This is a pretty big eye opener if you can give a couple of hours up of your time… so far I haven’t managed to view all in one slot and have another half hour to complete.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation
Crikey this is heavy stuff PD my poor remaining brain cells have got concentration fatigue after just five minutes!
Well, Muddy,I struggled through it over a period of about 4 days.
By the time I got to the end, although the message had penetrated some, I couldn’t really remember the beginning , the middle and a lot of other stuff. So might have to try again after Xmas…No, no I won’t .
How an enemy could destroy Britain by sabotaging your car’s sat-nav
We are often so close to substantial change in ones life yet I doubt many ever actually realise just how fragile the status quo really is
You most probably didn’t notice, but the world almost ground to a halt one morning 11 months ago.
It was January 26, and the problem was first picked up in the early hours by members of the U.S. Air Force Space Command at a base in Colorado.
Something had gone wrong during the decommissioning of SVN23, one of the global positioning satellites (GPS) orbiting the Earth — something that appeared infinitesimally small but was actually hugely significant.
Due to what appears to have been human error by a U.S. Air Force serviceman as they replaced the oldest satellite with a new one, the latter was uploaded with the wrong time.
It was out by just 13.7 micro-seconds, or 3.7 millionths of a second.
That is not so much the blink of an eye but a tiny fraction of the blink of an eye.
But, as this ‘anomaly’ spread to 15 of the 31 satellites in the GPS network, it was long enough to throw electronic networks and communications systems back on Earth into disarray for the next 12 hours.
The balloon went up in companies across the globe as engineers were dragged out of their beds to fix the problem before it spun out of control and international telecommunication systems went down.
Ripples were felt across the world — in North America, emergency services radio equipment stopped working, electrical power grids were disrupted and the BBC was unable to broadcast digital radio programmes in some areas for up to two days.
Yet it could have been much, much worse.
Experts fear that what the Royal Academy of Engineering has called Britain’s ‘dangerous dependence’ on GPS will lead to a truly apocalyptic disaster when it fails completely.
With the system ubiquitous in computer networks, financial systems, transport, agriculture, broadcasting and emergency services, a satellite blackout could plunge the world into chaos, upsetting everything from the precision docking of an oil tanker to the delivery of £50 from a cash machine.
To understand how Armageddon really could be only a few microseconds away, one must first understand that GPS — which stand for Global Positioning System, and is best known as the satnav system in our cars — is about much more than telling us when we’ve missed a turning. GPS is really about time, not maps.
It was launched by the U.S. Air Force in the late Seventies to provide an accurate bomb and missile targeting system.
The U.S. government later allowed civilians to use it for free, although it still costs the Air Force $1 billion a year to maintain.
The GPS system depends on a network of 31 satellites circling the Earth twice a day, each moving in a very precise orbit.
Each satellite is fitted with a clutch of incredibly precise clocks which keep time with the others.
They continually broadcast their time and position to Earth where a GPS receiver can work out its position to within a few feet from the minute differences in each signal’s arrival time.
GPS receivers used to be expensive but there’s now one in every smartphone. It’s a brilliant navigating tool even if it makes us lazy — many of us will never pore over a paper map again.
But it’s also a phenomenally accurate time-keeper, which is why it is found in pretty much every electronic system imaginable, and certainly any system that relies on a precise, synchronised timing signal.
That would include the financial sector that needs to put ‘time stamps’ on every transaction from a cash withdrawal to a high-speed stock market trade.
Then there are mobile phone networks that rely on GPS to keep transmitter towers synchronised so calls can be passed between them, and electrical power grids that need to time the delivery of energy on overloaded networks precisely.
It’s easy to see how a catastrophic failure of GPS could spell disaster for us. And there are plenty of reasons it could happen.
Sabotage is a strong possibility, thanks in large part to the extreme weakness of GPS signals.
The London Stock Exchange is affected for up to ten minutes every day by blockages to the GPS signal which can disrupt the time stamps that identify when each trade is made.
Experts believe the problem is caused by nothing more than delivery drivers passing by the building fitted with a GPS jammer to stop their boss monitoring their movements.
Such dashboard jammers — illegal to use in the UK but, bizarrely, not to buy — cost just £50 and pose a growing security threat.
Ports have been unintentionally closed down by criminals using jammers to stop the authorities tracing GPS tags fitted to stolen goods.