Russian GLONASS Down For 12 Hours

An anonymous reader writes "In an unprecedented total disruption of a fully operational GNSS constellation, all satellites in the Russian GLONASS broadcast corrupt information for 11 hours, from just past midnight until noon Russian time (UTC+4), on April 2 (or 5 p.m. on April 1 to 4 a.m. April 2, U.S. Eastern time). This rendered the system completely unusable to all worldwide GLONASS receivers."

Comments

Ukrainian hackers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sayin'.

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely NSA or CIA.

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[CeasedCaring]

Actually, it was last weeks NCIS:LA "Zero Days", which aired 3/25/14, and involved the NCIS techies corrupting GLONASS to divert a missile aimed at San Francisco. See TVRage

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[beelsebob]

Unlikely... More likely it's them checking their (not announced) scrambling works, ready for an invasion.

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[rvw]

Just sayin'.

Or Russian Wodka. It would give them a good excuse to take over Ukraine by accident - sorry wrong turn!

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[Lorens]

Or Russian Wodka. It would give them a good excuse to take over Ukraine by accident - sorry wrong turn!

They've already used that excuse, without the vodka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_S-363

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[Jizzbug]

This was us (the U.S.) getting back at Russia for helping Iran capture that CIA drone by spoofing m-code GPS with GLONASS. Now we have demonstrated capability to disrupt GLONASS globally.

When GLONASS went live just before the drone was downed, we were still in the process of launching new satellites to regain GPS superiority (Russia had GPS superiority for a short time there).

See, e.g., http://cryptome.org/0005/iran-rsa-cipher.htm.

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never resort to hackers as an explanation for a problem that was more likely caused by a burned out tube.

Re:Ukrainian hackers?

[Barryke]

From Stargate SG1:
"Plausible deniability. In the event of a future breach of security, we'll be able to point to this television program. That is, if it stays on the air." - Hammond

Well they sure solved that last part... fast turnaround times. I wonder who had the idea first.. (i hope the engineers that developed it)

sanctions?

[turkeydance]

maybe.

How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[ZorinLynx]

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

I've noticed much increased performance since I upgraded to a phone that uses both systems, especially in cities with a lot of tall buildings like NYC and Chicago.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Anonymous Coward]

>tall buildings
more likely you get are getting a fix from nearby cell towers + wifi

GPS/GLONASS doesn't work without direct line of sight to the satellites.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Guppy]

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

To promote their system, Russia decided to make new smartphones without GLONASS support illegal in their country -- so major manufacturers added that capability to all their phones (since there is almost no additional cost to each unit, once the capability is designed into the chipset). Not sure about CDMA chipset, since there is no major CDMA networking in Russia.

Would be nice if we got Galileo GNSS and Beidou support too, but I'm not expecting it to happen unless they pull a similar stunt with their markets (well, China might).

   

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Near glass buildings you can get some extra erroneous readings ;)

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[ackthpt]

I found they gave the impression things were going better with my GPSr, I synched with satellites quickly, but once in a while I'd have wild, like 1000+ foot inaccuracy. The issue would resolve after a day or so. The last time it happened I disabled GLONASS and haven't used it since. Having it does create a larger constellation to use, but only so long as they all work from the same page -- where they think they are.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[NatasRevol]

Yes, off by dozens of feet compared to the 11,000 miles the signal traveled.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Anonymous Coward]

To promote their system, Russia decided to make new smartphones without GLONASS support illegal in their country -- so major manufacturers added that capability to all their phones (since there is almost no additional cost to each unit, once the capability is designed into the chipset). Not sure about CDMA chipset, since there is no major CDMA networking in Russia.

Would be nice if we got Galileo GNSS and Beidou support too, but I'm not expecting it to happen unless they pull a similar stunt with their markets (well, China might).

Why do you call it a stunt? I think requiring some kind of global navigation capability is fairly common and quite reasonable (think emergency services). Why not require, at a minimum, the global navigation system your country controls for phones sold in your country?

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Anonymous Coward]

global positioning system

FTFY

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[wiredlogic]

It isn't the fact that you have support for both but rather that newer receivers have have improved ability to pull the signals out from background noise and lock on faster.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[beelsebob]

Actually, the smarter receivers do still work with bounced signals involved.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually can't buy a phone in the US that does not have a GPS locator built in for emergency purposes.

Truthfully, it's just so they can track your every fucking move. Pretty brilliant, really.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[radarskiy]

-1, uninformative.

You didn't answer the question (what is the response of a dual-system receiver when one system is sending bad data), you just told the OP what he already stipulated (that the receiver is dual system).

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[tlhIngan]

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

Given GLONASS is really only complete above the Russian Federation and spotty everywhere outside it, a dumb navigation chip would use GPS outside of Russia and GPS/GLONASS inside because it can't acquire a complete GLONASS lock outside.

A smarter chip may use whatever GLONASS satellites it does see to aid in reception, and the error would probably result in the software rejecting it as a whacked out satellite. (It happens on GPS as well - sometimes they screw up so the receivers know to discard the data received from a malfunctioning satellite). In this case, it would've seen the GLONASS was returning a nonsensical result and mark it as a bad satellite.

