Russia issues threat to GPS satellites

> “Russia has demonstrated a deliberate disregard for the security, safety, stability and long-term sustainability of the space domain for all nations,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said.

It's funny that a general and commander of a military organisation, from a country that started the militarisation of space, is saying this with a straight face.

I love watching how the US tries to shape American public perception - one of the interesting things that I noticed when the US decided to create a military arm for outer space was how suddenly, US media was flooded with news from government sources on how the US military has had many unexplained "encounters" with UFO (with the media even hinting to their possible extra-terrestrial origins). a PR exercise this was quite interesting to see as it was a U-turn after denying for decades that UFOs are extra-terrestrial. Looks like they now want some of the gullible public to believe that militarisation of space is a step to protect them from future "alien" threats. (After all, any sane people will question the need for spending more money on a currently useless arm of the military.)

I’m not sure why you are being so hostile, but the GP is quite correct.

Clock sync error is one of the most common reasons why credit card terminals fail to process a transaction.

GPS is one of the most common ways to set up a clock, and whilst the terminals and ATMs usually don’t get GPS time directly but through an NTP server the NTP servers do set their time via GPS.

Even if you have an atomic clock it’s usually set via GPS first.

GPS time is why you can actually get a coax to an external GPS antenna in most datacenters today.

After banks and stock exchange another victim of the clockpocalypse would be the Internet at large since whilst TLS itself doesn’t require time synchronization other dependencies such as certificate validation do.

Most modern computers are really really bad at keeping exact time without synchronization, it wouldn’t take much to knock them all out of sync and if GPS goes down it would be really really bad…

Oh and if that isn’t enough then modern cellular networks are also extremely dependent on GPS for both keeping time tolerances in check and for many other reasons.

If Russia knocks out GPS or there is a global GPS outage it will wreck the global economy in a manner that I don’t think most people can even comprehend.

You cannot overdraw your account because your computers clock is wrong.

You cannot overdraw your account because there is an issue with a credit card terminal around clock sync.

This simply cannot happen.

If it can, let me suggest that whoever is writing the account debit code wrap the balance check and debit in a transaction.

You can easily stick a rackmount atomic clock in your data center.

NTP can source from a variety of sources. There are digital RADIO time signals.

On a given exchange, again, you can still trade stocks. Folks forget that there used to be open outcry trading. Even without that an order book can be operated successfully without GPS.

Credit card terminals do not require clock sync with GPS links, they do not have GPS antennas in most cases. If they need precise time, they can timestamp when going through authorization steps to approve the transaction.

It's weird, as someone I guess older, the new generation seems to build such fragile system and think only such ultra complex systems are usable. Yes, things like Google's Spanner are cool. Yes, performance would degrade without GPS (maybe - I can think of some work arounds). But not everyone needs globally distributed consistent databases. You'd be surprised at how much of banking, stock exchange work does NOT depend on anything like these tools.

I wish the HN comments would focus on the many pretty obvious options one could deploy if GPS went away if you even believed that the current system means your bank account will be overdrawn because of a lack of GPS.

The Bank has a record of your balance, regardless of GPS. For all live network authenticated reductions of this balance, GPS time is not relevant, the bank still has access to the balance, can still decrease it, can still report an overdraft.

The entire point of a cesium clock is that it does NOT need to remain linked all the time. That is literally why you would get one in your rack.

So your statement is totally false. In fact, the BENEFIT of a cesium clock is the incredible stability in the absence of a sync.