Russia issues threat to GPS satellites

Re:Russia issues threat to GPS satellites by mikewarot on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:38AM (#29427911)

The thing is, once something becomes commonplace, people build in obligations against it without thinking about it. All those layers that civilization depends upon have a cost, and as long as the cost is paid, all is good.

We're talking about the sudden loss of precision timekeeping, which could desync all sorts of things in unexpected ways. It's my understanding that precision time is required to make even the cell phone networks properly operate, and they'd fall apart without it.

If Russia were to take out GPS, the effects would be deep and expensive to correct, if we could. There's a very small, but non-zero chance it could collapse our supply chains. As time goes on, this chance grows, unless there is an active effort to keep backup systems viable. We all know how actively the US maintains infrastructure 8(

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Re:Russia issues threat to GPS satellites by whoknowswhat11 on Friday December 03, 2021 @06:27AM (#29428828)

The claim was about ATM withdrawals and credit card swipes. Ie, without a GPS clock there would be a "clock sync" error in the ATM machine, and no cash could be drawn.

I continue to remain EXTREMELY skeptical of this claim. It makes almost no sense.

Please note that GPS is not the source of time, NIST is, and you can get NIST time in a variety of ways including over the internet if needed. And as I have been describing, many of these described errors are around systems with one source of truth (ie, not google spanner type globally distributed databases). So they make even less sense.

Note I'm familiar with clock skew issues and errors in authentication and other systems. These issues show up when errors are in minutes and seconds not microseconds.

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