Thread

UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told

171 points · 213 comments · thm

autoexec · 1790188120 · focus · HN ↗
> 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"
1. tene80i · 1790188379 · focus · HN ↗
  Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.
  1. boredatoms · 1790188468 · focus · HN ↗
    Why does a banking app require GPS?
    vallerie · 1790189312 · focus · HN ↗
    - 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.
    autoexec · 1790191749 · focus · HN ↗
    Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/regions/aws-regions.html" rel="nofollow">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!"

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