EUROPE’S Galileo satellite positioning system is meant to break the unspoken tyranny of America’s GPS, which can be switched off at the whim of the US government. But the European Space Agency’s decision to keep the transmission codes from its test satellite secret riled some academics in the US, leading them to indulge in some nifty code-breaking. Galileo, it seems, is truly free now.
Signals from the system’s 30 satellites, which should be in orbit by 2010, were supposed to be “open source” like GPS, meaning that anyone can develop technology to receive and use them. But when the first test satellite, Giove-A, went into orbit…
