Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?
Worked with Huawei. Look at the smartphone market pre and post Huawei ban, immediate crater.
Huawei didn't have the best phones by far. DJI is miles ahead of anything else one can buy.
DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
61–70 of 742 posts
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#62So the amendment/act [0] makes a change to "47 U.S. Code § 1601 - Determination of communications equipment or services posing national security risks" [1] to add DJI. Although the direct inclusion of an entity in US code is odd, it does follow from the 2019 NDAA (Sec. 889. Prohibition on certain telecommunications and video surveillance services or equipment. "...Huawei Technologies Company or ZTE Corporation...") which included based on that bill's text.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#63US is spiralling down and I feel like I am in a Truman Show with egregious presidential behaviours, dragging the world into wars which it doesn't need, banning chips, even sanctioning open source (RISC) software.
And this is further making the rest of the world enraged, china more so. Today they released Open source Deep Seek which beats GPT 4o in coding problems.
The train has left the station and the US is stuck. On the wrong platform. With no ticket.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since the control apps tap into GPS so they know when you're in a restricted zone, the gov't could simply make them mark all of the US as a restricted zone and the drone will never fly. I have one, I'm not happy about this.
I'm going back to the first gen mavic here in memory, but... Didn't they run Android, and you could root them to remove the no fly zones?
The old hack doesn't work anymore.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market... I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
Off the top of my head as a non-European: GDPR, 2-year warranties and other consumer protection laws
:-)
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry. > You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones. DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated f…
Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.
I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points. Those 20-50k drones, I assume you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136?
The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#67We should ban Creality and Bambu Lab too. Imagine if we also strangled consumer 3D printing for dumb reasons. You should only be allowed to print on $100k+ Stratasys for natsec reasons, of course.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down. I anticipate exactly zero automated drone factories.
I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.
Sure, but you won't be allowed to buy one for less than the cost of a small car.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#69This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway. It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional ele…
Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage). Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
We'll what happens after the first public vigilante action against a corrupt cop who got a paid vacation instead of a jail sentence.
But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though.
What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#70A few things to note here.
1.) DJI offers many drones related to infrastructure mapping and maintenance, as well as agricultural tasks. From a national security perspective, it is a non-trivial threat vector for a Chinese company to not only have intimate knowledge of US infrastructure by being their drone supplier, but also by becoming a dependency of US infrastructure. In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
2.) When it comes to protectionism, I'm generally against it, but I have different thoughts when it comes to China. They have banned Uber, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc, and just make their own versions of it. Then they have absolutely no respect for international laws when it comes to IP. They don't compete economically according to the same rules as everyone else, and don't deserve to be treated the same way.
3.) I have 2 DJI drones. The fact that there is no mention of compensation in this legislature is absurd. Fortunately, I don't rely on these for my business, but imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business. Not only are you grounding the tools that they've already come to depend on, but there isn't an existing viable alternative on the market for many of these tasks.