I've noticed much increased performance since I upgraded to a phone that uses both systems, especially in cities with a lot of tall buildings like NYC and Chicago.

Most likely your phone can properly extract the GPS data from the phone network via assisted GPS. In this case, you only need to see one satellite and the cell tower supplies the other satellite information.

Also, your new phone may have more sensitive electronics and more often than not, its wifi supports location assistance using wifi triangulation.

All that would combine to give you much faster acquisition than just pure GPS alone.

Both Google and Apple support WiFi location - Google is probably more question-response, while Apple sends you information and then a bit more to cache to lighten server loads. (That cache was the cause of the whole "iOS is tracking me" deal way back in IOS 4 because everyone believed Apple was getting the location data and stuffing it in the file, instead of what really happened in that Apple send more data for the cache in your phone to save data.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[AmiMoJo]

It seems to depend where you are. I find that in the far east GPS is often less accurate that GLONASS. My understanding is that it is due to them using different approximations of the shape of the earth (it isn't quite round, more of an ellipsoid). In fact you get this with some mapping applications too because the map data is based on, say, the Japanese approximation that is well suited to their country but the GPS receiver is using the US approximation (WGS85 or something?)

I bet if you are stood in Moscow GLONASS is better. I find it is definitely more accurate in Japan, although Japan is supposed to be launching its own GPS supplementary satellites to improve the situation in the next few years.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[R3d M3rcury]

True. But if you, say, double the number of satellites you're tracking, you have a better shot of being in the line-of-sight of three of them...

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[cheater512]

But more satellites that can be read = higher chance of getting them line of sight with obstructions around you.

Cell + Wifi gives rather good results quickly but I've also noticed GPS + GLONASS reduces the error margin quite substantially compared to plain GPS.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[AMDinator]

Not specifically phones, but some hardware reacted very badly- headings jumping back and forth, resets of the entire GPS, etc.

Source- I work in an industry that heavily relies upon GPS. Our dual GPS/GLONASS products (and our competitors') had major issues during this event.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Rich0]

Seems like the issue is that every nation wants to have its own standard for the shape of the Earth and use it for all the local maps, and rather than standardizing globally the solution is to launch multiple redundant location systems each designed around the local custom.

The whole thing seems silly, like arguing over where to draw the prime meridian. If every country wanted the prime meridian to go through their own capital, then you couldn't use a single lat/long coordinate to find yourself on any map. It really shouldn't matter what the shape of the reference globe is as long as everybody uses the same one and measures all their elevations relative to it.

But, these are the same legislatures that keep putting us through daylight savings time, so getting them to come up with a policy other than "let everybody else redraw their maps to our standards" is a hopeless cause...

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[rHBa]

And with that post you contributed what exactly?

This isn't stackoverflow you know, there is no requirement to 'answer the question' asked in the post you reply to, just that you have something interesting and preferably on topic.

This post is obviously off-topic but I'm hoping if you learn a bit about slashdot from it then at least it helped someone.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[AmiMoJo]

There are good reasons for having the different models. The actual latitude and longitude lines are fixed, what changes is the way GPS calculates its position. The US model doesn't work well in Japan and probably not too well in Russia, so why would they use it? Maybe the US should switch to the Japanese method if you don't think it matters that everything is off by a few hundred metres.

Maps are of course drawn with real latitude/longitude markers, not the GPS approximation.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[Rich0]

Maps are of course drawn with real latitude/longitude markers, not the GPS approximation.

This right here is the problem. If you're going to compute a position using GPS, then the map should be referenced to GPS.

I'm not saying the US has it right. I'm saying that having a single standard and using it everywhere makes a lot more sense than each country picking their own.

The bottom line is that if I ask "what is my current lat/long" there are 47 different answers depending on what definitions you make. By all means pick the best overall model, but don't use one model for one system and another for another. Change the maps to fit the model, and not the other way around.

It is as crazy as the practice in aviation of aligning everything to magnetic headings (in the US at least). Since magnetic north moves around all the time, things like VOR radials and runway headings are never quite right, and disagree with each other even in a local area based on when they were set up. It would make way more sense to just use true north for everything and stick a correction setting on the compass if it is actually used as anything but a backup.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[radarskiy]

"And with that post you contributed what exactly?"

I identified a +5,informative post as containing no relevant information beyond repeating what the OP supplied..

"have something interesting and preferably on topic... learn a bit about slashdot"

Maybe you should tell that to the person with the 5-digit ID who only quoted the OP's information back to him.

Re:How does this affect dual-system chipsets?

[rHBa]

Are you sure you replied to the correct post? I can see at least three pieces of information that weren't in the OP's post:

1. To promote their system, Russia decided to make new smartphones without GLONASS support illegal
2. Major manufacturers added that capability to all their phones since there is almost no additional cost to each unit, once the capability is designed into the chipset
3. There is no major CDMA networking in Russia.

