- #1
- 11,308
- 8,736
From today's news:
https://arstechnica.com/information...vent-on-april-6-could-have-some-side-effects/
There is an entire class of risks that I could label "infrequent events". The mother of all of them was Y2K. (Y2K bad consequences were avoided via massive publicity, money, and remedial efforts.) What they have in common is that the very long time between events, causes manufacturers, consumers, everyone to slack in vigilance. The irony is that the longer the time between events, the greater the risk. More dependable = more risky. That sounds contradictory.
I wrote before on PF that in some cases we should intervene to increase the resilience of industry and consumers. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/staged-blackouts.922146/ One of the comments on that thread is that the same thinking should apply to GPS.
IOT (the Internet of Things) makes the problem worse. We own, or will own, smart devices which we never expect to update to the latest software revision. Light bulbs, smart wall plugs, applicances, automobiles ... Indeed, we might buy them in a store but the manufacturers were nameless faceless people who market wholesale goods on alibaba.com. There is almost no hope of contacting those manufacturers in the future.
The article says that the remedy for GPS is to increase the internal week counter from 10 bits to 13 bits. I argue that will make the problem worse! They should shorten it, so that the date rollover events happen frequently enough that we are all confident that no large scale negative onsequences will occur. Longer intervals allow more nameless, faceless, manufacturers to come an go and to be forgotten before the consequences of their lack of vigilance become evident.
https://arstechnica.com/information...vent-on-april-6-could-have-some-side-effects/
Most newer GPS receivers will shrug off the rollover because they’ve been programmed to accommodate the epoch change. But older systems won’t—and this may prove to have some interesting side-effects, as timing data suddenly jumps by 19.7 years. The clock change won’t directly affect location calculations. But if GPS receivers don’t properly account for the rollover, the time tags in the location data could corrupt navigation data in other ways.
But navigation isn't the only concern. There are many systems that use the time for other purposes—cellular networks, electrical utilities, and other industrial systems use GPS receivers for timing and control functions. Since many of these systems have extremely long lifecycles, they’re the ones most likely to have not been updated.
The rollover issue isn’t limited to one day. Because of the way some manufacturers accounted for the rollover date in the past—by hard-coding a date correction into receivers’ firmware—their systems might fail at some arbitrary future date. Some have already succumbed: in July of 2017, an older NovAtel GPS system failed, and while the company issued a notice months earlier warning users to upgrade firmware, many remained ignorant of the notice until it happened. Motorola OncoreUT+ systems and some receivers using Trimble’s GPS engines also have failed over the past three years for similar reasons.
There is an entire class of risks that I could label "infrequent events". The mother of all of them was Y2K. (Y2K bad consequences were avoided via massive publicity, money, and remedial efforts.) What they have in common is that the very long time between events, causes manufacturers, consumers, everyone to slack in vigilance. The irony is that the longer the time between events, the greater the risk. More dependable = more risky. That sounds contradictory.
I wrote before on PF that in some cases we should intervene to increase the resilience of industry and consumers. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/staged-blackouts.922146/ One of the comments on that thread is that the same thinking should apply to GPS.
IOT (the Internet of Things) makes the problem worse. We own, or will own, smart devices which we never expect to update to the latest software revision. Light bulbs, smart wall plugs, applicances, automobiles ... Indeed, we might buy them in a store but the manufacturers were nameless faceless people who market wholesale goods on alibaba.com. There is almost no hope of contacting those manufacturers in the future.
The article says that the remedy for GPS is to increase the internal week counter from 10 bits to 13 bits. I argue that will make the problem worse! They should shorten it, so that the date rollover events happen frequently enough that we are all confident that no large scale negative onsequences will occur. Longer intervals allow more nameless, faceless, manufacturers to come an go and to be forgotten before the consequences of their lack of vigilance become evident.