Powerwalls: engineering cars in virtual reality

Radio appearance: Transparent PCs, injectable heart cells and structural batteries

My latest appearance on Monocle 24 radio's Briefing show, discussing Microsoft's transparent Minority Report-style PC, an injectable gel that helps regrow damaged heart tissue, and car body parts that also function as batteries. Oh and there was something about iPads.

The technology to prevent GPS jamming attacks already exists - we just can't afford it yet.

Jamming and spoofing can leave GPS useless Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Ships colliding at sea, stock markets crashing, transport networks in chaos: these are some of the nightmare scenarios that researchers studying GPS-jamming techniques this week warned we could be facing if suitable countermeasures aren’t produced.

The newspapers gave substantial coverage on Wednesday to a conference at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in west London, which highlighted the dangers society is facing as we become increasingly dependent on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) like America’s GPS and the forthcoming European Galileo.

The problem is that GNSS satellite transmissions, which are used not just for navigation but also to provide time stamps for transactions at the stock market and to alert trains when to stop at specific stations, can easily be jammed or falsified (spoofed) with fake signals.

Doing so might be illegal but jammers are cheaply and easily available over the internet and can be small enough to plug into a car’s cigarette lighter. A recent Technology Strategy Board-funded study led by Chronos Technology estimated that between 60 and 450 jamming incidents occur every day in the UK.

Many of these probably came from portable devices in vehicles, maybe from drivers who wanted to take a break without their boss tracking them or maybe from criminal gangs stealing shipments of goods.

As Dr Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas warned, criminals interfering with GNSS signals at a stock exchange in order to manipulate the market, could cause trading algorithms that monitor unusual activity to pull large amounts of money out and cause a crash.

Defence expertise

With GNSS being such an established technology integrated so deeply into our infrastructure, it seems amazing that authorities seem so unprepared for these scenarios.

But in the defence sector the problem is well understood and technology already exists for preventing jamming or spoofing attacks. In fact, industry delegates at the conference told me how frustrated they were that civil sectors were still dwelling on the scale of the issue instead of focusing on the solutions.

The problem is that current anti-jamming technology is very expensive. Not a problem when you’re building a billion-pound jet fighter, but different for the small delivery firm trying to monitor its fleet.

However, defence firms are looking at producing products for the commercial market and there are plenty of ideas out there about other solutions to the jamming and spoofing problem that need to be explored.

The best place to address the problem is in the satellite system itself, said Lyn Dutton, a GNSS specialist for Thales. Military GPS signals are already encrypted and so difficult to spoof, while new signals are being designed that use multiple frequencies and so require much more powerful equipment to jam.

Todd Humphreys has also proposed creating an authentication signal inside the public GPS transmission that would only require a software update for existing receivers to use it – but says authorities have shown little interest in this idea so far.

Europe's Galileo system will be vulnerable to jamming Credit: ESA

One solution to at least detecting when GNSS is being jammed could be based on the fact that most jammers are very simple pieces of equipment that blast out signals far stronger than those coming from satellites.

Receiving devices make internal measurements in order to correctly set their signal gain control, which means they could detect these ‘loud’ jamming signals but this information isn’t currently used.

‘GPS receiver designs need to be tweaked to allow this simple piece of information to be made available to the end user or tracking device to help warn of jamming or log jamming activity,’ said Dr Ramsey Faragher from BAE Systems, who remained tight-lipped on whether the company was developing this idea commercially.

Although these loud signals account for the vast majority of jamming signals, as Lyn Dutton pointed out, the really dangerous ones therefore are the quieter ones that only just cover up the real transmissions, and more sophisticated technology would be needed to detect them.

Spoofing signals are more difficult to detect but this is commonly done with expensive multiple-element antennas that can determine whether the signal is coming from the expected direction (satellites in the sky).

Michael Jones of Roke Manor Research said the company was developing the world’s first true anti-spoofing technology that would locate and block out false signals, and that there were several ways of detecting spoofing although he declined to say which the firm was using.