If you think any of this information is incorrect then please feel free to post your version of the facts, otherwise...

fcuk it, why am I feeding a troll with a 7 digit UID!?!

Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else think this is a shot across the Russian bow?
Demonstrating to the Russians that the US really does control space even if we have to bum rides to ISS at the moment?

KC

Re:Warning Shot

[NotDrWho]

Careful when you shoot across bows. World Wars are easy to start, not always so easy to finish the way you want them to.

Re:Warning Shot

[oh_my_080980980]

Over a GPS satellite? Not likely.

Re:Warning Shot

[ackthpt]

Careful when you shoot across bows. World Wars are easy to start, not always so easy to finish the way you want them to.

I doubt the US would do it, if we did want to disable it for any reason, such as missile guidance, we wouldn't tip our hand so casually.

Re:Warning Shot

[TFlan91]

When all their guided missiles rely on said system? I'd call that a major breach of national security

Re:Warning Shot

[Advocatus Diaboli]

Wishful thinking. Playing around with Russia in 2014 is very different from doing so with Iraq in 1991. You would have to be insane to do that and believe that they would not respond in kind or worse. More likely to the result of an internal update.

Re:Warning Shot

[Max_W]

Anyone else think this is a shot across the Russian bow? Demonstrating to the Russians that the US really does control space even if we have to bum rides to ISS at the moment?

Seriously? The US does not even control its inner cities. Have you been in Detroit, in Trenton, etc. lately?

Instead of such "Star Wars" the money could be better spent to tackle the severe social problems at home.

Re:Warning Shot

[Advocatus Diaboli]

Actually, most of their high value missiles use inertial navigation- just like those of every other country. Nobody trusts navigation satellites for anything more important than short and medium range cruise missiles.

Re:Warning Shot

[Amtrak]

The scary thing about Russia is that they don't need guided missiles to burn the world. They have enough nuclear bombs that they can just point all of them in a general direction and assume at least some of them will hit there targets.

Re:Warning Shot

[Lumpy]

I suggest you read up how WW-I was started over nothing.

Re:Warning Shot

[Lumpy]

"Seriously? The US does not even control its inner cities. Have you been in Detroit, in Trenton, etc. lately? "

If you dont think this is intentional then you are nuts. they know that these cities are out of control cesspools, and it is intentional they are still that way. We have the resources to clean them up and restore order easily, but you don't have a easily controlled scared populace when you do that. DC is a cesspool because it is more effective to have an element of fear to point at to help shove things down the public's throats. Like the PATRIOT act for example.

Re:Warning Shot

[NatasRevol]

There's no money in that.

Re:Warning Shot

[Cobalt Jacket]

If you're suggesting that a single assassination was the reason for starting it, you may wish to go read some more about it. The major players had been itching for a fight for decades. It was essentially an attempt to resolve differences left from the Prussian wars of the 1860s-1870s, which set the stage for 120 years of a crapsack continent.

Re:Warning Shot

[ColdWetDog]

Gee, I feel better already.....

Re:Warning Shot

[DrXym]

And presumably missiles are designed to failover to other forms of navigation if the GPS is being disrupted or at odds with other navigational hints the missile might be programmed with such as terrain contours.

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Over nothing? Among the Central Powers there were several imperial nation-states in which some privileged ethnic, cultural, language or other national group held power over and even suppressed others. This was most obviously the case in Austria-Hungary which favoured Hungarians over various German, slavic and slavonic speakers, Austrian-Germans over west and south Slavs, and so forth, Roman Catholics over Protestants and Orthodox Christians, Muslims and so forth. The German Empire suppressed Polish and other slavic speakers, and had its own Protestant vs Catholic issues. The Russian Empire got involved to try to "protect" their linguistic kin via Pan-Slavism; and all hell broke lose. The Ottoman empire also favoured Turkic-language muslims and the Janissaries over pretty much everyone else -- Arabs, Persians and so on -- and joined the side of the other two nation-state empires after putting their disputes with Austria-Hungary and the German Empire aside.

So "over nothing" really means over home rule and independence in the Balkans and what are now Belarus, Finland Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Azerbaijan and Georgia vs colonial rule by various imperial powers who had controlled these areas successively for decades.

Treaties caused the war to escalate, and those coupled with the rivalries among the various European Colonial Powers especially in Africa.

Re:Warning Shot

[kurkosdr]

"hit there targets". Their, their, their, THEIR! Basic kingergarten-level knowledge. Damn idiocracy. 10 years from now, everyone will spell "right" as "rite" and posts complaining about it will get downvoted. Mark my words. (after all, most people already think "definitely" is spelled "definately", and can't tell the difference between "doing good" and "doing well")

Re:Warning Shot

[kurkosdr]

*kindergarten-level (damn virtual keyboards)

Re:Warning Shot

[Lumpy]

And the world right now is all peace and love?

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, neat, I was never aware that language is static and unchanging.

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm - speaking of missles- 1 month after this:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/03/russia-tests-long-range-missile-amid-tension-201434201326810535.html

Re:Warning Shot

[cavreader]

Russia is not the only country capable of this type of action. After all how much precision is really necessary when you are dealing with nukes?

