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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

#511

Post by palata »

cm2012 wrote: post #438
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…

The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.

That's just an excuse, after 10 years failing to compete. Western drone companies have received billions in investments to make competing drones, but repeatedly fail, for some reason.

Western company can't compete, but that's on them. Banning DJI won't change anything, Western companies have to get their act together.

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

#512

Post by seanmcdirmid »

FactKnower69 wrote: post #509
ethbr1 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of running any internet-connected software with a push-update mechanism, built and controlled by a company in a country without a strong independent rule of law, should terrify far more people than it apparently does. This is one of those 'It's not a problem until it is a problem, and then it's a big fucking problem' scenarios.

>a country without a strong independent rule of law I'd really like you to try and define this term in a way that doesn't exclude the US

I'm not sure what you are getting at, but judicial independence is one thing that the USA has (in some quantity) that China has none of. There is no such thing as judicial review in China, if the official class decides to ignore China's constitutional freedoms of speech, religion, and press, then there is no recourse for a court to come in and say, "no, that's not right." Vs. the USA, where the Supreme court comes in all the time and tells presidents and congress what they can't do.

The Chinese government has said multiple times that it believes rule of law is a western imperialistic concept, so it isn't like this is even a goal for them.

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

#513

Post by palata »

83 wrote: post #464
sschueller wrote: post #178

So I guess the new viable business strategy in the US is: 1. Find a sector which a foreign companies dominates 2. Enter this sector even with a bad product 3. Go to congress and get the other ones banned because they are "insert reason here".

Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists? If you look at what's happening in Ukraine It's pretty much a given that the US defense sector is looking at ways to improve the US small drone manufacturing capabilites, and have less potentially hostile drones flying over their own territory.

> Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists?

I work in the drone industry, and this is so very obvious that I don't know where I would start describing it.

Yes, it was pushed by lobbyists. Every single US drone company has been pushing for a DJI ban for years.

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

#514

Post by seanmcdirmid »

palata wrote: post #511
cm2012 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.

That's just an excuse, after 10 years failing to compete. Western drone companies have received billions in investments to make competing drones, but repeatedly fail, for some reason. Western company can't compete, but that's on them. Banning DJI won't change anything, Western companies have to get their act together.

This isn't really true. Western drone companies haven't bothered competing in the consumer space, but they have made lots of advancement in the non-consumer space, where, arguably, the profits are better. Why try to compete with DJI for mail order drones going to kids when you can get a multi-million dollar contract with the Pentagon?

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

#515

Post by FactKnower69 »

tyree731 wrote: post #231
throwaway_j12 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this seem at odds with the facts? China isn't militarily supporting Russia or Ukraine. Ukraine's drone army is built from cheap Chinese drones. China is neutral. The argument that it hasn't sanctioned Russia means it is a party to the war on Russia's side is an argument of the form "if you aren't with us, you are against us." But then, you'd think the US would levy the same kind of vitriol at e.g. India. Chin…

> China is neutral. Neutrality in the face of gross violations of international law amounts to tacit support. And yes, I understand that you have addressed this point in your comment, but whataboutism gets us nowhere. If a country is violating human rights, they should be held accountable. > Taiwan and China are recognized by the United States by international treaty as one country. A treaty not worth the paper it's…

>Neutrality in the face of gross violations of international law amounts to tacit support.

Overall hysterical post but this line was the best by far

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

#516

Post by jiggawatts »

dji4321234 wrote: post #350
TheChaplain wrote: post #328

I don't trust DJI. I was looking to replace my GoPro with the DJI Action, but their app was not on the Play-store. It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering. I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.

> 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…

> there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.

> clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.

Juniper also had a “small bug” in their implementation of the NSA-mandated Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator algorithm that just so happened to leak the exact number of state bits onto the wire required to hack any VPN connection.

I don’t know if you’re an optimist or just a kind soul, but the rest of us are jaded for good reasons.

A drone company has ZERO business collecting flight log information, in the same way my car manufacturer has no business knowing where I drive.

That their “finger slipped” and they “accidentally” made opting out harder should tell you something.

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

#517

Post by WheatMillington »

beloch wrote: post #247
henvic wrote: post #28

DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc. It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. 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...