What he did reveal was that the blocking method was the same as for existing anti-jamming equipment, which Roke Manor is also working on turning from an expensive defence technology into a commercial one.

Blocking fake signals

Most GNSS antennas receive signals from all directions, but devices such as the Gajt produced by Qinetiq and Canadian firm Novatel use multiple antenna elements to nullify all signals except those coming from the sky (the real satellite ones).

The alternative to these solutions is to use other radio signals to triangulate positions and compare them to GNSS readings to see if they are accurate. Mobile phones already do this to a degree but BAE has developed more sophisticated radio positioning technologies that take different signal measurements to learn about the signal environment.

The dangers of GNSS jamming have ignited a debate about how much we should depend on the technology and the importance of having alternatives should it go down. This has led to renewed interest in the terrestrial radio navigation system LORAN that was used by ships in North America until 2010, and its enhanced successor eLORAN, which is curently used in the UK.

But as some delegates at the NPL conference pointed out, GNSS has provided an incredible leap in our navigation capabilities and we should be careful not to over-exaggerate its problems.

‘When computer viruses first appeared we didn’t go back to pen and paper, we created solutions,’ said Michael Jones. These solutions to GNSS-jamming now exist but we currently face a trade-off in how much risk we’re willing to accept because of their high costs.

It’s now up to engineers in both the defence and civil sectors to take on the challenge of developing cheaper countermeasures to stop GNSS being abused and enable its full potential to be maintained.

This article first appeared on The Engineer.

MIRA's Network-Assisted Vehicle: testing autonomous driving systems

Outrage and bluster: when silly comments distract from the really important debate on unemployment

Another day, another Conservative politician blaming unemployment on a feckless and lazy underclass. Well, not quite, but minister for disabled people Maria Miller did tell BBC 5 Live that there wasn’t a shortage of jobs. Rather, she said, there was a lack of appetite for those jobs available and that it was important to make sure people had the right skills and didn’t fear the risk of going into work.

Of course you only have to glance at the figures (2.68 million job seekers against 463,000 vacancies) to realise that saying there is no shortage of work is ludicrous. But, as all too often happens in these cases, the uproar over the silly parts of the minister’s comments mean anything sensible in there gets overlooked.

In Britain’s engineering industries, barely a week goes by without some report or company warning of an existing or impending skills shortage. Either there are too few engineering students or too many of them are choosing to go work in the City. These words are often met with incredulity by substantial numbers of the engineering community who feel undervalued, underpaid and under attack from frequent redundancy announcements.

One of the more nuanced takes on this issue is that there isn’t a skills shortage so much as a skills mismatch: some jobs can’t be filled because there aren’t enough people with the appropriate skillset while some highly trained workers languish in jobs that don’t employ their full abilities.

The exact situation is a complex one to describe accurately. A December 2011 report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) on recruiting unemployed people found “a significant mismatch between the composition of jobs in the UK economy and the composition of occupations sought by unemployed job seekers”. Meanwhile, “the unemployed cohort consists predominantly of people who previously worked in low skilled, entry level occupations.”

But another UKCES report from 2009 said that while an oversupply of high skilled jobs and low skilled labour had created “both unemployment and unused skills”, the skills gap was small relative to most countries and that growing numbers of high-skilled people significantly exceeded the growth in high-skill jobs.

The problem, the 2009 report said, was actually due to a lack of demand for skills, not a lack of supply. “The UK has too few high performance workplaces, too few employers producing high quality goods and services, too few businesses in high value added sectors.” The solution is to invest as much in raising employer ambition as in enhancing people’s skills.

The initial findings from the first UK-wide employer skills survey published in December 2011 appear to back this up, recognising that while only pockets of the economy suffered from skills deficiencies, where they did exist they were likely to impact on businesses.