Re:Warning Shot

[Cobalt Jacket]

Obviously not, but from the 1930-to-1955 period had between eighty and 100 million dead. Relatively speaking, things are safer.

Re:Warning Shot

[geekoid]

There is always an excuse when you make a mistake.
Should I respond to your error with a rant on spelling?

Re:Warning Shot

[geekoid]

It was. The chain of event that follow the assassination were a pretty rapid and unlikely chain of events to have happened without that assassination.

If you are curious, reading the account of what was happening the day the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated is a comedy of errors.

It's also highly unlikely the WWII would have happened without WWI, since there would not have been the poverty and economic status Hitler used to gain power.

Re:Warning Shot

[geekoid]

Actually, it's easier to manipulate comfortable people who feel safe. When was the last time a government was overthrown because it's populace was secure and well fed?
The PATRIOT act was easy because of 9/11. Not becasue states won't take care of their cities.

Re:Warning Shot

[geekoid]

The cities are part of a state and the state responsibility. The military is a federal organization.
The government of Michigan is letting those people down, not the feds.

Re:Warning Shot

[kurkosdr]

My spelling mistake was just a mistype on Samsung's stupid virtual keyboard. But if you confuse "there" with "their", it means that, for you, use of english is nothing more than parroting a bunch or sounds you 've heard in similar situations, and you don't have a clue about basic grammar. Cheers.

Re:Warning Shot

[Jmc23]

Where have you been for the past couple of decades? The US has gotten more blatant in it's actions. It is these very overt actions, without significant outcry from other countries, that is leading the other Big Powers to feel confident in making overt moves as well.

It will be interesting times ahead. The US used to get away with so much of it's foreign policy because of the mythic aura of the American-Dream that made it so palatable to poor developing countries. With the recent constant revelations of just how hypocritical the US is, and the fact they're running out of countries that they haven't fucked over, they're losing their carefully built image and status as "policer-of-the-free-world". It'll be fun to see just how far the bullies will go now that they realize there is no functional deterrent to their actions.

...unless you take out their gps...

Re:Warning Shot

[CreatureComfort]

You're right, we'd make it look like Chinese hackers did it...

Re:Warning Shot

[kurkosdr]

To put it in layman's terms, if you have the SLIGHTEST clue about grammar and how sentences are formed, there is no way you can confuse "their" with "there". I, a non-native speaker (I am greek), do not confuse the two. So, confusing the two means that you 've learnt english as a bunch of sounds, and when you write you are trying to find words that fit the sounds. I have no problem with people writing "thought" as "thougt" or even with people writing "definitely" as "definately" (as long as they don't insist it's the correct spelling, like most do), but seeing people confuse "their" with "there" and "your" with "you 're" saddens me, because said people are parrots. There is no nice way to put it.

Re:Warning shot

[Anonymous Coward]

"Austria-Hungary which favoured Hungarians over various German, slavic and slavonic speakers"
You must be joking. The Hungarians were itching for independence from Austria during the years leading up to the war (and since 1848), their prime minister opposed the war, etc.

Re:Warning Shot

[WindBourne]

If you are a civilian that is close to an area, you should feel better. Less chance of civilian casualty.

Re:Warning Shot

[kurkosdr]

In even more layman's terms, there is a "special" category of mistakes, like confusing "their" with "there", "your" with "you 're" or "here" with "hear" that happens ONLY to people who consider language as a bunch of sounds (and not as a bunch of words and gramnar rules). We all mispell words, get tenses wrong and forget words (when we fail to apply the grammar rules properly), but people who make mistakes of the "special" category don't even know what grammar is.

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Glass houses, mate. I don't know if you're aware of it but proper grammar also requires that sentences begin with capital letters and end with periods. Additionally, beginning a sentence with "Ten" is considered to be better than "10".

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

1930-1955 is not World war 1, what exactly are you trying to point out that the events of two world wars are what caused world war 1?

So that means that the Vietnam war had a significant impact on the Civil war.

Re:Warning Shot

[Jeremi]

My spelling mistake was just a mistype on Samsung's stupid virtual keyboard. But if you confuse "there" with "their", it means that, for you, use of english is nothing more than parroting a bunch or sounds

ROFL.... "my mistake was the computer's fault, your mistake was a sign of your intellectual inadequacy".

Or perhaps the OP also has a virtual keyboard (or some other not-terribly-bright auto-correct mechanism) that auto-converted a slight misspelling of "their" (e.g. "ther") into "there" and wasn't noticed in time.

But don't let that stop you from telling the OP how superior your language skills are to his. You clearly are a prodigy, that's why you get to post to Slashdot.

Re:Warning Shot

[schnell]

If you dont think this is intentional then you are nuts

Of course it's intentional but not for the reason you think. The reason that Detroit, Trenton and (at least previously) DC were/are cesspools is because of the evil force known as democracy. The residents of those cities and states voted for crap politicians who drove their respective areas into the ground economically. Nobody from outside imposed Marion Barry or Kwame Kilpatrick onto their cities, and nobody had to nefariously conspire to make them suck, they did that perfectly well on their own. Externalities can hurt a city or state, but to get it into Detroit territory you have to actively keep making it worse on your own - and the residents of those areas have nobody but their own votes to thank for it.

