use GPS for it's primary purpose (military), you want redundancy, not a single point of failure for all allied nations. If you'd be willing to pay another country for it, you'd be better off putting that money into another identical system.
And yet again, why should EU companies that require GPS to perform their business be paying a GPS tax to America when they could be paying that tax to the EU instead?
But how much are we willing to pay for said alternative system? I believe the article said that it was going to cost $3-4bn. That's a lot of money. For my money, I would rather accept that when the US gets all flustered about a possible terrorist attack (or G-d forbid, another happens), my GPS gets bad accuracy or is turned off for a little while.
First, 3-4 billion is chump change when it comes to government spending, and particularly so when it comes to international consortia spending. The economic value far outweighs the cost, by orders of magnitude.
Second, while you may find it merely inconvinient to have your GPS stop working, try telling that to a pilot (or 300 passengers) on a plane that is landing on a GPS precisions approch with weather at minimums and terrain all around, when the government decides to get into a tizzy and "disable" their approach. WAAS is intended to counteract that, but the point remains: they are having to deploy another multi-billion dollar system to offset the deliberate design issues and unreliability of the first multi-billion dollar system.
The Europeans are spending the money once, and getting a better, more reliable system they, instead of we, control. It makes all the sense in the world, and will probably allow their planes to land in near zero-zero conditions (unlike GPS+WAAS), and certainly with more precision than GPS (1 cm accuracy!).
Finally, fuck the US if we don't like it. We have no business, and no right, to dictate to the rest of the world what technology they may, or may not, deploy. As for our "reserving the right" to shoot down their satelites, I'm sure they (and the Russians, and the Chinese) reserve the "right" to nuke us back into the stoneage if they feel sufficiently threatened. That so-called "right" (talk about orwellian doublespeak!) to destroy something or someone suddenly becomes a lot less appealing when one is on the receiving end, doesn't it?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
BTW, thought I'd pick apart your post (even though it is irrelevant to my point about need to worry about US use of GPS).
kept up a pretense of having WMD for over ten years
If by "kept up pretense of having WMD" you mean he repeatedly stated he had gotten rid of all the WMD the US gave him and Iraq no longer has any WMD then you may have a point.
and it was Hussein's unwillingness to submit to the UN resolutions to open up his former WMD plants, etc. for inspection that triggered the invasion.
The best rebuttal to this has to be the UN Quarterly report on weapon inspections just before the invasion. Have a read. Not saying Saddam never had some fun screwing with the inspectors, but if the threat of invasion was enough to get him to stop and all this was going forward so well, why invade?
Had the prior Iraqi regime complied without even the months long final warning process (let alone the ten plus years prior), no bombs, tanks, or other assorted objects that go boom would have ever been needed.
According to your own president, this isn't true. Even though they now know there was no WMD, the invasion was still needed because some day Saddam might have decided to maybe make more WMD.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
When a nuclear-armed nutcase talks of turning his neighbors's countries into a "sea of fire", and then starts showing off the weapons capable of doing so, then starts developing ICBMs, I think we should take notice.
You mean when people like this say things like this?
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
I'm really not sure where to start...
To begin with, the Galileo system is reputed to have better accuracy. Positional accuracy is, after all, the point of the whole system. So why wouldn't they do it. Furthermore, your reaction to them merely setting up a separate system not controlled by your own government seems to me to be good evidence that were the shoe on the other foot, you'd likely be extolling the virtues of a system not controlled by a foreign country with even more fervor.
As for unleashing our nuclear arsenal, I know you must be kidding. Mutually assured destruction, despite my admitted characterization of it as lunacy during the Cold War, works. France, Germany, England, Russia, etc. have nukes too my friend. All of that is, of course, an argument beyond the simple absurdity of your statement.
As for invading Europe, we can't even control a country with less land area than Texas. What makes you think we could successfully invade Europe and prevail?
And how would the U.S. shut down the internet? Cripple, sure. But I don't imagine there's a big red button in the White House that simply shuts down the internet. We may have developed the core of the internet; but I think that saying we control it is a bit ridiculous.
Finally, you can shake your finger and say "shame on you" all you like. We just did invade a country without provocation or necessity. I'm all for our presence in Afghanistan; but Iraq is a lark. It was the personal agenda of the President, misrepresented and sold to the larger public as a defense of our national security and freedom in general.
Really, take a pill. The Europeans are launching a satellite positioning network. It doesn't rate talk of nuclear war and ground invasions.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
The US vs Europe debate fails to notice that there exists an
operational alternative to the US GPS system. Russia has had a
working system for years. There are shipping chipsets that do both
GPS and GLONASS.
http://www.glonass-center.ru/
Europe should just slip the Russians a few Euro to keep it running
and get a contractual agreement on levels of service.
Oh man, I barely know where to start. How about here:
We could unleash our nuclear arsenal and flatten Europe.
Indeed you could. And 1 minute after your missiles left the grund. France, England and probably Russia would retaliate, flattening the USA with their nuclear arsenals.
We could withdraw all our trade and let Europe flounder on its own
I suppose you could but are you aware of the trade balance between the US and Europe? I suggest you look it up before embargoing.
We could even invade and take control of Europe
Oh dear. Considering that your entire army cant control two 3rd world countries with a total population of around 50 million, where the governments are your puppets, I seriously doubt you could "invade and control" 400+ million people with high tech weapons, well organized armies, and fully developed infrastructure.
While we could shut the internet off at any time
Indeed you could shut down your root servers. And the internet would probably stop working outside of national nets for all of 30 minutes before everone had repointed their DNS.