this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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A talk from the hacker conference 39C3 about the Baltic Jammer (which causes GPS interferences in the baltic sea) and how a civilian project plans to protect against it with existing infrastructure. (in English)

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[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I live in a suburb to the north of Stockholm, I have experienced the GPS jamming first hand.

There were a few days when my car's inbuilt GPS thought I was driving around in another suburb on the other side of the city.

Does anyone know if GPS has the abillity to do signed packets?

I mean, I'd rather the GPS fail completely, than giving me false data.

[–] SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago

Civilian-use GPS signals are unencrypted specifically because they want to be as open as possible. It was originally a military only system, that was only opened up in 2000 after a civilian airliner blundered into Russian airspace and got shot down.

Military-only signals are encrypted. There are also newer civilian-only signals with checksums and on alternative frequencies but there aren't enough of the new sats up yet to live on it fully. Check whether your phone supports dual-band GPS, or specifically the L5 signal. There are even apps you can download that will display the full output of your GPS chip, including every satellite in view.

[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 2 points 3 days ago

Pretty sure that gps is a plaintext broadcast. It's nice because it's universally accessible, but it's a target now that people rely on it.

Back in the 90s my head was full of maps of my region because I drove a lot for work. Mobile online GPS is a game changer, since you get traffic updates in real time. While I suppose you could review your route ahead of time, there is not a known way to get relevant traffic updates unless you have a radio station just to that effect.

My real concern for you would be a sudden information blackout.

At least, it did not tell you, you were in Kaliningrad... 😉