Seriously... not EVERYTHING is a gubmint conspiracy. Sometimes it's just stupid people electing terrible leaders, and that's the downside of democracy that comes along with all the other good stuff. Ask the people of Venezuela how electing people who promise free goodies works out in the long run.

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow up, you are not the arbiter of the English language. You are derailing actual discussion of the thread subject and it is as bad as spam.

Re:Warning Shot

[gaiageek]

That's a relief. Everywhere I go I'm close to an area. It's like I'm surrounded.

Re:Warning Shot

[tygt]

after all, most people already think "definitely" is spelled "definately"

I'm afraid that I most commonly see "definitely" written as "defiantly", which leads to some strange initial interpretations before I fix things up:

"I am defiantly hungry!"

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 insiteful.

Re:Warning Shot

[Stickerboy]

Where have you been for the past couple of decades? The US has gotten more blatant in it's actions. It is these very overt actions, without significant outcry from other countries, that is leading the other Big Powers to feel confident in making overt moves as well.

It will be interesting times ahead. The US used to get away with so much of it's foreign policy because of the mythic aura of the American-Dream that made it so palatable to poor developing countries.

No, the US used to get away with so much of it's foreign policy because the idea of foreign aid and economic trade with America made it very palatable to poor developing countries. See how everyone is starting to bend over backward to China as it begins to assert its economic weight.

With the recent constant revelations of just how hypocritical the US is, and the fact they're running out of countries that they haven't fucked over, they're losing their carefully built image and status as "policer-of-the-free-world".

What rock have *you* been living under for the last 100 years? Have you been paying any attention at all to US foreign policy in Latin America and the Middle East for, I don't know, the last century? Has there been a time when the US hasn't acted exactly as it has? Has there been one significant change in dipping their toes in other countries' affairs? The only change, ever, has been international press coverage of events. People interested in foreign policy have always seen the US for exactly what it is - it's just until 20 years ago there was a Soviet Union and a Warsaw Pact that made the US much more endearing.

It'll be fun to see just how far the bullies will go now that they realize there is no functional deterrent to their actions.

...unless you take out their gps...

Which is exactly as far as they would have gone before! Do you think bullshit brush wars are a new thing? Or that developed countries with strong militaries intervening in neighboring countries with weak ones is new, either? Wake up. The only international law worth a damn is the international law that's enforced at the point of a gun.

Re:Warning Shot

[Pumpkin Tuna]

Have you even been to DC? The vast majority of DC is a pretty cool place to live. When I lived there the only thing that vaguely made me feel threatened was terrorists with airplanes, anthrax and the sniper, who was from out of town.

Re:Warning Shot

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

"hit there targets". Their, their, their, THEIR! Basic kingergarten-level knowledge. Damn idiocracy. 10 years from now, everyone will spell "right" as "rite" and posts complaining about it will get downvoted. Mark my words. (after all, most people already think "definitely" is spelled "definately", and can't tell the difference between "doing good" and "doing well")

It's even worse than that. There/their/they're confusion has been around a long time, but what just baffles me is that younger people today actually think that "prolly" is a real word. I talked to a relative who is in college right now and pointed out to him that "prolly" wasn't a real word and it was "probably" and he looked just shocked as he replied to me that he did not ever recall seeing the word "probably" in his life.

Re:Warning Shot

[TangoMargarine]

Muphry's Law

Re:Warning Shot

[TangoMargarine]

Even speaking maximally literally, I wouldn't call the future king being assassinated "nothing." Whether they thought the country the assassin was from had knowledge of his actions is another question.

Re:Warning Shot

[TangoMargarine]

With a pistol, Princip shot and killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The reaction among the people in Austria was mild, almost indifferent. As historian Zbynk Zeman later wrote, "the event almost failed to make any impression whatsoever. On Sunday and Monday [June 28 and 29], the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine, as if nothing had happened."

Escalation of violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina

However, in Sarajevo itself, Austrian authorities encouraged[32][33] violence against the Serb residents, which resulted in the Anti-Serb riots of Sarajevo, in which Croats and Bosnian Muslims killed two ethnic Serbs and damaged numerous Serb-owned buildings. The events have been described as having the characteristics of a pogrom. Writer Ivo Andri referred to the violence as the "Sarajevo frenzy of hate."[34] Violent actions against ethnic Serbs were organized not only in Sarajevo, but also in many other large Austro-Hungarian cities in modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Hmm. Looks like the Balkans were up to their usual hijinks. 80 years later and they went and did the same thing(ish). Sigh.

Re:Warning shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Very unlikely German Austrians were suppressed by Hungarians, as the most efficient and effective forces were from what is now Austria. Vienna was the center of this empire. And they speak some kind of German to the present day.

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

A 737 plus a 1000 kW jammer can take out GPS in most nations without violating airspace. Line of sight and so on.

