| ▲ | DJI couldn't confirm or deny it disguised this drone to evade a US ban(theverge.com) |
| 55 points by sea-gold a day ago | 35 comments |
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| ▲ | roenxi 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| On the one hand, pretty easy to see why the US would be looking for ways to stop Chinese drones getting in. Various US-backed entities have demonstrated that sleeper cells of drones are a pretty reasonable attack vector and the Chinese would be crazy not to try and prepare some sort of latent drone attack force in the US given that they are probably next on the chopping block after the US is done with Russia. Plus drones are very militarily strategic and China appears to have achieved an overwhelming dominance in the market which bodes well for them. US leadership must be quite unhappy about that and looking to try and salvage what they can of their local capabilities. On the other hand, I doubt they can really stop China and it is amazing watching the US first position themselves to reject manufacturing as an undesirable industry, then start blocking imports from the globe's foremost industrial superpower as they realise that industrial capacity wins wars. There is a level of incoherence here - how does the US intend to run an advanced industrial society if it won't accept local pollution and won't accept goods from the places pollution is outsourced to? Depending always on how misleading the Chinese figures are, the US doesn't have the globe's preeminent economy any more. They appear to be #2 or very close to becoming it. They're going to have to re-learn how to engage with a larger more industrially successful power and keep on good terms with people through diplomacy. |
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| ▲ | imglorp 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > sleeper cells of drones are a pretty reasonable attack vector What exactly is the attack vector here? If we're talking about sleeper agents sure but these restrictions are focused on importing commercial products by citizens here: crop dusters and photography etc. sure they have a cloud service and might exfiltrate some aerial photography, but then anybody can see the same on Google Earth. I think this is just a negotiating tactic and a little bit of red scare to amp up the defense story | | |
| ▲ | unsnap_biceps 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ukraine's attack on Russian airfields via drones positioned near the airfields hidden in trucks was extremely successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb | | |
| ▲ | JKCalhoun 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | But a DJI drone I purchase from Amazon is missing a rather important component that would make it a weapon for the Chinese. | | |
| ▲ | mcphage 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Dear DJI customer, congrats! For free, we are sending you a brand new hardware update to your DJI drone, a super battery pack! Please attach it to your drone immediately and try it out, the improvements will be positively explosive! Also please don't shake it or bump it too hard." | | |
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| ▲ | defrost 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | DJI drones are not arriving in the US strapped with explosives and ready to swarm an airbase taking out bombers and jets. A more realistic "danger" is DJI drones taking over the market (more than they have already) and: * backdooring usage patterns back to China - that gives a lot of info via traffic analysis especially if adopted by law enforcement and military, * suddenly proving useless in a crunch (when used by military or paramilitary for observation or weapons delivery against forces China favours) due to backdoor control. | | |
| ▲ | codedokode 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | If American companies like Tesla leave the possibility of tracking/disabling their cars remotely, why China should not do the same? It would be strategically stupid to make a product without a backdoor when everyone else inserts backdoors. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | My comment above made no judgement about backdoor access to products, it merely pointed out that country X might judge an over reliance on products from country Y a security risk if those products leak information or can be remotely controlled. It's a risk for China to use US hardware in Chinese network infrastructure as much as it is a risk for the US to use Chinese communications or other hardware. These risks can be mitigated by vetting but they are real risks that countries must account for in their national security protocols. |
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| ▲ | nirui 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > US first position themselves to reject manufacturing as an undesirable industry I'm a Chinese let me just point out the obvious here: it's not that US "rejected" manufacturing, it's simply that the US at that time needed to get itself into a more profitable service economy, and by doing that it raised the living standard in the US so slowly more and more US citizens stopped seeing manufacturing jobs as an attractive option. In fact, I don't really think Americans can be attracted to the manufacturing industry again (least not in this form), unless of course if you want to work in a sweat factory and handle heavy metal such as lead and lithium-ion while have full knowledge that doing such work will shorten your lifespan by 10% or more. Even China is upgrading it's manufacturing capability/technology because (guess what?) the Chinese also stopped wanting these dirty jobs. The DJI bomb conspiracy is stupid because it assumes that the CBP of the US is dumb enough to not screening for explosives while doing their inspection. If smuggling this massive amount of bombs into the US can be this easy, then I'm afraid you are in much bigger trouble than this. | | |
