"Suddenly I was in a very different quarter," says Putin's spokesman. A jamming confused location systems in Moscow's center. But what is he for?
By Julian Hans, Moscow
Tourists have it easily in the Russian capital. The most important thing is in the middle: the Kremlin and the Red Square can also be found without reading Cyrillic letters. Everything else is then distributed in concentric circles around, since no one can really get lost. Until now.
For those who rely on the navigation in the mobile phone, could have problems recently. In June, pedestrians and drivers first saw that they were teleported, at least virtually. They were still in the Moscow center, and their navigation devices suddenly showed the location of Wnukovo Airport. Which is 30 kilometers southwest on the outskirts of the city.
Since then, the phenomenon has been repeated again and again, mostly for several hours and mostly near the Kremlin. This is particularly annoying for taxis and their customers. Because they usually find in Moscow via app and satellite-based GPS navigation. Taxis got wrong orders to the airport, while in front of the Kremlin walls annoyed customers waited in vain. Guests traveling in the city center complained when the taximeter billed a trip to the airport.
An employee of the company Yandex therefore decided to get to the bottom of the matter. For Internet searches and navigation, the company is clearly ahead of Google in Russia. Yandex also operates the largest taxi service in the country. The technology chief Grigory Bakunov took a morning time, packed different GPS devices into his backpack and drove a morning with the Segway through the october-cold Moscow.
Is the Kremlin fighting with the transmitter against drones?
Somewhere in the Kremlin sparked a transmitter a strong signal, which pretends to originate from a satellite satellites, Bakunov later summarized his results. IT experts speak of "spoofing" when hackers pretend to be someone else, to dress up electronically, so to speak. It is already possible to buy such a transmitter for false satellite signals today, Bakunov wrote. He only wonders why the Kremlin is using it?
The most plausible explanation for him is that the security service wants to prevent drones flying over the center of power and possibly making video recordings. This is forbidden anyway, but if such a remote-controlled aircraft is in the air, you can not catch it so quickly. All modern drones were equipped with GPS and would have stored the coordinates of places where they would not be able to ascend - especially airports, a Yandex representative hastened to clarify. This, however, is merely a possible explanation. Russian journalists reported that the phenomenon had also occurred during the president's travels to other cities.
Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was unaware, referring to the ever-secret government security service. He could only confirm from his own experience that navigational devices were sometimes crazy, that happened to him recently: "Suddenly I was in a very different quarter."