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the Saudis were contracted to do 9/11, America was doing to well economically while the war industry suffered.

Can you not think about Raytheon and Lockheed ? Are you so cruel ?

Re:Warning Shot

[Anonymous Coward]

You grew up in a semi-soviet country like I did. So we both had proper English teachers. Unfortunately, the other effects of semi-sovietism really shove something hard up our asses.

You got the present of a nice education at the price of excessive taxation and a shitty economy, unemployment LATER ON. I am from Germany.

Nothing comes for free.

Re:Warning Shot

[Jmc23]

Who put a firecracker in your ass?

Anyways, until recently, the regular population of most countries actually still believed that the "American" way was honourable and something to strive towards.

Re:Warning Shot

[mjwx]

It was. The chain of event that follow the assassination were a pretty rapid and unlikely chain of events to have happened without that assassination.

Erm, no.

There had been an arms race between the European powers for decades before WWI, building more battleships, developing machine guns, bigger artillery pieces. Beyond this, the powers were signing mutual defence pacts. The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand was merely the spark that ignited the powder keg. The war was pretty inevitable due to the background behind it. Germany and England (as well as everyone else) was spoiling for a fight. If it weren't for Austria being backed by Germany Prussia and Italy and Serbia being backed up by Russia, UK and France the war between the two would likely not have started, but because both sides had the backing of major powers, they were both extremely belligerent and of course their allies were more than happy to get into the fight. Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on 28 July 1914. What happened in between was a month of diplomacy, however this failed because each side had more interest in war than peace. The assassination in the end, was just an excuse for a war the European powers had been preparing for, for decades.

It's also highly unlikely the WWII would have happened without WWI, since there would not have been the poverty and economic status Hitler used to gain power.

Here I'd say you were half right. Hitler did use poverty and the dissatisfaction of the people with the government to seize power relatively bloodlessly. however it wasn't WWI directly that was the cause, rather the lopsided treaty of Versailles that kept Germany in poverty and the allies, specifically France and Russia were the instigators. Germany was lumped with war debts it couldn't pay so it made the perfect environment for an ultra nationalist party to come in and gain the popularity of the people by blaming all their problems on outside sources (and the Jews).

Churchill attributed the start of WWII directly to the treaty of Versailles. Rather than it being WWI that saw the rise of extreme nationalism in Germany, it was the allies treatment of the Germans after WWI that created the environment that allowed Nationalism to rise.

Re:Warning Shot

[WindBourne]

LOL. Yeah, typing that in quickly on a droid can be difficult.

Down? Or encrypted?

[Anonymous Coward]

The system shutting down while still broadcasting "gibberish" seems awfully inconvenient. Sure they just didn't switch to encrypted transmissions?

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[sjwt]

Im not up on GLONASS but don't most GPS systems broadcast in a range of service levels, you can only decrypt that access level you pay for, and countries reserve the top level for their military.

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[meadowsoft]

It is called selective availability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability#Selective_availability My undergraduate thesis involved how to couple intertial senors using a Kalman filter to compensate for SA in GPS signals. Two years after my project concluded, the US disabled SA in GPS. I doubt that this recent "outage" was related to similar SA in GLONASS. Rather, perhaps it was indeed an encrypted transmission, or was based on a second independent synchronization signal only available to military assets used to put the scrambled transmissions back in the right order.

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS has citizen band and military bands. The military bands are, of course, encrypted and not intended for civilian use. It stands to reason that GLONASS or any GNSS system probably behaves similarly. You wouldn't want your military using an easily jammed or spoofed, unencrypted location signal, would you?

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[guzzirider]

Most likely encrypted.
They, (The Russians) are massing troupes, maybe by historical Russian standards, a small mass.
It would make sense that they would test whatever secure military mode that is built into the system.
12 hours is not an a huge amount of time, but is could be enough to operationally test most of the hardware that is deployed on the 'frontier'.

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[AmiMoJo]

It wasn't gibberish, it was just incorrect orbit data that produced invalid results when used to calculate position on the ground. There was no fault as such, the ground station just sent up some bad data and the satellites relayed it.

Re:Down? Or encrypted?

[Anonymous Coward]

troupes & troops are not the same thing

Down or Scrambled

[Anonymous Coward]

Did not mean to cross the Ukrainian border, satnav was broken.

Soviet fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Death to Putin, death to Russia; long live Ukraine etc.

Late April Fools Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone was trying to pull a late April Fools joke on Russians!

Re:Late April Fools Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Edit: It WAS April 1st, in the USA, when this went down. (Well, the night of April 1st.)

I don't miss them.

[ackthpt]

I used them along with the US GPS satellites, until a couple months back, but found I was having some serious accuracy issues. Disabling them resolved the issue and I haven't used them since. GPSr unit: Garmin Oregon 600

Re:I don't miss them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because you were using two different systems and your device was not smart enough to deal with discrepancies. Disabling GPS would have accomplished the same thing.

