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Russians Seek Answers To Central Moscow GPS Anomaly (yahoo.com)
stevegee58 writes: Russians have been noticing that their GPS doesn't work in Moscow near the Kremlin. Everyone from taxi drivers to Pokemon Go players suddenly notice that they're transported 18 miles away at the airport when they near the Kremlin. While this may be an annoyance to the public it seems like a reasonable countermeasure to potential terrorist threats. Is it only a matter of time before other vulnerable sites such as the White House or the Capitol in Washington start doing the same? "A programmer for Russian internet firm Yandex, Grigory Bakunov, said Thursday his research showed a system for blocking GPS was located inside the Kremlin, the heavily guarded official residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin," reports Yahoo. "The first anomaly was recorded in June, according to Russian media reports, which have also suggested that the GPS interference comes and goes in a pattern. Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday he did not know why the malfunction was occurring and admitted experiencing the problem himself when driving recently. Peskov redirected questions to Russia's Federal Guards Service, which is responsible for protecting the Kremlin and senior Russian officials."
In conjunction with the fact that it isn't marked on any paper maps and is completely invisible, you mean?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now that it's know that there is an error then any attacker would plan for alternatives.
The only way it really can be effective is when it's not active until really needed.
And there are still maps, alternative beacons, compasses (magnetic and gyro) and dead reckoning that can be used to find such targets for anyone out to perform an attack.
People were able to navigate even before GPS existed.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This is why I always felt JDAMs were a bad idea in the long run because their INS is less accurate without GPS assistance and a discrepancy like this must really screw up the guidance if GPS assistance is switched on.
This is a feature not a bug.
Yeah, imagine the sales pitch (in a heavy Russian accent): Let your sat nav guide you into the Moskva river, enjoy a river cruise and take a bath while travelling to work! Just don't forget to install an outboard motor in the boot of your car and mind the airliners when you drive across the runways at Sheremetyevo airport.
re 'People were able to navigate even before GPS existed"
The US tried that with maps and sketches by informants from Iraq.
When US top experts got deep in Iraq they find cache of vacuum cleaners not match sketch.
Spies who defect or are sent to be perfect defector often draw nice map to earn top defector status and good life as expected. Map match map by past double agent sent last decade, is confirmed by two sources from different departments. Must be true as both now trusted defectors could never both be two double agents.
Decades later MI6 or CIA send local spy in, find art restoration room not vault conference room corridor.
So working gps on site is vital to get signal out, perfect alignment and not spread data flow all over site to be detected during bug sweep.
Would toy device or entertainment unit with hidden or designed useful compasses (magnetic and gyro) be allowed in with any staff?
Giving staff extra special spy device during spy meeting can be a risk for both spy handler and spy to try and hide and walk in.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It seems a bit odd to redirect attacks to an airport - I'd have expected it to point to the opposition's headquarters.
It seems like this would be easy thwart by having the software software prevent sudden large movements (while GPS is active) that don't match the reading of an IMU.
Everything you need is in every smartphone, you just need basic programming knowledge to defeat these countermeasures.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Would that mean the Russians have an alternative working and secret GPS that only the top guns use (and military)?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
AC GLONASS does not work near or in NSA, GCHQ lab so its hard to prototype a device with that functionality.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Very few military weapons depend solely on GPS (or GLONASS for that matter). It's been obvious for a while that satellite navigation and guidance systems were not going to survive any engagement with another military for very long. The Chinese finalized that argument in 2007.
Further, a Predator or other military drone isn't going to last 5 seconds above Moscow airspace. It would have to be a stand-off weapon or (god forbid) a ballistic missile. The area covered is very small by these standards and any of these weapons would already be in "terminal" phase... GPS wouldn't be used (or make a difference... especially on ballistic missiles).
If the signal is always adjusted to a specific spot (it seems Vunoko) it's easy enough for a "major actor" to just reprogram whatever is using GPS to say "if you see a 18 mile jump at any of these coordinates surrounding the anomaly, adjust".
