Many of us have a love/hate relationship with our GPS’s. We love the fact that they can tell us when a route is filled with traffic, or a better way to get from Point A to Point B. But we hate it when we are running late and when the GPS route is a convoluted series of seemingly contradictory turns down small side streets, or when we are somewhere where coverage is spotty or blocked.

That is fine when we are in a car, or using transit. But what happens, as I pose in the subject line, when you are flying a plane and its GPS quits working? It sadly is happening with increasing frequency, as the places around the world that are part of conflict zones continues to expand, and because spoofing or blocking GPS signals is one way to prevent military actors from getting precise positions. That link will document exactly what is happening, and you can click on other links at the end of that post to understand the different types of spoofing that have been observed. The number of incidents has risen alarmingly in the past several months, with as many as 1350 daily flights encountering spoofing, but averaging 900.

Now, that may sound like a lot of flights, but when you consider that these days about 100,000 flights fly every day around the world, it is admittedly still a small number. However, the spots where GPS signals are unreliable have expanded to ten distinct areas. Some of these you might suspect, such as around the Middle East and Russia for example.

(I wrote a few years ago about the Russian airlines. This is yet another reason to steer clear of any flights that come near the place.)

But there are several problems behind this data. First, flight crews are not trained to switch off their GPS when spoofing happens. In fact, they run a variety of automated systems that rely on the global GPS network with all sorts of acronyms. Some spoofing hits the autopilots driving the plane, some hit the ground collision radar that prevents planes from hitting the side of a mountain, others hit the transponders that broadcast the plane’s identity. Second, the symptoms aren’t consistent across all these systems: Each system exhibits different behavior when they get spoofed GPS signals. This means that aircrews are losing trust in their instruments, which is not a good thing. Third, the air traffic controllers — particularly the ones handling long-haul transoceanic flights — have to work harder to separate the planes flying a particular route which are in trouble, which means lower passenger capacity and more flight delays. In some cases, the situation happens close to a landing, which means some planes have to “go around” and take time and fuel to attempt a second landing. Finally, there are a bunch of aircraft-related international organizations that work together in a very delicate balance, and spoofing upsets that particular applecart. Imagine the UN, only worse.

GPS spoofing is now being used as a weapon of war, and it is sadly catching on as the investment in small armed drones is small but the damage that they can cause is great if they can rely on precise positioning for their targets. Sadly, it will take some time before the civil aviation industry can retool to work around spoofing in any effective manner.

An article in this week’s New York Times decries the end of the floppy disk. Its use as a medium of data transfer for Japanese government reports has finally been replaced with online data transfer. I read the piece with a mixture of sadness and amusement. The floppy was a big deal — originating from IBM’s big iron. It became the basic fuel of the PC revolution.

Before we had PCs, in the late 1970s, we had the first dedicated word processor machines coming into offices. I came of professional age  when these huge beasts, often built-in to office furniture. They were the domain of the typing pool of secretaries that would transform hand-written drafts into typed documents. These word processors had printers and ran off 8″ floppies that held mere kilobytes of text files. Those larger disks were a part of America’s nuclear control bunkers up until 2019 or so.

But back to the 1980s. Then IBM (and to some extent Apple) changed all that with the introduction of 5″ versions that were attached to their PCs. Actually, they measured five and a quarter inches. Within a few years, they became “double-sided” disks, holding a huge 360 KB of files. To give you an idea of this vast quantity of storage, you could save dozens of files on a single disk. But things were moving fast in those early days of the PC — soon we had hard-shell 3.5 inch floppies — the label remained, even though the construction changed — that could hold more than a megabyte of data. Just imagine: today’s smart watches, let alone just about any other smart home device — can hold gigabytes of data.

You would be hard-pressed to find a computing device that has less capacity these days. And that is a good thing, because today’s files — especially video and audio — occupy those gigabytes. But I just checked: a 5,000 MS Word file — just text — is only 35 KB, so things haven’t changed all that much in the text department.

The double-sided label sticks in my mind with this anecdote. The scene was a downtown office in LA, where I worked for the IT department of a large insurance company in the mid-1980s. We occupied three office towers that spanned several blocks, and part of the challenge of being in IT was that you spent a lot of time going around the complex — or at least for the times — debugging user’s problems. We would often tell users to send us a copy of their disk via interoffice mail and we would take a look at it if it wasn’t urgent. Soon after I got this call I got the envelope. Inside were two sheets of paper: the user had placed his floppy disk on the glass bed of their Xerox copier, and sent me the printouts. But this was a user who was paying attention: he noticed the “double-sided” designation on the disk, so flipped it over and made a copy of the back of the disk too.

The dual-floppy drive PC was a staple for many years: one was used to run your software, the other to store your data. The software disks were also copy-protected, which made it hard for IT folks to backup. I remember going over to our head of IT’s home one weekend to try to fix a problem he had with the copy-protected version of Lotus 1-2-3, the defining spreadsheet of the day.

Those were fun times to be in the world of PCs. The scene shifts to downtown Boston, at the offices of PC Week, back in early 1987. I had left the insurance company and taken a job with the publication. A few months into the job, I had gotten a question from a colleague who was having trouble with his PC, the original dual floppy-drive IBM model. I went over to his desk and tried to access his files, only to hear the disk drive grind away — not a sound that you want to hear. I flipped open the drive door and removed the offending disk. My colleague looked on with curiosity. “Those come out?” he exclaimed. No one at the publication had bothered to tell him that was the case, and he had been using the same physical disk for months, erasing and creating files until the plastic was so worn out that you could almost see through it. I showed him our supply cabinet where he could stock up on spare floppies.

Apple was the first company to sell computers sans floppies in 1998, and other PC makers soon eliminated them. Storage on USBs and networks made them obsolete.Sony would stop selling the blank disks in 2011, but they lived on in Japan until now.

Floppies were trouble, to be sure. But they were secure: we didn’t have to worry about our data being transmitted across the world for everyone to see. And while their storage capacity was minuscule — especially by today’s standards —  it was sufficient to launch a thousand different companies.

Self-promotions dep’t

Speaking of other things that have lived on in Japan, I recently wrote about the Interop show network and its storied history. I interviewed many of the folks who created and maintained these networks over the years, and why Interop was an innovative show, both then and now.