Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?
Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.
Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?
For most things the fallback is going to be everything we used to use. Maps, stellar navigation, inertial navigation that sort of thing.
Guided weapons wise, terrain mapping is pretty common for cruise missiles. Storm Shadow, for example uses GPS, terrain and inertial guidance systems. Trident uses inertia and stellar navigation.
As for why it hasn't proliferated into civilian use? Mostly it has its just the old things. You can perfectly well drive your car with a road map and sign posts. Pilots still train to use dead reckoning and beacons. Etc.
I had an old colleague who in a previous life worked on an incredibly accurate positioning system that was effectively a brief case that knew where it was at all times. The story he told was the DoD made them an offer they couldn't refuse, and everything became secret. I'm pretty sure the company in question is still in business.
I'm not trying to say it's not legal but it might not exactly be legal?
”Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet.
One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.”
[1] https://www.paintersforstal.co.uk/news/the-history-of-beacon...
https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-military-nail...
We're also going to need a prompt launch capability to replace attrition losses. There should be warehouses full of spare navigation, reconnaissance, and communications satellites ready to mount on a reusable booster and launch within hours. Concerns have been raised over a "Kessler syndrome" due to orbital debris but in lower orbits with significant atmospheric drag this won't be a serious problem.
That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?
We will have to kiss goodbye to any future space launches, existing satellites are likely to get knocked out and ultimately our frontier space era will grind to a hault.
For fairly obvious reasons, militaries that have it would rather it stay in their hands, for fear of creating a non-state peer competitor that can do cheap long-range strikes on strategic targets.
It's fairly likely it'll fall into private hands anyway though, because anyone who can afford the prices for commercial satellite imagery could build such a thing.
There are also about half a dozen rival GPS like satellite systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Simi...
The location system in your phone often uses a resilient, non-GPS backup based on cataloguing the locations of WiFi routers. Not due to enemy action but your Starbucks having a building over it. There are two main systems, one from Google, one from Apple. It can make a noticable difference if you are playing something like Pokemon Go. The thingy can be in range with one system but not the other.
Once a stealth technology is integrated into civilian life, it's no longer stealth, and you lose the element of surprise if you have to use it in warfare. If somebody _does_ feel they have a clever secret work-around, the incentive is pretty high to keep it a secret.
Modern cruise missiles and stuff like Storm Shadow, Taurus etc. already rely on sensor fusion - GPS, inertial navigation, radar, optics and probably a ton more to always keep track of the position.
Assuming Starlink is a no-show for whatever reason, airliners and ships will have to revert back to stationary navigation aids aka your good old light towers and radio beacons.
Which systems are actually getting deployed, and in what pieces of equipment? No idea, I imagine that's super duper classified.
On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
[2] https://www.gps.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/CGSICMeeting...
... Star navigation, INS, magnetic navigation...
But nothing like we have today.
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Veritasium did a video on it recently https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
if it's an active frequency hopping radar can you react in time to ruin its image?
can a ground based laser track it well enough to dazzle its optical sensors?
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
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or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
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Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
Real accuracy is a matter of application. For mainstream civilian use the 20-30cm offered by Galileo/GPS is beyond real accuracy. It gets even better for specialized civilian use or with the aid of differential GNSS (low single digit cm). You'd have to think real hard for a reason to need better precision on a global scale especially if that involves any extra cost.
Can't say how much of a priority accurate positioning would be for civilians during an armed conflict.
In a true Kessler scenario where LEO is denied for an extended period of time, I expect a variation of that strategy is how we would replace GPS for most civilian use cases. Likely by using cell towers to triangulate, possibly enhanced with additional transmitters to improve accuracy and coverage. Pure cell tower triangulation would have much worse coverage than GPS, obviously especially in rural areas where cell service is often already poor, but also anywhere that getting a signal from multiple towers isn't easy or possible. Cell towers are never distant enough to use the relativity-based timing tricks GPS relies on, so multiple signals would be required to triangulate. We'd likely end up with substantially less precise positioning, maybe something more on the order of the 10-20m of error we used to see with GPS before the US stopped limiting civilian access to the deaccuratized version. Cell tower triangulation also obviously doesn't work for aviation or oceanic shipping, where trident-like inertial+stellar nav would probably be the only workable option.
Pretty sure the Spanish Armada was <150 total ships, of which only a small subset would be the big galleon things. (And then my knowledge hits a wall, idk what the difference between a galleon and ship-of-the-line/battleship is)
I'm not sure how much to trust the rest of that website.
Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole.
In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North.
EDIT : The Wikihow article shows it better.
https://www.wikihow.com/Use-an-Analog-Watch-as-a-Compass
It is an old Army/SAS trick for keeping baring without a compass.
I doubt officers or crew would ever have to resort to a sextant, but that's besides the point. It's the type of thing that's integral to learning navigation theory and building tacit knowledge that's fundamental to the job.
EDIT: 2016 article discussing restoration of traditional navigation instruction: https://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-bac...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/10/...
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Can already see the poor headlines of "Snapdragon chips used to bomb schools!"
(I’m mildly curious what their ground stations in Central Europe look like from this perspective).
It's entirely clear that they cut cables and intend to cut more. It's not training, it's current aggression.
Or both.
GPS jamming is for recievers.
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The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...
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In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.
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It wasn't. Poland was formally independent country, but practically under control of Moscow.
With great power yadda yadda
Thank the Brits for that.
How’s the modern world in general working out for your nation? Would it be better off in pre-industrialised times? Do you enjoy being clothed and well fed; do you enjoy travel via bike, car, train, or plane and not needing to do back-breaking manual labour; do you like clean water and sanitation? Do you like to kick back and watch the TV after a long day? Or, listen to radio? Or maybe you prefer to make a long distance call to a friend? Assuming of course that you like turbines for power generation from coal, gas, nuclear, wind, or waves.
Yep, all of the above require the Brits again… [1]
Do you feel any pangs of irony when posting your dislike of Brits via the world-wide web, on a Turing machine based computer, powered by an ARM chip? ;)
Do you like sport? Music? Literature… ok I’ll stop now …
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
I am beginning to enjoy how deranged HN’s hatred of the British is. I try to explain to fellow Brits how much Americans in particular now hate us and it doesn’t register with them.
But the meaning of a statement is not solely determined by the words in it.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.
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Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
Is it usual for companies in the UK to just not pay their employees?
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- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...
No, they do not. Attacking nato is suicidal behavior. Pretending like the war with ukraine is "expansionist" in intent instead of establishing a sphere of influence is just disingenuous. Was it stupid? Yes. Does it mean Russia is going to invade poland? Fuck no. Stop reading propaganda. You're smarter than your leaders. Act like it!
My experience is nationalists (and bigots, and especially ethnonationalists) do have greivances, and some westernised intellectuals have ideas about decolonisation etc., but most people do not
The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.
It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.
It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.
This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.
All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.
But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.
Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.
This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.
And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.
Any power.
Even the tiniest bit.
And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.
My frustration is likely just showing, on this specific topic.
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If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.
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That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.
Also, cool username =)
Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.
I'm guessing you'd walk into your bank and ask for one. You can probably order one from their app somewhere.
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The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.
Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"
Also isn't GPS always wireless ?
The networks (including physical IP networking) that underpin banking require a very accurate source of time to function. This is frequently farmed out to GPS, rather than use local atomic clocks. This makes GPS (or rather GNSS) a single point of failure.
I'm surprised so few people on HN appear to be aware of this.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
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So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.
https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
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