| ▲ | roenxi 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > The DJI bomb conspiracy is stupid... Given that we seem to be in an ongoing escalation spiral towards WWIII I'm amazed at how little interest people take. The Ukrainians pulled an attack like this off literally last month, and it was widely publicised how they did it. If the Chinese military wanted to pull something similar off they'd ship components in and assemble them inside the States. And then probably make an attempt to recruit other Chinese drones act as decoys in a large swarm to overwhelm any anti-drone defences. The more obvious counterargument to the idea that is relevant to the DJI restrictions is that there is likely no special need to use DJI drones, arguing that out would require a better knowledge of exactly what anti-drone defences the US has then I possess. But the feasibility of the style of attack isn't in question. And it may well be that easy to smuggle a massive amount of bombs into the US, their border sounds pretty porous. Based on the stats theoretically an army could have walked in to the US over the last couple of years and they might not have noticed. Around 11 million people are in the States after bypassing the official checks and at its height the Eastern front in WWII was only around 10 million soldiers at any one time if we add the Germans and Russians both. |
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| ▲ | dmd 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > won’t accept local pollution Oh, don’t worry, we’re fixing that! :/ | |
| ▲ | msgodel 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Mandate open source firmware. This should have been done long ago but now it's creating problems even for the government. There is no legitimate reason for non-free firmware. | | |
| ▲ | freeopinion 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would you say the same about OHV firmware? Airplane firmware? Cubesat firmware? Amateur rocketry firmware? Starship firmware? Speedgun firmware? BGP router firmware? Consumer Wifi router firmware? Any wifi firmware? iPhone firmware? GPU firmware? That's a long way to ask if you mean all firmware, or if you think some devices are more public security sensitive. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's perfectly reasonable to require firmware be open-source or permissively licensed to customers. It's pretty rare that firmware is a competitive advantage; companies just try to produce the bare minimum to get their devices to work and maybe lock them down to sell software subscriptions. If you sell me a piece of hardware, you should owe me any software required to make it perform to its original spec. Simple as that. | |
| ▲ | Kim_Bruning 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The canonical wisdom is that the more security sensitive or critical a piece of software is, the more important it is that it be auditable. Open Source meets that criterium, and is arguably the only thing that does so fully. Some systems do require secrets, that's what cryptography is for. The algorithms are generally open and audited, and only the minimum (the keys) are kept secret. | |
| ▲ | coldtea 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Both ideas make sense. Wouldn't mind ALL firmware, but also clearly some device categories are also more crucial than others. | |
| ▲ | msgodel 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Would you say the same about OHV firmware? Airplane firmware? Cubesat firmware? Amateur rocketry firmware? Starship firmware? Speedgun firmware? BGP router firmware? Consumer Wifi router firmware? Any wifi firmware? iPhone firmware? GPU firmware? Yes. |
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| ▲ | 4gotunameagain 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > They're going to have to re-learn how to engage with a larger more industrially successful power and keep on good terms with people through diplomacy This will take decades, if it ever happens. The entire political and power system of the US is rife in arrogance and the thought that they can do whatever they want. Because they could, for quite a while. Look at all the coups, all the meddling. | |
| ▲ | hopelite 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is nothing reasonable about “drone sleeper cells”. That’s the noon of paranoid fantasy that fuels the “think tanks”. The stuff they fantasize like they’re suffering from fever delusions is really astonishing. They always make for a good laugh, reading their position papers and analysis. Unfortunately for us all, they often persuade all the clowns in Congress and the Pentagon. | | |
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| ▲ | pseudo0 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://archive.ph/RC7wx |
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| ▲ | JKCalhoun 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So there's no open source drone (and I mean quadcopter in this case) already? 3D printers (using lightweight filament), motors, ESCs, a microcontroller running some open code....? |
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| ▲ | bastard_op 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Same as 99% of Chinese sellers on amazon - make a bad product, just rename, and have deepseek make you a new random short-as-possible company name with random characters and as human as possible. |
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| ▲ | ncann 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | DJI drones are nowhere near "bad", they're the best and nothing else comes close. It's a shame how they're sanctioned given there's no viable alternative. I always wonder why there's no Western company that has the same product offerings. | | |
| ▲ | tmerc 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | DJI drones are the industry standard because they are very good and typically cost significantly less than non Chinese manufactured drones. I can't currently substantiate this claim with data, but I would be shocked if less than 80% of commercial drone flights in America used DJI. I think the actual number is going to be in the 90%+ range. There is one American company making comparable products, https://www.anzurobotics.com/. If I understand correctly, these are basically DJI hardware with American software. I don't know if they use DJI control boards or manufacturer their own but their FAQ does mention they license tech from DJI. |
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| ▲ | coldtea 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In most electronic peripheral categories, like USB hubs, the "expensive" US stuff you buy for $100 and $150 are the same Chinese internals you get for $20. | | | |
| ▲ | lxgr 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reason for these odd names is Amazon requiring a registered trademark: https://www.slashgear.com/1336325/reason-amazon-sellers-have... As for the quality, I’ve ordered a few products under some pretty outlandish names and I can’t say that quality was any worse than that of most other no-(real)-name things sold on Amazon. |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Kevin is an old acquaintance of mine and I would trust anything he says on the topic |
