News DJI drone ban passes in U.S. House — 'Countering CCP Drones Act' would ban all DJI sales in U.S. if passed in Senate

[WmMan]

https://www.twz.com/air/mysterious-drones-swarmed-langley-afb-for-weeks

If aliens aren't swarming over military bases (which would normally be inaccessible to consumer drones due to geofencing), maybe it's Chinese-made drones with a special firmware update. A spy only needs to pick one up from an American retailer, update it, and away they go.

The US military has already made a weapon compromised of hundreds of drones and has been testing it. The fighter jet has a bomb looking capsule that contains hundreds of drones that are all syncretized together and they then act like one intelligent entity and swarm around like a flock of birds or a swarm of bees would do. I've seen a little video of this weapon in usage and it looks like a swarm of bees or another type of insect that swarms & moves around in the air as a single entity. They have proven the concept works & are now weaponizing them to give them the explosives needed to destroy a target, or targets when they have reached the objective. The drones are small but carry a big punch & there are hundreds of them in each launch pod. They are controlled by AI computers, think for themselves and they behave like a swarm of insects. Plus they communicate with each other and pass on intelligence to the rest of the swarm. It's a possibility that the swarms of drones being seen around military bases are their own, being tested a real world setting, to see what the capabilities of the swarm is really capable of doing if used as designed.

 

[USAFRet]

The US military has already made a weapon compromised of hundreds of drones and has been testing it.

Source?

I've seen a little video of this weapon in usage and

Link?

It's a possibility that the swarms of drones being seen around military bases are their own, being tested a real world setting, to see what the capabilities of the swarm is really capable of doing if used as designed.

The DoD owns thousands of square miles of Utah and Nevada (UTTR and NTTR) for exactly type of testing.
They would not do it over populated areas, and the main F-22 base.

 

[CmdrShepard]

We have a post attacking congress, and undermining confidence in democratic form of government.

The so called "democratic" forms of government (and I am not talking just about USA here) are doing a great job of undermining confidence in themselves with all the blatant corruption and hypocrisy on display 24/7/365.

If that doesn't deserve a rebuttal i don't know what does.

It does, but don't be surprised if you find a lot of other people from around the planet (who are the majority compared to so called "democratic" forces) who will strongly disagree with what you seem to be defending.

It's a post designed to shape public opinion, not an honest comment on the topic at all.

So was the congress decision to ban DJI drones -- a publicity stunt like all other Chinese sanctions designed to paint a "China bad!" picture domestically to distract people from internal problems by giving them external "enemy" to focus on. You might find that international readership doesn't fall for such tricks anymore.

 

[abufrejoval]

I am obviously in the minority here. Communist Chinese products are required, by law to have backdoors for Government use. That is why I avoid them. I don't want to be using a Chinese product that can be bricked by the Communist Chinese Government at anytime. Countries using these products for their Internet backbones will be in for a nasty surprise if their government angers China. I know this is political but most of the posts for this story are. Countries can ban product from where ever they want. Most countries do.

It is very hard to say "no" to your government. And actually it should be, too, because they are or at least represent the sovereign: if you say no to your sovereign, that easily leads to treason everywhere.

And I'm quite sure that quite often it doesn't even take a law: a phone call or a personal visit may suffice, even if your country is regarded as a democracy: you do remember what Edward Snowden made public, right?

It's becoming quite a mess, obviously, when every government demands a backdoor into tech that is somehow produced or just operated within their realm, to potentially weaponize it aginst any other country or just the local opposition.

And it doesn't get any easier by some big international corporations establishing their own digital realms or metaverses where they claim sovereignty, being legislator, judge and executionor but mostly the taxman.

DJI makes marvelous products and may have some of the best-meaning and brilliant engineers. But there is no escaping the pressure of the bureaucrats, be they from the middle kingdom or from anywhere they sell.

One escape valve would obviously be open-source, but handing the brilliant blueprints to the competition is something very few Chinese will do voluntarily, knowing their compatriots and the global competition.

Designing drones in such a way that they remain non-trivial to clone yet open to open source control might be an avenue, but it will require a very costly redesign with well defined abstraction layers.

This can't be all impossible, because it is done with mobile handsets, where typically the broadband access layer is protected by an (e.g. L4 based) enclave that doesn't offer consumer payloads or code access.

Dealing with sovereign conflicts in a provable and observeable way within very small consumer devices is going to be required in nearly every domain. I believe that incorporating spatiality in general and a spatial representation of regulation will make this algorithmically much easier to at least approximate, because it uses well known GPU occlusion processing.

Obviously this will eat quite a few of transistors, but we still seem to get more of those much easier than world peace.

 

[Vic Moss]

This legislation, if passed DOES NOT ban future DJI sales. It simply forbids the FCC from giving any new FCC licenses to new DJI models. Please make sure you understand the full affect of this legislation before you write an article. Giving out bad information makes this situation much worse that it truly is. For updated informatoin, please read this article: https://dspalliance.org/the-truth-about-the-countering-ccp-drones-act/

 

[Ralston18]

I doubt that there will be very little benefit with regards to continuing this thread.

And the discussion is very likely to go even more and more into uglier politics, multiple links etc..

No point or value in going down into all those proverbial rabbit holes.

Closing thread accordingly.