Russians seek answers to central Moscow GPS anomaly(yahoo.com)
yahoo.com
Russians seek answers to central Moscow GPS anomaly
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russians-seek-answers-central-moscow-gps-anomaly-091145932.html
14 comments
Reminds me of China's use of GCJ-02 instead of WGS-84 (the international standard for geodetics). GCJ-02 intentionally obfuscates coordinates to a random degree, for "national security" purposes. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
People might be surprised by this but GPS jammers are widely available, here's an article about a truck driver in New Jersey who got caught with one 3 years ago:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/08/man_fined_32000_for...
So it's not like the Kremlin has started using some highly sophisticated countermeasures, I bet you can order GPS jammers from Alibaba.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/08/man_fined_32000_for...
So it's not like the Kremlin has started using some highly sophisticated countermeasures, I bet you can order GPS jammers from Alibaba.
If, as suggested by the article, it's acrively telling you you're somewhere else, that's an order of magnitude more sophisticated than the alibaba jammers which truckers use to just stop their trackers.
This might be accomplished by something no more sophisticated than a repeater, they're cheap and readily available to provide GPS location inside buildings. Simply stick an antenna on the roof and the indoor transmitters will cause indoor devices to resolve the location of the roof antenna.
I wonder if the same principle could be used to pipe an authentic signal a few miles then amplify it sufficiently to be preferred by nearby devices
I wonder if the same principle could be used to pipe an authentic signal a few miles then amplify it sufficiently to be preferred by nearby devices
They are spoofing Moscow airports coordinates, which suggests it's an anti-drone measure (usually drones have no-fly zones pre-installed in the firmware).
The most interesting takeaway is that the US government managed to get their governmental buildings added as no-fly zones to the drones, but the Russian government couldn’t get their no-fly zones added.
Or, knowing the Russian penchant for secrecy surrounding the locations of government buildings and installations, they may have decided to not even try. Kind of like the way that plat maps for Soviet cities were intentionally obfuscated so as to confuse intelligence agencies (and local drivers).
The location of buildings in moscow is pretty well-known, though. But there have been also discussions in other countries about trying to get governmental buildings added to the no-fly list for drones, and having issues with that, so it might actually be the reason.
Seems like a case where everyone pretty clearly knows what the problem is, and who is causing it.
Doesn't Russia have their own GPS system as well? (GLONASS)
They're not worried about drones running off of GLONASS...
[1][https://translate.yandex.ru/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftjou...]