This is an interesting article. It has a very strong AI accent.
I really wish I could tell how real it is. When some part of it I can tell is AI slop, how much of it is AI slop? Inside GNSS has always been a marketing rag with sometimes some interesting articles.
The author is a security researcher, so maybe poking at GPS bits makes sense, but talking about floating point bit depth? There's too much slop for me to figure out if there's anything of real interest or if this is just a hallucination.
Edit. After reading more carefully this is 100% AI slop. Inside GNSS published Steven Murdoch's chat gpt session. Maybe some data was transmitted? The only way you'll actually know is to redo the research your self. There are many fabrications / confabulations that clearly happen with AI in the text.
"Numbers station" is a weird analogy, because the idea of a numbers station was to broadcast messages to undercover operatives in a way that can be received using unmodified (and therefore non-suspicious) household radio receivers.
Here, it appears to be a rekeying system for specialized military gear.
GPS was always a dual use system. This is very detailed and specific, but not interesting or surprising. Research has been study GPS signal data, found parts that are encrypted and he doesn’t understand. The end. Article seems only intended to generate an emotional response of “how dare they use GPS for war, man!”
> for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals
It’s common knowledge that the military has access to a separate, encrypted, higher-precision GPS signal. “Numbers station” implies that they’re distributing unrelated encrypted information, but they’re not; it’s not surprising that GPS signals would be used to deliver information related to GPS, even if only military receivers have any use for it!
In my view people nitpicking the 404 media story are being ridiculous. Everyone in their audience knows GPS originated as a military system, indeed I think most of teh general public knows that. Bashing them for not mentioning this is just looking for something to be mad about.
> To make processing this massive dataset practical, we built a Julia pipeline to extract the bits directly into a DuckDB database.
The raw data is a bit more than 1GB per annum.
The data of interest is 176 bits every 12.5 minutes for 19 years. That is, about 17MB of data. Possibly multiplied by the number of satellites, roughly thirty.
Though I take your point that it’s not big data by the conventional use (i.e. requiring a distributed computing to process). The phrasing in the original article was better: “To make iterative analysis practical, we wrote a Julia pipeline: NetCDF source files are converted to Apache Arrow, then thread-parallel bit extraction is performed into a DuckDB database.”
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadI really wish I could tell how real it is. When some part of it I can tell is AI slop, how much of it is AI slop? Inside GNSS has always been a marketing rag with sometimes some interesting articles.
The author is a security researcher, so maybe poking at GPS bits makes sense, but talking about floating point bit depth? There's too much slop for me to figure out if there's anything of real interest or if this is just a hallucination.
Edit. After reading more carefully this is 100% AI slop. Inside GNSS published Steven Murdoch's chat gpt session. Maybe some data was transmitted? The only way you'll actually know is to redo the research your self. There are many fabrications / confabulations that clearly happen with AI in the text.
https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA
Here, it appears to be a rekeying system for specialized military gear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414479
https://www.404media.co/the-u-s-military-quietly-turned-gps-...
The 404 article seems fluff-free and cites
https://insidegnss.com/current-issue/
as source.
The part they kept out of the headline:
> for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals
It’s common knowledge that the military has access to a separate, encrypted, higher-precision GPS signal. “Numbers station” implies that they’re distributing unrelated encrypted information, but they’re not; it’s not surprising that GPS signals would be used to deliver information related to GPS, even if only military receivers have any use for it!
What's interesting to me is how out of date US GPS system is compared to China's BeiDou
and while most US GPS receivers will use Russia's GLONOSS, China's BeiDou is blocked
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849174
PDF of article (page 62) https://cdn.coverstand.com/61061/865273/2c88ea662e2b57478723...
The source data and analytical code (in Julia) is also available at https://lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=...
In my view people nitpicking the 404 media story are being ridiculous. Everyone in their audience knows GPS originated as a military system, indeed I think most of teh general public knows that. Bashing them for not mentioning this is just looking for something to be mad about.
These people need to mind their links. Unless that "current-issue" is the only/last one.
I'll take this opportunity to plug the CONET project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
[edit: formatting]
Someone broadcasting one time pad messages using GPS over years...
a spy operative using jogging app changing routes slightly
or maybe a cartel member embedded inside highly hostile countries like Singapore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjLnIb41DuQ I Found The US Nuclear Detection System In Space (saveitforparts)
The raw data is a bit more than 1GB per annum.
The data of interest is 176 bits every 12.5 minutes for 19 years. That is, about 17MB of data. Possibly multiplied by the number of satellites, roughly thirty.
It's not big data.