The Empty Field That Wasn't: GPS, OTAD and Two Decades of Encrypted Broadcasts

(lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com)

41 points | by lordgilman 10 hours ago

3 comments

  • moritzwarhier 6 hours ago
  • timeinput 7 hours ago
    This is an interesting article. It has a very strong AI accent.

    I really wish I could tell how real it is. When some part of it I can tell is AI slop, how much of it is AI slop? Inside GNSS has always been a marketing rag with sometimes some interesting articles.

    The author is a security researcher, so maybe poking at GPS bits makes sense, but talking about floating point bit depth? There's too much slop for me to figure out if there's anything of real interest or if this is just a hallucination.

    Edit. After reading more carefully this is 100% AI slop. Inside GNSS published Steven Murdoch's chat gpt session. Maybe some data was transmitted? The only way you'll actually know is to redo the research your self. There are many fabrications / confabulations that clearly happen with AI in the text.

    • rcxdude 7 hours ago
      I've worked with the guy credited in the article before, so I'll vouch for his general credibility and the underlying information likely being solid: there's good evidence for this field being some kind of encrypted data stream, probably key distribution, and the behaviour has changed over time. But the breathless LLM-tone really did make it hard to read.
      • timeinput 6 hours ago
        Cool. Some data may have been transmitted over GPS. That's interesting and note worthy.

        If only that was all that was posted.

        Instead there's this stuff that makes me question Steven Murdoch's research practices. If you're willing to publish slop are his research practices slop? Can I trust any paper he creates in the future when I can tell this one has factual errors? Why should I bother reading it?

        I actually think he's a good researcher from a little reading. I wish he hadn't done this.

        • andyjohnson0 1 hour ago
          > Can I trust any paper he creates in the future when I can tell this one has factual errors?

          What are the factual errors?

        • rcxdude 2 hours ago
          I agree
    • sjm217 5 hours ago
      The code is all available and every claim is traceable back to the statistical analysis. Results are reproducible from the original data which is archived on Zenodo. Further analysis would be very welcome. https://github.com/sjmurdoch/gps-special-messages
    • ekelsen 5 hours ago
      So much AI. I stopped immediately. He might have something interesting to say, but apparently not important enough for him to write about it himself, so not important enough for me to read it either.
  • transistor-man 7 hours ago
    This is a fantastic writeup