GPS spoofing the new game in town

There have been comments and minor warnings about GPS spoofing before, but now we have examples of it in action and it turns out to be very easy.

GPS and location awareness in general is increasingly popular because it allows applications to deliver a local experience. The very nature of the sort of application that provides local information makes it difficult to see why anyone would bother to fake their location. However you need to be aware that it is generally very easy to do so - and thus to spoof GPS.

Nearly all development environments include some way of providing a fake GPS signal to allow location using apps to be tested. These GPS simulators are generally part of the SDK and if they are not then it is often one of the first things that is supplied by a third party.

For example, for Android there is Fake GPS which can be downloaded for free. Or there is a slighly less easy to use utility in the SDK. However, until now there seemed to be little point in playing with them just to find out what fast food was available in say Nova Scotia or Timbuctoo. Some amusement might be had by using GPS spoofing to check into a remote location and you can imagine scenarios where this might be used to claim that you were somewhere else - perhaps to cheat in some way.

Read more: I Programmer

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