I have passed long days in electromagnetic testing room, and I can say that you will be surprised by what can happens with complex and highly programmable electronics !

I had to work on a navigation system some years back, I didn't have to spend time in the "bubble" but colleagues did. We certainly did have people who were very aware of RF design and cross talk issues as we had a TEMPEST rated room as they had also been working on secure digital comms.

Your "demonstration" prove that a software modification can open up the frequency range.

True, but it is hard as the radio in a phone tends not to be open software. A USRP would be much better but then you need amplification and power. You are inside a metal tube and you need to get inside an antenna on the outside which is designed to go off when it receives a burst from a 50KW radar. The transponder squirts data back using something like 20w or so. It would be hard to overwhelm that from inside the plane. I would agree that if you hold up to a window, you could get some power outside (a phone does work on a plane on the ground up to a certain height, it is just a weak signal).

Inside the plane, RF goes by coax. Data goes by different means, usually twisted pair. Either way, the data wiring goes from the front-end in the cockpit to the avionics bay which is located underneath the cockpit (so no long cable runs). The FMS does not fly the plane (it acts more as a top-level monitoring system), there are other computers that worry about that.

If you have read the publication subject of this article, you will see that aircraft manufacturers have actually not worried at all about vulnerability.

Please remember that planes ship with standard flight control systems only. Cockpits and avionics are selected by airlines based on different options. It would be quite hard to try out every variant. However flight test has a big increase in general RF "crud" in the fuselage as you have multiple high performance logging and telemeter systems with cabling all over the place.

In the end, it seems that if you want to cause chaos, just get an airband radio and claim to be Frankfurt Radar or something.

Good point. And not only that, information is flowing into the pilot from multiple sources, visual clues, ATC and multiple instruments.

It seems that the aircraft industry is about as security conscious as the car industry.

Not really.

Aircraft typically carry different ways of getting the same vital information, passenger aircraft must do so. Equipment in former times was very unreliable, so essentially the plane must carry two (or more) of everything. Critical components, may have the "A" and "B" computers programmed by different teams or even using different architectures. They also carry a human, who may notice if their are strange instruments.

Drones are a different matter and do seem to be spoofable.

Except that TIS-B is not wired into TCAS at the moment. In fact, I have not heard of any use of ADS-B for air to air, just air to ground. Separations are controlled via time slots outside controlled air space and inside controlled airspace, by ground controller using good old fashioned PPI displays. Yes, those displays are "enhanced" by information from ADS-B but many smaller or older aircraft don't have it.

Nope.

A good demonstration of this was the issue about Nexus 4s being able by accident, to transmit a little bit on LTE (only one frequency) and only because the LTE frequencies were enabled by accident in the software. Unless there are antennas designed, the signal would be weak as hell even if you can get it out of the phone. Then you have to get the signal out of the fuselage which is normally working, more or less, as a Faraday cage to an antenna pointing at the ground or a satellite. The vulnerability that worries aircraft manufacturers (about mobile phone use) is the fact that ageing RF cabling and connectors may have faulty shielding.

Yes, the antennas are fixed but the ILS can be tweaked and often had to be (worked a long time ago at a place that built ILS equipment). They are supposed to be self maintaining using ground mounted calibration antennas but every so often an aircraft has to check the slope out by probing the ILS envelope (flying deliberately off the glide path) under VFR conditions. However, on top of the glide slope, there are radar altimeters (on the plane) and marker beacons (on the ground).

Quite simple. Use your own (or borrowed) Lear or Gulfstream, or charter one. No security. Coincidentally, many of those guys who voted in the regulations have access to their own small jets or have access to them via their lobbyists. Kerb to plane in 5 minutes. If the airport doesn't support normal passenger flights, you can even drive up to the plane.

I don't live in the UK anymore bit isn't NI capped? Isn't it also paying for other things as well such unemployment, etc?

They get their power from France (Mostly nuclear) and Switzerland (lots of Hydroelectric). When the LHC is running, it can take the same sort of power as the whole of Geneva. I am not sure how they procure their power, but given the mild winter, power has been a lot cheaper than expected unfortunately the decision to extend the run was made some months ago and they may already have locked in the price.

There is a black hole in Geneva. It is called the Paquis (drugs, street hookers, etc.).However it existed before CERN.

A big collider takes a lot of money and politicking to get started. It is a massive engineering project (the LHC was lucky, the detector chambers were new but the ring was inherited from the LEP). The CERN people already talk about what is next because they know they must start thinking now.

As for cosmic rays, yes they are incredibly powerful but undirected. You can't guarantee that the interesting particles will come into your detector any anyway, you normally end up with secondary collisions at best as the interesting particles interact at higher altitudes. Yes, you could fly a big detector, but they are extremely big and heavy,

I was involved in establishing one of the first major Electronic Markets in Germany. The country was quite decentralised with regional financial centres so we made sure that everyone communicated with the exchange (situated in Frankfurt) at the same speed. We even had line simulators to ensure that users in Frankfurt saw similar response times to users in Hamburg.

Now exchanges are more or less forced to join the race for the bottom by offering co-lo services (rackspace in the Exchange) where you are just a LAN switch away from theeExchange infrastructure. If you don't support that, the alleged "liquidity" moves to another exchange. Inside the machines, the algorithms are now run on the graphics cards (cheap multiprocessing) so they can run evven faster. Others use custom signal processing hardware.

Users actually issuing buy or sell orders to hold are never that close, the decision making happens within the institution not in the Exchange building. The "algo" machines just act as a man in the mmiddle driving prices to their advantage. Also, the algo traders are imposing a massive load on the order book and matching code within the exchange's systems. generally speaking the systems were chosen for reliability rather than pure speed.

The UK uses paper and pencil. Candidates may personally supervise counting or their agents can. Funnily enough, the Federal Republic of Germany (pop about 80m) does fine with paper and pencil and usually, there is a single, transferable vote type system so more complicated as you have take into account people's secondary choices.

Funnily enough, Nokia Maps on the better S60 feature phones was very good, performing much better than much of the competition, particularly if you had the content installed locally.

Yes, Nokia had plant in Germany and Eastern Europe as well as in Finland. Now all closed.