**TIME IS A RADIO SIGNAL AND SOMEONE IS JAMMING IT** MEANWHILE, twenty thousand kilometres
**TIME IS A RADIO SIGNAL AND SOMEONE IS JAMMING IT**
MEANWHILE, twenty thousand kilometres up.
You think GPS is a map.
It is not a map. It is a CLOCK. The map is a side effect of the clock. Everything else is a side effect of the clock.
The clock arrives from orbit at a power level below the background noise of the universe. You cannot hear it. Your receiver reconstructs it out of static, correctly, several times a second, and has done so quietly for thirty years while nobody put it on a register.
Forty percent of European air traffic now operates in regions seriously affected by interference. Baltic flight disruptions rose fivefold in a year. In January, thirteen European states and Iceland issued a joint warning to the international maritime community.
They wrote a LETTER.
Researchers off the Polish coast found positioning unavailable roughly seventeen percent of the time during the worst weeks. Not degraded. GONE. They then established that the interference is not one transmitter but a synchronised network of them, running several generations of equipment, switching on and off together, and — this is the part to sit with — partially jamming its own spoofing signal.
Somebody built that. Somebody maintains it. Somebody has a change process for it.
The Swedish Transport Agency reports that since the end of May, spoofing has become more systematic and more widespread. Spoofing is not the loss of the signal. Spoofing is the ARRIVAL of a confident, well-formed, entirely false signal, which your equipment accepts without complaint, because your equipment was designed in a decade when nobody lied to it.
Now the part nobody has costed.
The timestamp on the trade. The phase angle on the protection relay. The handover between two cell towers. The sequence-of-events log you will one day hand to a regulator to prove what happened first. All of it is the same clock. All of it is that signal. All of it is arriving from space, for free, from a satellite constellation operated by a foreign government, at a power level below the noise, through a receiver on a pole that somebody bolted to the roof in 2011 and never touched again.
The Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine has reviewed this and finds NO ACTION REQUIRED, as the clocks currently agree.
Maureen has marked it green.
Niko summarised the joint warning as broadly positive.
Martin signed the timing resilience statement. Martin has not been in the building since 2019. Martin's approvals are timestamped. They are timestamped very precisely. They are timestamped using the clock.
Nobody is coming to fix this.
The clock is outside the building.
The clock has always been outside the building.
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Scott Gardner ·