NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2026 Jul 9, 17:53 -0700
Bob Peterson,
Thank you very much for linking to that article on gcaptain. Interesting to see a container ship travelling at over 100 knots. :)
From my perspective, spoofing incidents like this one are low concern precisely because they are outrageous. That ship is incapable of a speed like that. The spoofing could be detected with very simple software tests. Visually it would be obvious, too. Large errors are not necessarily dangerous because they announce themselves!
This is analogous to a "blunder" in a celestial navigation computation. If I add 20°30' Dec to 21°10' Zenith Distance at Local Noon and conclude that my Latitude is 31°40', the error is no problem because I end up in the wrong place by ten full degrees. But if I instead add those two numbers and get 41°20', I may not notice at all. Small arithmetic errors can be more dangerous than large errors. Similarly, slow and subtle GPS Spoofing could be much more dangerous than the drastic cases described in that article.
Frank Reed