This is meant to throw off things like car bombs, thus internal assassins and possibly smaller states like the Ukraine.
In Putin Russia, GPS relocate you!
I would agree but there are a lot of idiots out there.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
this hits my Gee-spot.
Broadcasting GPS data for the local airport seems like a good way to have an aeroplane land on top of you.
Are you implying that planes rely exclusively on GPS to the point where an anomaly would suddenly cause them to change course and attempt to land on the roof of the Kremlin? I know $50 drones which are more intelligent than that.
That's plain stupid. The GPS signal is very weak (-130dBm, it boggles the mind how weak a signal that is). Swamping the band with stronger signals will "overwrite" the true GPS signal and not even the best directional antenna can retrieve it.
Assuming the story to be true, the answer to the anomaly is pretty obvious. The USA is sending a message - fuck around with us and we can fuck around with you. Of course Russia has GLONASS but I bet a lot of devices don't use it or prefer GPs.
Pilot error blamed for Syd flight failure
One approach trajectory for runway 34 in MEL flies directly over a runway at the much smaller Essendon airport and some large jets have come close to landing there because they follow their navigation, see a runway and go for it.
People fuck up. In the dark with rain going they might see lights below, assume they are in the right spot and put their A340 down in Putin's bedroom.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
A better answer might be that the best reasonable directional antennas are not directional enough to reject a strong local jamming signal.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Me too. It could tell my ankle bracelet that I am at home when I am at the air port.
Most recent phones support GLONASS. Even an older device like the Nexus 5 does so. You can use an app like GPS Test (by Chartcross, for Android) to see them. They're the higher numbered satellite (60s, 70s). The support is built into the GPS integrated receiver, from Qualcomm and others.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
It makes sense to send terrorist threats from the Kremlin to the airport where they become a photo op and a chance to show strong leadership. Why do you think other politicians want it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Who needs GPS for spying? We've had satellites that can read the numbers on vehicle licence tags for decades.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's because Putin's animal magnetism has a 18m radius.
Poutine doesnt want hipsters with DJI drone to take his dick pix
The worst, saddest thing I can say about your idea is it would play into Clinton's war card...
depending on what you call the war card.
Not every schedule is about the US election but recently, we've got the Pentagon's assault on Deir Ezzor (a thorough slaughter of Syrian troops), and then the assault on Mosul (which entails destruction of all water and power infrastructure, as part of "humanitarian" warfare). If the attacks on a humanitarian convoy was a false flag, then that's some hard core stuff there. White helmets already are something of a "reverse false flag" - many monthes ago there were severe hints they are Jihadi who put on some clothes and/or helmet.
Some newspaper I've read still pretends the rebels are "Free Syrian Army", about the story about Kurds being bombed by Turkey slight North-West of Aleppo in order to make room for the "rebels".
In all likehoodness or hopefully, the "West" is bluffing. They want to scare us afterall (i.e. the West scares itself). The Empire reaches several objectives : to bolster the Jihadi, get right-wing governments elected in Europe and North America, and increase weapon sales.
Broadcasting GPS data for the local airport seems like a good way to have an aeroplane land on top of you.
So that's why Mathias Rust landed there! :p
They must have jammed Loran-C too, back before GPS/GLONASS
In an instance of war or a strategic hit precision guided bombing sequence requires gps. If there is no gps they will have to use laser guidance or some other less 'fire and forget' tracking method. Bomb makers knew this day was coming Guided-Bomb Makers Anticipate GPS Jammers http://www.defensenews.com/sto...
You've linked to a subscriber only article but I'm going to assume that your article is about that Sydney flight which ended up on Melbourne instead of Asia because of a navigation error which had nothing to do with GPS
For those with Androids, by default, WiFi access point known locations supersede GPS **Even when WiFi is turned off** (the asterisk-encapsulated part can be disabled, but it's pretty difficult, and it annoys you about it all the time when you do).
