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College Students Hijack $80 Million Yacht With GPS Signal Spoofing
colinneagle writes "A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin built and successfully tested a custom GPS spoofing device to remotely redirect an $80 million yacht onto a different route. The project was completed with the permission of the yacht's owners in the Mediterranean Sea this past June. Because the yacht's crew relies entirely on GPS signal for direction, the students were able to lead the yacht onto a different course without the knowledge of anyone on-board. The GPS spoofing device essentially over-powered all other GPS signals using until the spoofed signal was the only one that the yacht followed. The team then used the GPS spoofing device to convince the ship's crew to redirect onto a different route voluntarily. By changing the signal on the spoofing device, the students led the crew to believe that the ship was drifting off-course to the left. In response, the crew steered the ship to the right, thinking that it would get the ship back on course, when it actually brought the ship off the course entirely."
Not really, you can get quite far by learning to multiply by 2 and 10, divide by 2, and add and subtract. Learning the squares is quite useful, too. Not quite as quick as rote memorisation, but not everyone's suited to being a conformist drone. I got the highest grade going in my mathematics exams right up until college with such basic techniques.
I don't know about you, but I don't get many people stopping me on the street to demand I perform simple multiplication. Even if I did, I'd tell them to JFGI.
Being a computer scientist was probably half the problem - when you've been programming from age 5, it becomes abundantly clear that the how and why of mathematics are important, and not the mere implementation detail of arithmetic.