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  • Hacker News
  • Related:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500504 Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones (wsj.com) 3 days ago

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606271 Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering (space.com) 3 months ago

    by gm678
  • *10 metres
    by delta_p_delta_x
  • Wouldn't RTK help mitigate this, as the base stations would also be affected by the atmospheric disturbance?
    by 1e1a
  • It seems worth mentioning that the last time GPS had issues like this afaik, it was due to the US utilizing 'selective availability' due to national security issues. We used it somewhat famously during the 9/11 attacks.

    Also the page 404's via archive.org, but information formerly from gps.gov can still be found here: https://archive.ph/trwOo

    Edit: The selective availability page moved to https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability

    by f1ay
  • An interesting warning as Austin is blanketed by Cybercabs. I think a town full of golden driverless cars 33 feet from where they think they should be is terrifying.
    by nwbear90
  • TFA article claims: "Indeed, the solar storm of May 2024 is estimated to have cost the US agricultural industry $500 million due to disruptions in precision navigation."

    This seems hard to believe. The link provided hand waves through how it maybe could happen, and ends with an Economist just SWAGing that it could have been maybe a dollar an acre or so.

    "He estimates that affected farms lost about $1 per acre. Nationally, this equates to an estimated half-billion dollars in lost earning potential, Griffin says."

    So yeah, hard to believe was the right call. Very few farms were affected, but if we assume half of the total 900 million acres of farm land were, add 10% to get a round number, and guess it at a dollar per acre, we get the quoted big number.

    by MarkusQ
  • I'm an Amazon driver and we heavily rely on GPS for delivering. We don't just use it for navigating, we also make each delivery inside of a geofence, and the delivery location is recorded and used for future routing. When the GPS says you're a block away from where you are, you're unable to make the delivery without contacting support. I've had days where GPS problems wasted a lot of my time, so I imagine it would be expensive if it happened across an entire region. On the other hand, these kinds of disruptions are already factored into the business model and planned for, so saying it cost an industry X amount of dollars is assuming that the industry was planning for ideal conditions in the first place.
    by merryocha
  • This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people getting reincarcerated after their electronic monitoring devices mistakenly report them leaving their homes.

    Some reporting I did on the topic a few years back: https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-...

    by chaps

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