Intentional

[DarthVain]

Until very recently the US would intentionally degrade the GPS signal to all but military traffic (all the time). Considering the major military actions going on in the Ukraine by Russia one could suppose this is actually the case, particularly if perhaps the Ukraine military also uses the same system... I would not be terribly surprised if this is the case. The US did the same when they invaded Iraq.

Unless the gibberish it was transmitting was: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. Then someone needs to press a damn button!

Re:Intentional

[CajunArson]

If by "very recently" you mean 14 years ago (literally in the 20th century) that selective availability was turned off.....

As for your other points:
1. The U.S. did not degrade any civilian GPS when they invaded Iraq.

2. If you honestly think the Ukranians are beholden to GLONASS... which doesn't even work for the Russians a large portion of the time.. and are somehow too stupid to buy commercial GPS products that are made in Taiwan and used by the rest of the world, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Hell, even the Russians use GPS (quietly) even though they tout GLONASS because nationalism.

Re:Intentional

[meadowsoft]

From Wikipedia again:

"...it happened in 2000 once the U.S. military developed a new system that provides the ability to deny GPS (and other navigation services) to hostile forces in a specific area of crisis without affecting the rest of the world or its own military systems."

Perhaps the US is using such a system actively in the Ukraine region.

Re:Intentional

[geekoid]

No link, just a quote. tsk. tsk.

Anyway, how to you disable a radio signal being broad cast to a 1/4 of the world to a small subsection?

Anyways, 2000 was 14 years ago and literally in the 20th century, like the poster said.

Re:Intentional

[Anonymous Coward]

Satellite, directional antenna, jammer. Done.

That's why prudent folks have celestial navigation in their BEARs.

In post-Soviet Russia when you pull out GPS

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU get lost.

that explains the US military shuttle record

[ducman]

Now we know why that US DOD mini shuttle was up for so long, recently. It was hacking into the Russian satellites.

Re:that explains the US military shuttle record

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, why use a 10000 dollar antenna on the ground if you can spend 5000 million dollars for the same job ?

Oh, I forgot PORK. In the light of that, you are probably right.

Go Team!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama may be "weak", but GLONASS is weaker :)

mod uAp

[Anonymous Coward]

So that their OUTER SPACE THE

You inse8sitive clod!?

[Anonymous Coward]

aaproximately 90% developers

Solar Flare Arrived Yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it was the solar flare eruption's arrival yesterday that caused a problem.

Re:Solar Flare Arrived Yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

The G1 storm warning was cancelled. Perhaps the operators wanted to be sure.

Here doggy!

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, Putins dog is lost somewhere in the Urals.

I saw this episode..

[modi123]

How is this possible?! NCIS:LA's Eric totally fixed the zero day in GLONASS on episode 5x18! During a gun battle on a roof no less!

Cause

[Charliemopps]

“Bad ephemerides were uploaded to satellites. Those bad ephemerides became active at 1:00 am Moscow time,” reported one knowledgeable source.

It still could have be the US, who knows.

Re:Cause

[swb]

Maybe a little warning to Ivan that despite their recent upgrades in kit, Uncle Sam is still in the game.

So much speculation...

[Flytrap]

So much speculation from people who do not appear to have even read the article.

FTA: “Bad ephemerides were uploaded to satellites. Those bad ephemerides became active at 1:00 am Moscow time... a GLONASS fix could not take effect until each satellite in turn passed back over control stations in the Northern Hemisphere to be reset, thus taking nearly 12 hours.”

The article concludes that the outage was probably due to a human error which "...could conceivably occur with GPS, Galileo, or BeiDou" and advises consumers not to rely on only one system.

My [completely uninformed and speculative] guess is that the Russians probably rushed a software update to meet some military deadline and it backfired on them - now Putin's troops amassed along the Ukrainian boarder may have to do without whatever feature they were trying to quickly enable.

Re:So much speculation...

[Anonymous Coward]

who, in particular, updated these bad ephemeris data and/or what was their source? this is not stated in the article.

Re:So much speculation...

[geekoid]

It was probably as reported, but was around during the cold war, so part of me still wonders. IT's an irrational part of my, but then a childhood full of fear of nuclear hell leaves a mark.

Re:So much speculation...

[TythosEternal]

The "...could conceivably occur with GPS, Galileo, or BeiDou" part of the article isn't entirely true, though. Galileo is not operational (only four satellites have been launched, all proof-of-concepts), for starters. Beidou is a mixed constellation for which half the coverage doesn't have the access issues of a pure-MEO constellation. A GPS satellite could conceivably have the same problem, but it's easily corrected because GPS is supported by a network of ground stations with global coverage--corrected ephemerides can be uploaded virtually at a moment's notice.

The specific issue with GLONASS (bad ephemerides) would be easily corrected with a better ground network. As it is, you can only upload the appropriate data when they are over a limited, high-latitude portion of the earth. It's very much a single point-of-failure issue, which one can interpret as either a poor design decision or a by-product of pride / stubbornness (which, in engineering design, are frequently one and the same). It's a good reminder that, despite good scientific and technological underpinnings, the Russian space program still suffers from underdeveloped support and very limited global / international cooperation (not to mention testing and quality assurance issues).