If the complaining taxi drivers are using auto manufacturer GPSes, then I guess that's not the problem. But if they are using Androids, it could be. And for Pokemon Go users, it certainly would be consistent.
I turn off this feature mostly because it's very annoying when I fly on an airline with WiFi (always). When I land, it shows me in Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, or wherever the hub of the airline is, even though I'm somewhere else.
Google collects WiFi location data via crowdsourcing (see https://www.cnet.com/news/goog...)
This is a common problem when someone moves houses, or moves an access point from one place to another. It takes a long time for Google to update its database.
It is strange to see many posters think that GPS is an american something. GPS is a shorthand for the generic term "Global Positioning System".
The american implementation is called NAVSTAR,
The soviet (later russian) implementation is called Glonass,
The European Union has Galileo and
The chinese system is called COMPASS
(but most call it Bei-dou, lit. art of wayfinding, in order not to confuse it with "Compass Call" which is an american military satellite jamming aircraft).
All of these are Global Positioning Systems, although there were a few years after the fall of USSR, when only the american system had truly global reach, due to russians' lack of funds to replace ailing satellites.
Some weapons are GPS-guided, such as JDAM-assisted bombs.
The world is gearing up for a heated conflict. Wether it occurs or not is a different story. But last month's US chief of armies gave a chilling speech where they expect mass casualties within 10 years, to the likes of WWII.
The nations are placing their pieces on the map and gearing up for defence. GPS denial devices is an obvious counter-measure, assuming it actually deter military -grade GPS systems (which are far more precise than civilian ones).
You mean the militants that use roadside bombs because the only people they will try to kill in person are women and children? Those fuckers drop their guns and melt into the population when the marines show up. They use children as human shields because they know we try like hell to avoid collateral damage and killing the innocent. When the US occasionally fucks up the innocent often do die but to ISIS and Hamas and other similar bastards there are no innocents. To their hate filled minds everyone is a target and the weak and helpless are their very favorite victims. The US military isn't afraid of shit. All those guys are volunteers in an age when they know without a doubt they'll see combat. The problem is their opponents are cowards that hide like cockroaches and have to be rooted out of their hiding places. The "militants" are nothing more than the scum of the earth that victimize their own people more than their proclaimed enemy. In truth they are the enemy of all civilized society.
Eh, you say jamming signal I say homing beacon.
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
LOL. And if he takes his shirt off, it goes up to 20m!
Render the GPS on someone's cellphone useless if they're, unbeknownst to the poor phone user, near a location that the government has decided shouldn't be found via GPS. What happens to the poor soul who needs to call 9-1-1 after gettiing in a nasty car accident or to report a crime and the EMS service or police can't find them because GPS indicates they're miles away from the true location? Short: answer: there a good chance that, if they're seriously injured, they'll probably die. Jeebus, this is that damned stupidest thing I've heard in a while.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say? People following navigation incorrectly thinking that their navigation is in error and making a decision to land at a wrong airport has nothing to do with GPS.
That's actually a prefect example of why this is a non issue. Do you think a pilot will blindly follow an incorrect GPS reading and smash into the side of the Kremlin because their navigation was right? Because that pilot error example you linked to showed the navigation was actually right and the pilot made a decision to ignore it thinking it was wrong.
While we're on the topic of GPS being wrong, airlines don't blindly follow the GPS position they are given. Heck my $50 drone doesn't blindly follow the GPS position it was given. If the GPS location jumps unexpectedly it will fall back to inertial or VOR based systems. This is what allows planes to fly polar routes or intercontinental routes where GPS coverage isn't available.
Yes!! Very likely narrow High power RF pulses in a random manner would disrupt a GPs system and show no ill effects other than reduced receiver sensitivity on other types of receivers GPS unlike other communications systems relies on nanosecond pulse timing and such random pulses would harm it and not disrupt other communications that rely only on signals that can be microseconds in error and system still tolerates this error GPs however is ruined by these narrow pulses
We've had satellites that can read the numbers on vehicle licence tags for decades.
