Tag: GPS

The sensor in your pocket

Wayze brings together crowdsourcing, cloud and smartphone GPS services to create a useful product.

Very soon your smartphone will be able to warn you if you’re driving too fast reports VentureBeat.

Israeli founded and Google owned traffic application Wayze will soon give alerts to users in certain countries if they’re over the speed limit, the service announced yesterday.

Wayze is unique in that it’s one of the first genuine crowdsourcing programs where users contributed information on traffic conditions and it’s doing the same thing in gathering speed limit information.

The fascinating thing about Wayze is how it brings together crowdsourcing, cloud and smartphone GPS services to create a useful product.

Wayze also shows how the smartphone is the ultimate personal Internet of Things sensor, that’s something which shouldn’t be overlooked.

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Disrupting the GPS network

Spoofing GPS signals presents a real risk to many industries and businesses.

Another day, another technology security issues – this time The Economist reports the Global Positioning System can easily be hacked to alter the courses and positions of vehicles and equipment, something proved by University of Texas researchers taking control of a super yacht by setting up a false GPS signal.

Given the importance of the GPS, this is a significant problem. There’s no end of mischief that malicious individuals could get up to by distorting the signals in their neighbourhoods.

One idea that immediately came to mind on reading the story was how a cunning restaurant owner could make all the GPS units in the neighbourhood think they are sitting outside his business. Anybody using a smartphone app would think the nearest eating place was his, it would also fool systems like Local Measure that use geotagging as part of their service.

The risks though are greater than sneaky restaurant owners, the University of Texas researchers showed how a 65m, $80 million dollar ship can be tricked into sailing off course by ‘spoofing’ the real GPS signal.

With everything from emergency services’ tracking systems to smartphone and dog collars relying on GPS, the risks are huge.

It’s another reason why we need robust systems along with the critical thinking skills to know when the computer is wrong.

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