FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US • Hacker News Board

Re: FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

#121

Post by red-iron-pine » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #77

Danox wrote: post #74

Another dumb move how do you expect to keep up to the rest of the world, which will just move on, another thing that’s bad is that most of the local US drone companies are not exactly moving all that fast to make drones for civilian use within America, they all want to cater/make military drones to sell at a high price to the American government at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Is that really any surprise? Consumers are cost sensitive and have you seen the morass of obtuse and pointless regulations surrounding drones in the US? Meanwhile the military can do whatever it likes and has much deeper pockets. The cherry on top is how utterly unenforceable (in a practical non-proliferation sense) the bulk of the regulations are. Strap a microcontroller dev board to anything sufficiently lightweigh…

> Strap a microcontroller dev board to anything sufficiently lightweight and it can become a drone. The most expensive part of a DIY heavy lift build that breaks ~all the rules is probably the props.

the only thing keeping most of the DJT crowd alive is, basically, because no one has tried to do a ukranian drone assault on the administration.

there are no serious large scale countermeasures that can't be worked around with things like basic HAM radio skills and fiber optic cable. ban them now and make them hard to get, otherwise it's gonna start looking like that youtube video "Slaughterbots" really, really quick

Re: FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

#122

Post by red-iron-pine » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

Danox wrote: post #90

edaemon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palmer Luckey owns a drone company. He can't have an objective opinion on his competitors being banned.

He won’t be so lucky because no one outside the United States is gonna buy his stuff, but he doesn’t really want to sell it to anyone but the American military anyway at a inflated price.

> but he doesn’t really want to sell it to anyone but the American military anyway at a inflated price.

that's a fancy way of saying "grifting the taxpayer"

and what is the US military using their powers for these days anyway?

Re: FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

#123

Post by theptip » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #105

theptip wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that lidar maps are public knowledge. If they were why would Google be spending so much money creating their own? This is not the same thing as taking a picture from a satellite.

I realize that. I didn't say "publicly available" but rather that anyone important has access to the information that they want. I expect that any exceptions to that can be trivially remedied on a case by case basis. It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well fu…

Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? Or do you concede the point that they do not, in fact, have those yet?

Satellite does not get you most of the way there, the threat model here is military (drone) warfare where you would like 3d maps at high resolution. To me “Targeted collection” would look a lot like “backdoor some small % of the commercial drones we sell and siphon the data out”. You should check the Snowden files for the implant tech that NSA was putting in Cisco routers bound to China if you think this sounds far fetched.

Re: FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

#124

Post by gyanchawdhary » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 12:23 AM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #43

ACCount37 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, or to avoid surrendering yet another technology relevant to the future to China. As if them manufacturing the bulk of world's solar panels, wind turbines and heading for EVs isn't bad enough.

The US is a tiny part of the world, however self-absorbed and exceptional it imagines itself. And everyone else is going to continue buying the best options while the US drives it lifted rolls-coal pickups and tells about the olden days.

wrong.

Re: FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US

#125

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

gyanchawdhary wrote: post #124

llm_nerd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a tiny part of the world, however self-absorbed and exceptional it imagines itself. And everyone else is going to continue buying the best options while the US drives it lifted rolls-coal pickups and tells about the olden days.

wrong.

[deleted]