Re:So much speculation...

[kbdd]

"So much speculation from people who do not appear to have even read the article."

I find that the impact of my arguments suffer when I try to base them on facts. It is so much more fun to shoot from the hip while looking in another direction.

Re:So much speculation...

[Anonymous Coward]

A nice way of saying that the Russian Empire is much smaller than the U.S. Imperium.

Can't you Anglos be honest for at least one instance ???

shut off during war

[peter303]

So no one else could it. Might have been something to do with Ukraine issue.

Ingress

[tbuddy]

My heart goes out to the Russian Resistance team for their downtime.

Looks like the NSA sent sent the Russians a messag

[Anonymous Coward]

That would certainly put a major shock into Russian national security. Especially since I believe that deliberate tampering in space, either through scripts sent from earth.

Russian time?

[blackm0k]

The editors realize that Russia spans 9 time zones right? I think they meant to say Moscow Time. Can you imagine if an article was posted referring to American Time as a time zone?

What's Random Gibberish?

[hhawk]

One person's gibberish is another's encrypted data. Perhaps Russia was testing a encrypted "secure" mode that would switch to in time on conflict, such as an invasion or something like that.

Re:What's Random Gibberish?

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts, too.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This could be prep to the Russian attack.

[sageres]

Is it possible that GLONASS went into fully encrypted mode? Sort of like GPS did partially during the first Gulf War? It is made for the Russian military, you know. Perhaps they are about ready to invade the Ukraine.... ;-(

In Soviet Russa....

[bobbied]

Following GLONASS directions on your Garmin gets you lost....

Fully Operational

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody thought it was a fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!

In Soviet Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

Satellite lose YOU!

Yay unexplained acronymns!

[TangoMargarine]

For those of us who don't have any idea what GNSS or GLONASS stand for...it would really be nice to tell us what the hell this article is actually about.

GNSS = global navigation satellite system
GLONASS = "acronym for Globalnaya navigatsionnaya sputnikovaya sistema or Global Navigation Satellite System, is a space-based satellite navigation system operated by the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces. It provides an alternative to Global Positioning System (GPS) and is the only alternative navigational system in operation with global coverage and of comparable precision."

Oh, so it's GPS. See how easy that was?

Not only that...

[Bohnanza]

Glasnost seems to be dead too.

Apparently just corrupt ephemeris data

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't the timing data that was bad, it was the ephemeris. Which is computed periodically by the ground controllers and just repeated by the satellite.

Modern satellites can operate for quite a while without updates, by using a pre-programmed series of predicted ephemerides. But that doesn't protect them from a corrupted update.

Apparently what happened was a bad upload, and they had to wait for the satellites to complete an orbit (12 hours) and come back in view of the control station to receive a corrected upload.

Oops

[Jeremi]

"In an unprecedented total disruption of a fully operational GNSS constellation, all satellites in the Russian GLONASS broadcast corrupt information for 11 hours [...] This rendered the system completely unusable to all worldwide GLONASS receivers."

Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.

jamming

[Anonymous Coward]

Selective Availability was turned on because while it's always been trivial to jam GPS (or Glonass) in a region, preventing adversaries from using it, the US military had no way to jam it in a way that denied it to adversaries while letting them keep using it themselves. Apparently in the 1990's they developed a way to do that: jam GPS for others while still letting authorized receivers (I guess that means receivers with the crypto keys to undo the jamming) keep working. That is why Selective Availability was turned off. SA's intention was never to deny precise positioning to civilians under peaceful conditions. It was to deny it to battlefield opponents, and they now handle that by localized jamming.

Nicolas Cage's hair is a bird...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that's hyperbole if not outright factually incorrect. So I will disregard the rest of your rant.

PLus

[Anonymous Coward]

celestial navigation. You can always find Los Angeles if you are over the clouds and know the sky.

No, British-Sponsored Terror

[Anonymous Coward]

The British supported a Serbian Terror Network that was ultimately controlled by the Serbian government. So did the Russians. These terrorists killed the heir of the Austrian throne. Not exactly nothing.

All the NSA/GCHQ/GITMO crap the English get is well-deserved.

I sense the shadowy hand of Lighthouse...

[knightsirius]

I sense the shadowy hand of Lighthouse behind this :P

Troupes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's troops, not troupes. A troupe is a collection of theatre actors or circus performers. Russia massing troupes would be a cause for celebrations, a levee, a parade, or a fair.

Oh, by the way

[Anonymous Coward]

The GLONASS is a global navigation satellite system, and I'm saying this because there are zero clues in the article.
While, yes, you can Google(R) it, or guess it; no, it isn't good form to have to look up buzzwords, mnemonics and nerdisms to find out just WTF the article is talking about.

It's as bad as trying to read some of the code, or worse, the "documentation" some of you assholes churn out.

Missing comma

[matmota]

Calm down, it's just missing a comma:

"Hit there, targets!"

In Soviet Russia, targets hit you!

GLOSNASS meaning?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think GLOSNASS means "Get Lost Navigational Aid Satellite System".