Uh...says who? Certainly not laws of diffraction.
Ezekiel 23:20
There's an odd throw-away line from a book on the construction of the Hubble telescope, purportedly from someone at Perkin-Elmer, who made it and the satellites who point the other way. "Turns out things are a lot clearer looking into the atmosphere than looking out of it."
Come to think of it, it's possible that many consumers devices actually track based on multiple satellite networks to increase availability and precision and the intermittent nature of the error is because the error depends on which satellite/satellite system is in view at the time.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
I am surprised that no one has put in the obligatory "in Soviet Russia, GPS gets directions from you" comment yet. How can you not quote Yakov Smirnoff?
Old meme -1. Actually funny +5.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Yes, that's a better explanation, I agree.
last month's US chief of armies gave a chilling speech where they expect mass casualties within 10 years, to the likes of WWII.
Stop lying. It never happened.
You're a paid Kremlin troll.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Former Eastern Block countries have some great "IT people" who could do great in a normal environment...but there are no "normal" jobs for them. So, they get hired by criminal organizations instead. Everyone's got to eat.
Stop lying. You're describing Eastern Europe cca. 1995.
Nowadays, more than 20 years after, the situation is the exact opposite: not enough IT people compared with available jobs in the local market. Moreover, non-local job opportunities all over the EU drain the IT people from Eastern Europe.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
You're over-thinking it. If the enemy knows that it is unreliable and can't be used for an attack... it won't be used for an attack.
It might not have to thwart other types of attack in order to achieve the purpose it was intended for.
Yes, you show that the purpose is not likely to be to fool people into believing that they are really at the airport when near the Kremlin. But that doesn't mean it won't work, it just means that the more likely purpose is to deny use of GPS for detonating a bomb near there.
It might even be backwards; they might be protecting the airport by sending a false "you're at the airport" signal in various places and it is only downtown where people noticed, and blamed the nearby government building.
That's the thing about intelligence services... you can't measure what they're doing very well unless you know what their intent is, and they're not going to tell you. So. You never really know. Even when stuff "leaks," or is purported to, there is no way to weigh it.
That reminds me of an interview with chess grandmaster Lev Alburt, who defected to the US around 1980. When he was a kid growing up in the Soviet Union, the government propaganda always said that the Americans were preparing to attack. And the people believed it. So the local kids drew maps showing the locations of military barracks and other landmarks, to give to the American paratroopers when they landed. But the liberation forces never came.
The Soviet Union flooded MI6 and the CIA with double agents. Decades of perfect stories to sell or give away. Until a real defector gets out and offers proof its all been set up.
The West really, really wanted to believe that lifestyle, freedom and cash offers could not be countered with a steady flow of double agents.
The other issue is how the CIA and MI6 have to act in Russia. Laying flat in a car, changing clothing, a wig just to reach out to a local turned contact to offer spy equipment or contact paper work often fails.
The turned official is often bait waiting to see what the approach will be and by what US/UK embassy worker or NGO. Thats why the GCHQ and NSA got all the funding. Safe and total signals capture and full translation services. Just like the Enigma but for decades, totally unnoticed by Russia...
The gps issue is just another line of protection to stop bugs from been able to be aligned out of any site.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Even without any atmosphere, the diffraction-limited resolution of a 2.5 m optical system watching from a 200 km altitude is limited to ~5 cm. Is that sufficient for reading the plates? (Even that number is only for watching from straight above, which sort of doesn't work for vehicle license plates - Pythagoras then applies for diagonal lines of view.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Yes, agreed, it's unlikely that plates can be read and illumination angles of 30 degrees make it much more difficult. But this received wisdom allows information more realistically obtained from in situ personnel to be helpfully explained away.
Stick their head outside the airplane window and say "Yup.. looks like we're close"? ;-)
You're very credulous. You read all that information, and fail to suss out the most important implication: there is no way for you to know what any of that means. You have no way to know what response there was to the influx of double-agents, or if the responses were effective. Neither side benefits from giving you accurate knowledge, but both sides are known to leak nonsense to conspiracy theorists and overly-credulous historians.
