GPS

By: Weixien Toh

A February 2013 investigation by the Los Angeles Times showed that “thousands” of high-risk sex offenders and parolees were routinely removing or disabling their GPS tracking devices. And these individuals have little risk of being caught because California's jails are apparently too full to hold them.

A team of Spanish researchers has developed a way to vastly improve in-car GPS navigation—and all it requires is some cheap, extra sensors.

Researchers have developed three attacks capable of crippling Global Positioning System infrastructure critical to the navigation of a host of military and civilian technologies including planes, ships and unnamed drones.

The scenarios developed include novel remote attacks via malicious GPS broadcasts against consumer- and professional-grade receivers which could be launched using $2500 worth of equipment.

As the global adoption of smartphones has reached impressive levels during the past couple of years or so (with absolutely no sign of stopping anytime soon), it is surely not surprising to see that hackers have turned their evil eye towards exploiting the various weaknesses of your favorite mobile device. But although in the past we’ve talked how hackers exploit various soft spots in the OS, it turns out that attackers can actually use underlying technologies to get access to private information.

Weaknesses in the technology that allows smartphone users to pinpoint themselves on a map, or check into restaurants and bars using apps such as Foursquare, could allow those users to be tracked remotely.

Ralf-Philipp Weimann, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg, reported this finding at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas yesterday. He believes that the complex mechanism by which phones get location fixes likely also hides vulnerabilities that could allow the mechanism to be used to install and run malicious code on the device.

Andrew Weissmann, general counsel for the FBI, has announced that his agency is switching off thousands of Global Positioning System-based tracking devices used for surveillance after a Supreme Court decision last month. Weissmann made the statement during a University of San Francisco School of Law symposium on communications privacy this past Friday. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Weissmann said the ruling in the US vs. Jones case, which broadly limited the use of warrantless GPS tracking devices, brought about a "sea change" at the Justice Department.

Using inexpensive cell phones along with open source software computer science Ph.D. student Denis Foo Kune at the University of Minnesota, along associate professors Nick Hopper and Yongdae Kim as well as undergraduate student John Koelndorfer, has shown that any third party can track the location of your cell phone without your knowledge.

Solar flares emitted by the sun on the morning of Jan. 23 concerned airlines enough to reroute its Polar route flights but may improve aurora borealis activity in Alaska.

Delta airlines announced that it had rerouted flights from China to the U.S. that traverse the North Pole making  direct fuel saving flights over the arctic. While there is no danger to passengers the airline reported that it changed routes primarily due to the possibility of radio interference from the solar flares.