Speaking as a Canadian, U.S. trade protectionism is nothing new. It happens all the time and frequently targets allies like Canada rather than rivals like China. What U.S. citizens should watch out for is when U.S. protectionism winds up hurting the U.S.'s own economy. e.g. Tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber may have helped out a few U.S. softwood lumber producers with good lobbyists (and Jimmy Carter), but the incr…

The US is the most protected "free trade" economy in the world, by far.

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

#518

Post by FactKnower69 »

beacon294 wrote: post #89
h0l0cube wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does poke a hole through the concept of markets that are free of government intervention lead to cheaper goods. I doubt these subsidies don’t further government revenue in some way, so is the Chinese government a better capital allocator than the free market? They’ve made bets on solar, EVs, battery tech, and pretty much everything related to advanced manufacturing bar the latest CPU lithography, and right now the…

The Chinese government is playing the "kill competitors with price cuts" game on the national level by not floating their currency AND subsidizing their major international tech. Eventually someone will foot this bill. They hope the marbles they gain will be worth the cost.

so has this ever happened in the past, or just baseless speculation at this point? this thread is chock full of china experts telling us with certainly what china is going to do (justified with a lot of "just trust me bro") but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence

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

#519

Post by khazhoux »

segasaturn wrote: post #324
chme wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hardware has no reason to require direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work. If some device requires internet access, then it cannot be trusted to not transmit personal data, therefore it should be possible to replace the software on that device, so that something that is trusted by the consumer can be installed. While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requi…

While I agree with you, I doubt banning Chinese tech will remedy this problem. My experience is that American brands are much, much more aggressive about making you connect to the internet, install our apps, create an account, subscribe to our newsletter etc. Look at the difference between iRobot and Chinese robot vacuums on Amazon - the difference is night and day.

> While I agree with you, I doubt banning Chinese tech will remedy this problem.

I don't mean this as a political issue, but in your comment I see one of the reasons Trump appeals to people. He promotes a mindset of "stop handwringing and just fix the damn problem."

Here we know the following:

1) DJI devices have an always-on connection

2) Chinese government is unfriendly to US and exerts strong control over Chinese companies

3) China regularly blocks US companies for whatever reason they decide.

So yeah, we can say "but banning DJI won't solve the general problem of bad companies; we shouldn't just focus on China; is a ban really fair? etc etc. Or, we can just say "screw it -- China treats US companies like shit and we're not gonna just hand over all our drone info"

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

#520

Post by FredPret »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #485
FredPret wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Struggling to understand in which context the US is the weaker partner. - GDP [0] - Total wealth [1] - Military - Demographics (US - growing, China - aging and shrinking) - Soft power [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/ [1] [ https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/glo... ]

GDP and wealth are hard to compare because China does so much stuff for cheaper. They can build massive infrastructure projects like high speed trains, huge bridges and dams all for way cheaper than we do, so their money actually goes farther. That means even for the same GDP they have more productive capability. Military is not the only way to exercise power - look at the Belt and Road initiative. Demographics - how…

Your first point about things being cheaper over there is true but that's not all there is to it. They're still in the basic infrastructure phase of growth. So they can build that much cheaper because people there get paid peanuts, and land is cheap. As soon as they reach a saturation point of prosperity close to where the US is now, they'll see prices spike to equal US levels. If this ever happens.

> Military is not the only way to exercise power - look at the Belt and Road initiative.

The military is the only thing that matters when the chips are really down. China can try to buy international favour with it's dodgy infrastructure deals, but that's not the same as deep, long-term alliances, and a competent military-industrial complex. The US has troops and advanced weapons stationed all over the place, including right next to China. I'd be amazed if the opposite ever becomes true.

> Demographics - how many PhDs are coming out of each country.

There's a fair bit more to demographics than the number of PhDs - not sure why you think this even matters.

> And obviously we’re banning DJI because they are the dominant player - we couldn’t compete economically so we’re using legal power instead. If the US was just better at building consumer drones this never would have happened.

Now it's true that DJI is the best, but this is not yet part of a broader trend where China is outcompeting the US on quality. And keep in mind that China is using its internal legal power to spend public money pushing companies such as Huawei, DJI, and Bytedance.

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