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autoexec 49 minutes ago [-]
> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.
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"
jameshart 44 minutes ago [-]
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
autoexec 28 minutes ago [-]
All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.
jameshart 21 minutes ago [-]
All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
autoexec 18 minutes ago [-]
> All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
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.
carlosjobim 21 minutes ago [-]
Do people write cheques in the UK?
autoexec 14 minutes ago [-]
There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.
TedDoesntTalk 14 minutes ago [-]
Or checks?
baliex 16 minutes ago [-]
No
bigyabai 33 minutes ago [-]
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
autoexec 7 minutes ago [-]
At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.
pmg101 28 minutes ago [-]
Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?
someonebaggy 23 minutes ago [-]
I didn't realise only people at war used cash
jameshart 17 minutes ago [-]
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bigyabai 21 minutes ago [-]
Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems.
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.
sieabahlpark 36 minutes ago [-]
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tene80i 45 minutes ago [-]
Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.
notahacker 41 minutes ago [-]
It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.
autoexec 40 minutes ago [-]
Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.
vallerie 35 minutes ago [-]
not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
autoexec 32 minutes ago [-]
> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
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?
mylies43 26 minutes ago [-]
Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website
25 minutes ago [-]
vallerie 27 minutes ago [-]
The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
QDwQ1 18 minutes ago [-]
ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables
vallerie 12 minutes ago [-]
Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.
It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.
asplake 32 minutes ago [-]
In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.
0x1ch 18 minutes ago [-]
I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.
boredatoms 43 minutes ago [-]
Why does a banking app require GPS?
vallerie 29 minutes ago [-]
- The UK is an island nation
- 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.
nickweb 41 minutes ago [-]
GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
O3marchnative 35 minutes ago [-]
That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.
ChocolateGod 34 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
fiftyacorn 28 minutes ago [-]
Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
autoexec 38 minutes ago [-]
Data collection and targeted advertising
itsafarqueue 38 minutes ago [-]
To track you
someonebaggy 39 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't. They're making shit up.
sieabahlpark 33 minutes ago [-]
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brightball 15 minutes ago [-]
Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.
someonebaggy 39 minutes ago [-]
The UK's largest export is banking (i.e. money laundering).
Not a strange thing at all. London sees itself as the competitor for the finance capital of the world. Why would you think it's strange?
mgaldys4 57 minutes ago [-]
In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.
ExoticPearTree 46 minutes ago [-]
I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
nradov 27 minutes ago [-]
This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.
someonebaggy 21 minutes ago [-]
Someone tell that to DDOS
41 minutes ago [-]
iAMkenough 30 minutes ago [-]
one step closer to star wars
EA-3167 29 minutes ago [-]
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
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.
ck2 1 hours ago [-]
this should end well
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?
cheschire 1 hours ago [-]
Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.
GolfPopper 1 hours ago [-]
U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986:
That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.
The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
I'm laughing at how many bots wanted to share their trivia with you after this post
notahacker 36 minutes ago [-]
Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
I mean isn't space X testing satellites with sat to sat lasers?
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.
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?
gwbas1c 20 minutes ago [-]
Because that is one of the methods used to verify that everyone is complying with treaties, such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties.
nradov 4 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately it's a little too late for that, those treaties are effectively dead anyway. Not a good situation but that is our reality.
mosura 1 hours ago [-]
The British seem reduced to their historic state of piracy to restore the empire:
“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”
Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.
nonethewiser 48 minutes ago [-]
Its OK for the UK to be strong
someonebaggy 19 minutes ago [-]
And also, all lives matter.
But the meaning of a statement is not solely determined by the words in it.
unrented7977 41 minutes ago [-]
If you take a look back at history, literally everyone would disagree. A strong England has done unimaginable damage to almost every other society on the planet.
zahrc 38 minutes ago [-]
Any strong empire, nation or person in power has.
With great power yadda yadda
vondur 25 minutes ago [-]
Really, what kind of damage? Granted their cuisine isn’t the best, but it’s hardly damaging.
graemep 21 minutes ago [-]
England is not the UK.
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
password54321 47 seconds ago [-]
Not really sure who we mean by "people". "People" will do business with the UK but that's not the same as "like" and "trust". If you mean regular people like from SEA that you have spoken to, yeah those people are generally nice and will act nice to your face. But many of them from those I have spoken to hold their grievances.
ChocolateGod 30 minutes ago [-]
I don't think we'd rather be speaking French right now.
nonethewiser 31 minutes ago [-]
Let me clarify.
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
mosura 17 minutes ago [-]
If they were to do something positive with it then it would be nice.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.
bigyabai 50 minutes ago [-]
Nobody is pretending to build or defend anything positive in space. Efforts like Starlink are blatantly and publicly a synthetic aperature radar constellation for military use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
wil421 47 minutes ago [-]
Of course it is. That’s why they didn’t really care at first if Russia was using it in Ukraine. I thought the military had their own constellation but maybe not.
ab5tract 43 minutes ago [-]
And in that respect, it was a deviation from the propaganda of previous eras, which did in fact frame efforts as building and defending positive things in space.
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"
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.
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.
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).
https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
- 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.
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
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2
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/CORONA_(satellite)
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.
“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”
Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.
But the meaning of a statement is not solely determined by the words in it.
With great power yadda yadda
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
Instead they are hell bent on criticizing and tearing down anyone that does, especially when their finance bros are invested in the legacy competition.