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DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

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Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#471

Post by sofixa »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #400
chme wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any concrete examples you are referring to?

> Any concrete examples you are referring to? Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe. Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation. Which, I will note, is fine. It’s optimised for stability, not wealth. On the ot…

> Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe.

Which Europe? All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus?

> Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.

This is true, because the EU is composed of 20+ different countries, each with different languages, cultures, histories, priorities. It's impossible to remove that boundary.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#472

Post by 83 »

aeternum wrote: post #382
deepGem wrote: post #326

DJI's response (a bit dated) https://dronedj.com/2024/03/02/dji-response-drone-ban-us/ The allegations are so subjective that they sound like some middle schooler complaining to their mom. “DJI drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperatur…

Unconvincing tbh. Research papers have shown that heartrate can be tracked from cameras with well under 4k resolution. Doing it with DJI's excellent camera tech should be quite easy. As far as US infrastructure, google street view and bing maps seem to be a bigger information disclosure threat but I guess they do blur out faces.

Google street view isn't going to be driving around sensitive government facilites or electrical infrastructure though - and you really can't guarantee no curious citizens will try to fly their dji drone over said facilities. So all DJI needs to do is put in an if(location == government_facility) and sit back and wait for the camera feed from some idiot american.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#473

Post by asadotzler »

langsoul-com wrote: post #33
Havoc wrote: post #7

Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?

Worked with Huawei. Look at the smartphone market pre and post Huawei ban, immediate crater.

The Huawei ban's impact on smartphones was mostly a side effect. The real target was wireless infrastructure. Any time spent analyzing the phone stuff is a waste, that was all mostly collateral damage as we tried to prevent Huawei from dominating our domestic 5G (and related) networks.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#474

Post by ninininino »

ninininino wrote: post #145

In this thread, people not understanding that we've literally watched in the past year as consumer drones with IEDs attached to them have made the $10 million M1 Abrams tanks obsolete and what that means for war and its downstream implications for manufacturing bases.

Addendum: for anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating:

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1247403968/ukraine-pulls-abra...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/26/ukraine-wi...

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-abrams-tanks-1...

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#475

Post by sofixa »

lukeramsden wrote: post #311
chme wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any concrete examples you are referring to?

Can start with the number of unicorns in USA vs Europe, especially when you take population in to account https://www.failory.com/unicorns

So Estonia is better than the US?

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#476

Post by dji4321234 »

lima wrote: post #434
dji4321234 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What about consumer apps in Local Data Mode?

Overall what I'd say about DJI is that they seem to be earnestly trying to make their features work at face value.

That is, if you opt out of data collection, they seem to be earnestly _trying_ to disable data collection. Unfortunately their apps are a spaghetti monster disaster and it's very difficult for them to get things right, so DJI frequently introduce new features or libraries which contain telemetry they've forgotten to disable. In my experience they do this more often in consumer apps than enterprise apps. I think they might actually have some kind of automated testing or audit applied to their enterprise apps.

Whether this is a conspiracy to introduce subtle surveillance bugs or simple hardware-company-making-software incompetence is of course an exercise left to the reader's paranoia level.

Anyway, I just use DJI RCs and forget network credentials. This limits the DJI bug/malice blast radius surface area to an acceptable range to me, and that's the advice I'd give others, too.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#477

Post by andrepd »

gumby wrote: post #424
hackernewds wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware Isn't this mandatory given the restrictions required of them to disallow flying in banned areas?

You don't need to phone home in order to implement no-fly zones. All you need to do is download the latest flight restrictions, which could most easily be done anonymously.

So many things don't need pervasive surveillance and privacy violations... yet it seems everything does it regardless, from the largest social media down to the most insignificant bank or government app you need to conduct your life.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#478

Post by asadotzler »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #36
Havoc wrote: post #7

Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?

> Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader? I guess that depends on what the goal is? If a foreign company is the market leader, banning it allows US companies to take over the domestic market without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.

Which US companies are going to have a $500 competent consumer drone with a great camera, solid reliability, and top of the line ease of use to sell me the day this ban goes into effect, or even 5 years down the road? The answer is none.

There are no US companies capable of serving this market. None can produce the product DJI did and consumers will abandon the market before they'll transition to a product that costs twice as much for half the value.

This is not like smartphones or laptops or televisions or any of that, it's not needed, it's a total luxury and hobby for 95% of buyers. They will walk before adopting a shitty US-based alternative and the market will shrivel and die.

So, this is a fine policy if hurting US consumers by destroying an entire field of hobby to thumb our noses at China is the goal. It's a broken policy of stimulating a US alternative is the goal. To accomplish the latter, subsidies and reasonable tariffs are the right approach, not bans.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#479

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

team_gold wrote: post #336

As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All…

I assume one of the goals of this is to change that by making it feasible for US companies to compete at least on the domestic market.

Ukraine has shown that having domestic at-scale consumer drone production is a critical military capability. I bet part of the motivation behind this is protectionism to make sure this capability can be built up. Otherwise any war against China starts with China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day, likely with mostly or entirely domestic supply chains, without even going to a war economy, while the US cannot manufacture the same class of weapon at any comparable scale.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#480

Post by sofixa »

wyager wrote: post #366
nkrisc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, those pesky consumers getting in the way of the innovation of the free market with their protections. If only they could be fully exploited for maximum value extraction without interference.

This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.

> This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies.

Source? Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita, and using the median?

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