Just like, you have no idea why the NSA got funding, or what it was for. Members of Congress had closed-door hearings about it, and nobody knows what reasons were given. It could be anything as well as it could be any thing that you would name.
Claiming to know things you obviously wouldn't have access to knowing about does not make you appear knowledgeable, it only makes you appear credulous.
Or to use Rumsfeldian information analysis, these are known unknowns. Falsely believing that what others know to be unknown is known to you, because people you trusted told you so, is a standard error that people make. Rumsfeld talked about that after the Iraq War. And the lesson he talked about; don't be credulous when people tell you that they know how to make known unknowns into known knowns, unless you have access to high quality data that corroborates it. And he had access to lots of data. You're just a regular joe, you don't have any access at all, not even marginal or fleeting access.
".. what response there was to the influx of double-agents, or if the responses were effective."
That can usually be seen with an influx of different science education offers, the building of listening stations globally, the power needs, cooling water and the rushed reaction to a few very select very fake signals collected.
Antenna design, foundations, the need to involve a local gov/mil with a cover story.
If billions get spent on placing hardware (like a long term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) thanks to results of double agents telling a good story over decades?
The over reaction in policy changes is noted or a better story is told.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Two things.
Likely the reason for the GPS scrambling isn't to deter human beings from locating within the area. If one were to build an autonomous drone however that might make any attack just a bit harder. It would require a manual operator, which would be subject to distance limitations, and also loss of connection as likely that signal can also be blocked.
Second, the story says "GPS", but doesn't actually say which GPS. So far as I am aware there are at least 3 or 4 variations of GPS out there. GPS as commonly known is the US system, but Russia and China also have their own systems. So I am not sure if they mean one or all of the systems are being blocked. It would seem less useful if only the Russian one were blocked for example and that might just point to a technical issue perhaps.
In truth they are the enemy of all civilized society.
Sure, but so are those who radicalized them. People don't become terrorists on a humbug.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But Assad's and Putin's targets aren't the jihadi's, they are the remaining pro democracy groups. If you are a vicious dictator anyone who believes in democracy is a terrorist.. der
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
".. what response there was to the influx of double-agents, or if the responses were effective."
That can usually be seen with an influx of different science education offers, the building of listening stations globally, the power needs, cooling water and the rushed reaction to a few very select very fake signals collected.
Is that how it was in your daydream, or are you going off a TV show?
You're being naive and credulous again, even while defending yourself against it! No, you do not, did not, and will not know how many double-agents there were, how many were triple agents, how many were single agents pretending to be double agents, if their activities were monitored in a way that made them ineffective, if their activities were monitored in a way that actually exposed intelligence resources in their home country, etc., etc., etc.
What sort of weird magical being do you believe yourself to be that you would glance at some sort of "science education offer" somewhere and know from that how many double agents were effective in country Y? I mean, that is totally fucking stupid, even as magical thinking goes. No, you wouldn't fucking know.
These are known unknowns. That means everybody already knows you didn't know it even before you say it and look stupid.
"wikipedia!" lol yeah, the spies would never think of that, golly, I'm sure national secrets are all over wikipedia. You point to a disinformation plan from the past... MY FUCKING GOD DUDE, that is the exact shit that should prove to you that you won't know what the fucking truth is because there is lots of disinformation. The thing you point at as showing how you magically know what is going on in the world is actually the exact fucking shit that should prove to you that you would never know any of that.
Not being able to find the Kremlin would require navigation of a truly mind-bogglingly low standard. I've walked around the thing (having several hours to kill in Moscow, between flying in to one of the internal airports and out of one of the external airports) and it took a solid 3 hours. Detouring, it must be said, to find a toilet and to buy a matrioshka which said rude things about Clinton and Lewinsky. And "odin piva, perzhalsta."
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"