Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is to strike their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.
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?
It’s probably trying to disrupt the Russian GPS jamming satellites.
Veritasium did a video on it recently https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA
has UK declared war on someone already?
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?
Because that is one of the methods used to verify that everyone is complying with treaties, such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties.
Unfortunately it's a little too late for that, those treaties are effectively dead anyway. Not a good situation but that is our reality.
In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.
I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.
Someone tell that to DDOS
nothing to see here; orbit on
So maybe that's why the UK talks about Israel's "right to defend itself" as a justification for flattening Gaza - they also want to "defend themselves" by attacking other states.
one step closer to star wars
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.
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?
Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.
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:
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere
Been there, done that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
If they're heavy enough, it doubles as a space fountain.
railgun microSD
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
I'm laughing at how many bots wanted to share their trivia with you after this post
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...
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.
More than testing. That is their primary on-orbit link method for Starlink satellites as of 2.5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-laser-system-is-beaming...
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Neutrinos
Gravitational waves
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Its OK for the UK to be strong
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.
How are those vaccines, antibiotics, and antiseptics working out for your nation? How many people would be dead in “every other society” otherwise?
Thank the Brits for that.
Also, how’s the modern world in general working out for your nation?
Yep, Brits again… [1]
Any strong empire, nation or person in power has.
With great power yadda yadda
Really, what kind of damage? Granted their cuisine isn’t the best, but it’s hardly damaging.
England is not the UK.
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
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.
I don't think we'd rather be speaking French right now.
Let me clarify.
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.
And also, all lives matter.
But the meaning of a statement is not solely determined by the words in it.
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.
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
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.
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> 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"
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.
If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.
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.
What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?
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.
The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.
It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.
So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?
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.
You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.
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.
Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?
We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.
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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.
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.
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All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.
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.
> 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.
A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
Also, cool username =)
> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.
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.
Do people write cheques in the UK?
> when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now.
I'm guessing you'd walk into your bank and ask for one. You can probably order one from their app somewhere.
I’m older (not in UK, in EU) and cheques are something weird from old movies. Never seen one in real life and concept is really strange.
A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products.
So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.
There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.
No
Certainly not spelt (or spelled) like that.
Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.
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.
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.
There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.
Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.
not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
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).
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
Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.
I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"
That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.
That’s beyond about 90% of the population.
Why does a banking app require GPS?
- 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.
Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).
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!"
Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links.
Also isn't GPS always wireless ?
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).
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
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
Data collection and targeted advertising
To track you
It doesn't. They're making shit up.
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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.
In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.
I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.
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.
I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera?
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?
Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.
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.
Is there something on your banking app that you couldn't do by browsing to your banks website?
Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.
Yeah, no one was saying it was world-ending. Good for you, I guess?
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?
TIL my banking app goes via satellite internet /s
I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...
I think the general assumption is GPS is denied in most combat zones, it's constantly being jammed in and around Ukraine.
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’m sure we’ll go back to beacons [1] here in the UK
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...
Maps, compass, and celestial navigation.
> Presumably when World War 3 kicks off
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 may have enough satellite imagery to build visual place recognition system. Geoguesst but for tanks
There's a bunch of stuff for using terrain to figure out where you are [1], generally used for missiles and planes though, not sure if works well from a ground perspective.
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...
I’d assume one of the things you’d do in anticipation of a war of space-denial scale it bomb your own landscapes a bit for this reason.
That and cut undersea cables. Russia has been messing around with them for a while now.
They are actively training for shit, it sure looks like. Same with other sabotage acts all over Europe in the last couple of years.
Doesn't make any sense to have merchants dragging anchor in active war. These actions are meeting their goals, not serving as preparation.