this should end well

or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission

are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?

Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.

U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

I mean isn't space X testing satellites with sat to sat lasers?

In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.

Neutrinos

In terms of international game theory, this is entirely expected. No action would be the anomaly.

international game theory

Not this quackery again

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.

Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"

Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.

Why does a banking app require GPS?

GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.

Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).

- The UK is an island nation

- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK

- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world

To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.

Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.

not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?

The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.

I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).

ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables

There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.

I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"

It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.

In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.

In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.

That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.

Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?

All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.

All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.

Do people write cheques in the UK?

Or checks?

I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.

A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products.

So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.

A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.

Also, cool username =)

If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.

Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.

Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.

After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.

What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?

That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.

I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..

It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.

The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.

So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?

Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.

Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.

Digital banking might be unavoidable but what did your app do that you couldn't have possibly done via your banks website?

You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.

Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.

It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.

It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.

This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.

All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.

But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.

Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.

This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.

And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.

Any power.

Even the tiniest bit.

And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cutting-edge-timing-techn...

Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.

Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.

It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.

Is there something on your banking app that you couldn't do by browsing to your banks website?

Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.

I thought after 60,000 feet MSL a country's airspace ends.

So, who's the UK actually attacking?

This is not an attack. The satellites aren't being damaged.

It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?

Because that is one of the methods used to verify that everyone is complying with treaties, such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is knock out their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.

Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?

Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.

Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?

We may have enough satellite imagery to build visual place recognition system. Geoguesst but for tanks

There's a bunch of stuff for using terrain to figure out where you are [1], generally used for missiles and planes though, not sure if works well from a ground perspective.

On the ground, you might be able to use the broadcast positioning system: more or less GPS but instead of satellites, the broadcast signal comes from existing TV towers... TV towers may well be targetted at some point in a war, but there's likely more valuable targets at the beginning of a war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM

[2] https://www.gps.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/CGSICMeeting...

That and cut undersea cables. Russia has been messing around with them for a while now.

They are actively training for shit, it sure looks like. Same with other sabotage acts all over Europe in the last couple of years.

Doesn't make any sense to have merchants dragging anchor in active war. These actions are meeting their goals, not serving as preparation.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-allies-foil-russia...

I’m sure we’ll go back to beacons [1] here in the UK

Using fire to signify a message is thousands of years old. The earliest use of beacons in the UK dates back to the medieval period, primarily as a means of communication to warn of impending invasions or other dangers. Positioned on hilltops and along coastlines, these beacons were part of an early warning system signalling the presence of a threat, such as an approaching enemy fleet.

One of the most famous early examples is the network of beacons used during the Spanish Armada in 1588. As around 150 Spanish battleships approached, beacons were lit along the southern coast of England, from Cornwall to London. As a result of this rudimentary but effective system Lord Francis Drake had the time to mobilise the country’s defences and defeat the Spanish fleet before they were able to reach the English shore.

[1] https://www.paintersforstal.co.uk/news/the-history-of-beacon...

Presumably when World War 3 kicks off

That presumes we're not already in it. When historians 100 years from now look back on this period, what's going to be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What's going to be the Reichstag fire of 2027?