DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

I was on a project that was subject to the cleared UAS list you linked, and I cannot recommend either Parrot (incredibly long boot times, underpowered motors meant it was slow and had poor station keeping in high winds) or Skydio (bad heat management/low thermal cutoffs to the point that during the California high desert summer our unit wouldn't even start due to reporting that it was overheated) at all. So maybe its not too bad that they're no longer for sale.

Europe is far from noble, just different mentality and expectations from life. VW keep saying that next year VW Golf robotaxis are coming and not delivering wouldn't fly, therefore we don't have crazy stock prices.

Airbus keeps making good quality planes that don't fall from the skies, selling those then flying around. It's alright, I don't know why the government should attack Airbus but maybe the US government should have kept Boeing in check.

Europeans have their ways and Americans have theirs. Let's keep it like that and not put all the eggs in the same basket, as it appears that Chinese came up with another hugely successful economy model.

It's not practical, one should always assume or even pretend to be the cause of problems yourself.

Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?

Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?

Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?

In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)

You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.

If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?

We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?

True.

I was just talking about my experience with DJI. Where you buy a product, can use it for a bit, and then it stops working, because you haven't connected it to the internet or created an account.

It is often the 'market leaders' that are so afraid to loose customers and their market position to implement customer hostile processes into their products.

> It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.

I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store, especially because their home market (China) doesn't even use the Play Store.

The iOS version of their app is Apple-approved and present in the App Store.

I do research in this space.

Their consumer apps are loaded to the gills with product-manager telemetry (tap/action tracing, etc., think Firebase/Flurry/whatever), and until recently they had a "sync flight logs" feature that would do what it said: give your detailed flight logs to DJI. It was opt-in, but it was easy to do by accident and many years ago there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.

They just removed this feature from US apps this week (too little too late, and too attached to reality and not attached enough to political pandering).

DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.

I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front, but sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware (this applies to US-based companies and US intelligence, too, of course).

However, their apps run on their own controllers are generally alright, and their enterprise apps run on their enterprise controllers in Local Data Mode are legitimately clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.

I fly DJI drones all the time using DJI RCs with network credentials forgotten, and I wouldn't hesitate to use one of these for consumer use. For the truly paranoid, use a burner email and a VPN to activate the drone.

I also wouldn't worry about using DJI Enterprise drones with the pro controllers in Local Data Mode for even moderately sensitive applications (infrastructure, law enforcement, etc.).

Of course I wouldn't use one for US military applications, insofar as it would be foolish to use any non-allied electronic device in this way.

ps - note that the analysis in the sibling comments are of older apps, DJI Go 4 and Pilot 1, not the newer flagship apps DJI Fly and DJI Pilot 2. The general theme (tons of dirty analytics platforms) remains the same, but the newer apps use more American platforms (Firebase, AWS-hosted proprietary stuff) rather than Chinese, and the "disable telemetry" and "disable data sync" options generally have fewer bugs now.