The Guardian’s “free our data” series reports on a team of researchers including a Cornell professor who wanted to test their receiver with the publically funded Galileo geo-location satellite system. They first discovered that the signals were encoded. Then, when they requested access, they were told to wait. So, naturally, they instead cracked the codes:

Galileo’s spokesman downplays the significance of Psiaki’s code-breaking efforts. “We expected this,” he says, “because the codes on the test satellite are easy to crack. In the Galileo system satellites will use different codes and to crack them I would say they will need 100 years.”

In that case, why not publish them in the first place? The more significant question is the incident’s impact on private investors. It is unclear how a commercial service can make money competing with a free service. Galileo’s spokesman argues that subscribers will be attracted by the system’s guaranteed reliability.

Psiaki, however, says: “It always seemed to me a little odd that you could get enough subscribers to a paid service when the free one is pretty good to begin with.” He can sympathise if Galileo does want to charge “a nominal fee” for the open service. But one thing he says Galileo can’t do is protect the open service with more secure codes, because of that EU-US agreement. In the end, he says, “these simpler codes may be the ones that are the most valuable commercially, because these are likely to be the preferred codes for mass-market receivers”.