EU tells UK: Cut the BS, sign here, and you can have access to Galileo sat's secure service Hidden away in the document laying out the starting position for EU and UK negotiations lies an interesting nugget for those following the tortured tales of the European satellite navigation system, Galileo. With Brexit "done" (we have a tea towel on order saying it so it must be true), the starting position for the future …
You clearly joke, but a more realistic scenario is:
1) UK shares info with US on the current keys for Galileo. 5 Eyes beats EU-UK relations.
2) Trump puts US troops under Russian command. Remember Helsinki? When Trump agreed to joint US-Russian operations in Syria? Joint operations have rotating leadership, that would put US troops under Russian command. Not exactly a good thing when Russia is bombing US allies and US bases in Syria!
3) Galileo is compromised. EU pulls the security keys, no war, just Putin laughing his c**k off at how easy it was to beat America.
So of course they want to keep control of the keys.
IMHO, They'd be better off tackling that Putin Oligarch in Vienna that the Republicans keep visiting. Because that money flow is what's corrupting the GOP and compromising the security of the west. They're not really putting party above country, they're putting self interest, especially $$$ self interest above country.
And Ukraine? They should restart that investigation into the Manasfort money flow. The one they stopped when Trump threatened to block Rapier missile shipments unless they killed the Manasfort Russian money investigation.
Expose the flow of Russian money into GOP pockets and you break the control.
"1) UK shares info with US on the current keys for Galileo.
[...]
3) Galileo is compromised. EU pulls the security keys"
Erm, I'm not sure you understand how cryptographic keys work.
If the ESA revoked the UK's keys, then all that would happen would be that the UK could not use the precise PRS part of the Galileo system. All the other EU countries will have their own indevidual keys, so they'll be fine, and the public Galileo signals will still work (which when combined with the public GPS and GLONASS signals will still be plenty precise).
Yup, you will know exactly where you are ("Here").
Of course knowing where here is in relation to anywhere else is an entirely different question...
Still at least the Brexit Satellite should also have nice clean telephones, if the prescience of Mr Adams can be relied upon (and it's so far more reliable than much else in this matter).
True, although it doesn’t really matter who built it. Unless you know the key that is used for the encryption, having built it doesn’t add anything.
Some of the best crypto libraries are Open Source but without the right key that I use for encrypted comms even the people who built it can’t make sense of what I send over the line.
I know im late to the party (I just found this article)
What about the NSA then. They "built" or helped build DES and then stuck weakened "S boxes" in it that was essentially a backdoor (in so far as NSA had the computing power to brute force it). That weakness wasn't found by cryptographic experts for a very long time. So yeah, if you helped build it there's a possibility you know it's weaknesses or even help design weaknesses into the system which can go undetected at least for a while.
Galileo is somewhat rubbish anyway. The people running it have so far demonstrated a miserable level of system governance, having a week long whoopsie due to probable incompetence followed more recently by utterly useless reports into the incident and recommendations so vague as to be as applicable to my long dead grandmother as they are to an organisation running a multi-billion sat nav system. Until they cut the BS in how Galileo is run as a governed system, there’s practically no point involving it in anything that’s “mission critical”.
"The noises coming from our clearly right-wing Gubbermint ..."
Well, Mr Johnson has also complained that the EU stops him giving financial support to ailing industries - in my view that is clearly stolen from the Labour manifesto (Mr Corbyn has uttered similar mutterings). And, speaking as a moderate free marketeer, not something I'm impressed by.
I think (as in I have a recollection but am not sure) that pre-Thatcher Tory governments supported ailing industries; reading the stories in DK newspapers in the 80es the UK did not seem to have many that were not ailing. In fact the subsidies continued; much of the unrest was due to the reduction of support, wasn't it?
Of course some will claim that pre-Thatcher tories were not right wing.
One of the places I might have ended up spending Brexit was Toulouse. One of the things I contemplated doing there was going on a tour of the Airbus factory. If you're not an EU citizen you need to give a few days notice of your planned visit: I don't know if they actually vet you, or it's just a bit of Gallic hauteur. I wouldn't technically have been an EU citizen on the days there were places available but, as I decided on Venice in the end, I didn't find out whether I'd be cut any slack during the transition period.
Still, it will be an interesting position for a company - which claims to be Britain’s largest space company, a world-leader in cyber security, and the biggest supplier of large aircraft to the RAF - to take with UK citizens. Not that we'll be UK citizens for that much longer, of course.
a company - which claims to be Britain’s largest space company, a world-leader in cyber security, and the biggest supplier of large aircraft to the RAF .... Warm Braw
Being right in two out of three aint bad, Warm Braw, for one of those claims is fabulously outrageous, and extremely easily realised as demonstrably so.
the only thing that the EU might want from the UK post-brexit, is fishing rights. Given that the UK, post-brexit, wants EVERYTHING, and has nothing but those fishing rights to trade, something tells me...
actually, even though I'm on the same UK boat, I would not mind a no-deal crashout, though something tells me people never learn from their mistakes, we'll just blame the UE, what else? :)
I suspect the EU would also like a free trade deal, so it can continue selling to us. But only if that deal includes the UK continuing with EU standards on everything, and the UK has ruled that out.
The EU is not going to allow us tariff-free access if we're going to trash worker or environmental protection to make our products cheaper, or if we're going to provide state aid to certain companies so they can undercut the EU market prices. They (quite reasonably) want to have tariffs that at least compensate for those factors.
well, yeah, but no but... yes, they kind of "would like" to have a free trade deal with the UK, but then do they REALLY, BADLY want, and more importantly NEED such a deal? Sure, it'd help to deal with your close (well, geographically) neighbour, but if the UK were to throw a tantrum again to show them who's boss, well, the EU won't despair and suffer badly, they'll just let us rot in peace.
"...if we're going to trash worker or environmental protection to make our products cheaper, or if we're going to provide state aid to certain companies..."
EU better not buy anything from China then, even without an EU free trade deal they seem to be quite competitive.
We should contract SpaceX to throw up vast amounts of small-BS which will interfere with Galileo via digital broadcasts of "Land of Hope and Glory." Maybe offer His Muskiness honorary citizenship and a well-paid job as adviser to Boris on press relations. If we are going to Trump (sic) the EU, we should do the job properly.
@steelpillow
"We should contract SpaceX to throw up vast amounts of small-BS which will interfere with Galileo"
Why? The uptime threshold is so low they can lose a week and everything looks good in the reports. And we are screwed if we wait for German planes and Pilots to help fight a war. The only one to arrive will be the war minister (now EU president).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