There might be 20 or more applicants for every job in some areas but if companies can’t recruit the right person they might choose to postpone hiring, creating more work for the rest of the staff and preventing the firm from meeting customer orders. UKCES wants to raise ambition and encourage more employer to train their staff to help ease these problems and bring Britain’s skill demands up to an internationally competitive level.

The point to take from all this is that the job market isn’t as simple as a lack of skills, confidence or determination on the part of the unemployed, but that all these issues have to be looked at in the context of an intricate job market of different labour and skill demands.

If Maria Miller had been more subtle in her approach then she might have sparked a much-needed debate on the UK’s skills mismatch and what we can do to address it. Instead, the Tory in her felt the need to deny the unemployment crisis before raising the problem, undermining her own point and prompting outrage and bluster from the Left that, although justified, continued the distraction away from the more important issues.

Why you can't always trust the broadsheets either

Trust in the media is up we learnt last week from a survey from PR firm Edelman. Given the hacking scandal this seems like a miracle, but a closer look at the stats shows almost 70 per cent of the UK public distrust the tabloids. About half of people actively trust the broadsheets, a position it's easy to fall into when you see the work of hard-working journalists going after important stories for newspapers with global reputations.

When you're covering the same stories as broadsheet journalists, you get an insight into how often they get facts wrong. But while everyone makes honest mistakes, it's a lot more disturbing to see reporters from trusted brands like the Telegraph and even the Guardian twisting stories to their own agendas.

This week I covered a report into the comparative lifetime costs of overhead and underground power cables. Not exactly gripping stuff you might think but it's an emotive issue for some, especially those who live in areas of previously untouched countryside where pylons are due to be erected.

The report made clear that despite improvements in technology even the cheapest underground cables are always at least five times more expensive than overhead lines over their lifetime: no less than £10.2m per km compared to £2.2m for pylon cables. That's a lot of extra money to spend when you think that the UK will need around 350km of transmission lines in the next ten years. When most expensive, buried cables cost £24.1m, taking the total costs even higher.

Even though the difference in estimated costs has come down, these figures for underground transmission are still eye-wateringly high - surely a disappointment for those who oppose pylons, especially as the country isn't exactly flush with cash at the moment. But if you'd read some of the upmarket newspapers you'd think the report had paved the way for the diggers to come out and start burying cables straight away.

Overhead lines are many millions of pounds cheaper than underground cables but apparently th Credit: National Grid

"Could underground cables save our countryside from march of the pylons?" asked the Telegraph. Not likely is the answer, but the paper focused on the fact that the difference in estimated building costs had fallen from thirty to ten times as much, compared with research from the 1960s.

So eager was the paper to stress that underground cables were supposedly much cheaper than previously thought that it managed to get the crucial monetary figures wrong, claiming overhead lines cost £22m per km (this has now been corrected but see the comments at the bottom drawing attention to the mistake). And it falsely claimed buried cables were more efficient, when energy losses are broadly similar to overhead lines.

The Guardian likes to think itself the most trustworthy of all the papers, and most of the time I'd probably agree. But its coverage of this story was little better, and the paper allowed itself to be led by the reaction of vocal lobby group the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) rather than the sober facts of the engineers who had compiled the report.

When the report was presented to journalists, its authors were keen to stress that we shouldn't focus on the ratio of costs at the expense of the figures. Yet that's exactly what the broadsheets did.

Targeting stories at a specific readership is vital for all journalists and publications, but it needn't and shouldn't be done in a way that skews the story so much that key facts are obscured (or worse reported inaccurately). Broadsheets in particular are often good at telling the story behind the stats but in this instance they've moulded the research to fit their own arguments.

And how did those untrustworthy tabloids do? The Mirror reported the story straight, while the paper most associated with spinning a story to get its readers' pulses racing, the Daily Mail, managed to speak directly to its readership's interests without masking the truth.

Don't judge a book by a cover and don't judge a newspaper solely on the colour of its masthead.