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$30 GPS Jammer Can Wreak Havok
An anonymous reader writes "A simple $30 GPS jammer made in China can ruin your day. It doesn't just affect your car's navigation — ATM machines, cell phone towers, plane, boat, train navigation systems all depend upon GPS signals that are easily blocked. These devices fail badly — with no redundancy. These jammers can be used to defeat vehicle tracking products — but end up causing a moving cloud of chaos. The next wave of anti-GPS devices include GPS spoofers to trick or confuse nearby devices."
they can be used to trick china and great britain to the brink of war by fooling the royal navy into invading chinese waters. then a stealth boat can make the other side think someone is shooting missiles at them. all of course, so rupert murdoch, i mean, uh, elliot carver, can sell... newspapers!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why would you want one other than to just be an asshole?
Finland has had plans to introduce a road toll system based on GPS. If that happens, spoofing/jamming GPS will save you a lot of money. As a side-effect of everyone using blocking devices, nobody will be able to navigate anymore :)
But the idea of abandoning radar as if GPS were a time-tested system is a little scary.
It is time tested. It works very well. It's just more vulnerable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
aka the carjacker's toolkit
What? Oh don't give me that indignant look. Post examples of perfectly non-questionable uses for these things instead. ('research' is a given and entirely too vague)
Why would people talk so loudly into their phones on public transport, etc, other than just to be an asshole? It works both ways.
which is totally what she said
To exacerbate your innate frustration with only being able to hear one side of the conversation. That's right - the fault is yours for listening in the first place. :)
Long signatures suck.
or just run your jammer at 100 watts
The FCC will appreciate that I'm sure.
Considering this discussion was about jamming GPS on an incoming missile. I think I'll cope with whatever fine the FCC decides to charge.
Shouldn't go to the theater while on call.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
With $30 jammers, who do you think will win that arms race?
Just because this is powered by electricity doesn't make it news for nerds.
No, but it being a high-tech subject with implications for a massive amount of existing and emerging technologies does.
I don't see how GPS jammer can be positively useful
Rental Car companies often track your usage and bill you extra if you leave the state(s) you said you were going to use the rental car in. If you're being tracked by the <insert name of law enforcement agency here> you can render their tracking devices useless. I'm sure there are other opportunities to take advantage of the "stealth mode" offered by such a device.
What competent engineer would design an important system that depends on GPS, with no backup? The satellite signals are very faint, and can be disrupted for seconds or hours by lots of different causes, including entirely natural causes like solar flares.
The competent engineer with the incompetent boss.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!