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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

#591

Post by lmm »

Sabinus wrote: post #587
lmm wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company and the Chinese government? Yes. We've seen the back and forth with e.g. Jack Ma. It doesn't happen as publicly because it's not such good marketing in China, but of course it happens.

Wasn't the result of this that Jack Ma disappeared for a while and when we reappeared he sang the praises of the government?

One of the results, yes. That's good marketing in China. What kind of things you see in the papers tells you something about a country operates, but not a whole lot about how much access TPTB are actually being given to your messages, which is presumably the thing you care about.

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

#592

Post by anigbrowl »

Invictus0 wrote: post #494
anigbrowl wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely this is possible without just banning competitors, no?

The competition is literally an arm of the state of China, which is able to subsidize the business and send prices through the floor. Why would any entrepreneur choose to compete with a state-backed enterprise? And by the way, have you heard of tariffs? We literally "ban" all kinds of products with very high tariffs.

You can build your own drone quite cheaply using open source technologies, so I don't believe that industrial competition is as impossible as you say; especially given the existence of US subsidies/tax breaks for anything remotely defense related.

And by the way, have you heard of good manners? They make discussions much more productive than smug comebacks.

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

#593

Post by jiggawatts »

snypher wrote: post #585
jiggawatts wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I fly over 55lbs drones for a living and they all have manufacturer black boxes, mandated by regulation, to say "A drone company has ZERO business collecting flight log information" is wrong.

I've never heard of such a law or regulation. Which country? Can you link directly to the government site where this is posted?

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

#594

Post by brokenmachine »

theshrike79 wrote: post #426
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 I heard (third hand knowledge) is that the DJI Android software stack can't handle AABs and for some reason it's easier for them to just get people to sideload instead of fixing their toolchain.

what's an AAB?

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

#595

Post by _DeadFred_ »

tredre3 wrote: post #159
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha sure. Let me guess, the train is to a third tier Chinese city no one is interesting in going to, on tracks that the local government can't afford to pay the construction financing on, let alone future maintenance.

I'm sure you're right that third tier Chinese cities are awful. But major Chinese cities are very far ahead of America in terms of infrastructure. Similarly DJI is very far ahead of any of its competitors. Banning Chinese things because of politics is one thing. But pretending it's because they're inferior is just ridiculous.

Ah yes, the city built yesterday is nicer than the city built 100 years ago. And the point is?

China funded all that pretty infrastructure on massive local debt that the fees are not covering. Will be interesting to see how that works out long term.

Edit: I love China. I love the chinese people. I loved Shanghai of the 2010s. I've worked with a ton of amazing chinese developers in the Bay Area that were stranded after tiananmen, and I'm sad for their tragedy but they were definitely a boon to the USA. I don't think Americans are superior to Chinese in any way. I also don't think a new building/infrastructure being nicer than old buildings/infrastructure proves anything anyone who upgraded to a new car from an old one doesn't already know.

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

#596

Post by _DeadFred_ »

danielspace23 wrote: post #327
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha sure. Let me guess, the train is to a third tier Chinese city no one is interesting in going to, on tracks that the local government can't afford to pay the construction financing on, let alone future maintenance.

Which is an ironic comment to make, considering the difference in high-speed rail development in China vs in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_... (TL;DR: China's high speed rail network is the longest and most used in the world, as well as cheaper than the US's)

Why build all that infrastructure when the same use case is already being met with airplanes? The USA serves it's tier 3 cities much more efficiently with a few plane routes than building an entire high speed rail would.

Again, China's high speed rail utilization is not even able to pay for it's initial build out, and is very under utilized as it goes to tier 3 locations that don't justify it. Will be interesting to see how it plays out once 'maintenance debt' (technical debt but for infrastructure) gets added to the 'build out debt'. If those tier 3 cities turn tier 1 it will look like genius investment, but I don't see it happening.

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

#597

Post by redserk »

janalsncm wrote: post #544
rainsford wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple famously told the FBI to go pound sand when asked to help access an iPhone in an actual terrorism case (i.e. it wasn't about going after dissidents or journalists or anything), even though such help was definitely within Apple's technical power. Now, while admitting that I am no way claiming the US is perfect, does anyone actually think something even remotely similar would ever happen between a Chinese company…

There is a good book on the American surveillance apparatus Means of Control by Byron Tau. People are a lot more watched than they think. The Apple example is well-known because it is an exception. Much more common is not only compliance but making an entire business out of selling private data to the government. https://theintercept.com/2022/04/22/anomaly-six-phone-tracki... It really doesn’t matter that China is wo…

> It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.

This is exactly the sentiment I wanted to convey. I'd feel far more comfortable if we didn't settle for "at least we're not as bad as..." levels of rhetoric. Unsavory surveillance practices in one country shouldn't give us a justification to accept the declining status quo here.

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

#598

Post by janalsncm »

samatman wrote: post #391
logicchains wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get. In the consumer market, if the $1000 drone has a significantly worse user experience then people just won't buy it. Before DJI the consumer drone market was much smaller; by creating a cheap, high-quality product DJI caused more people to purchase drones, growing the market. If there's no competitive…

By all reports, Skydio drones offer an excellent user experience. The DJI Mini 3 Prop is currently $899, and Skydio can't manufacture something like that in the US, and sell it for that amount of money. But I bet they could make something comparable at a sale price of $1100-1300. Allowing Communists to dump goods in our market is optional. I don't know that I support a ban on DJI products, I have a Mini 2: I like dro…

At this point China is about as communist as FedEx is federal. They are “state capitalist” which pretty much means the government owns or has controlling stakes in a lot of companies. Singapore’s is similar.

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

#599

Post by ulfw »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #522
ulfw wrote: post #146

So what's America's plan to survive? Ban almost everything they used to buy? (i.e. goods manufactured in China) Which Made in the Good Ol' US of A consumer drones are people supposed to purchase instead of a DJI Mini?

[flagged]

Oh yes someone who calls out US stupidity must be earning 50 cents.

Funny how you forgot the (effective) ban on Chinese EVs (sorry "100% tariff only") too. Let's not even get into the ban of other manufacturers such as Huawei. So, more $100,000 Elon Cybertrucks are going to save the planet from the climate crisis we are facing?

I stand by my question: what is the big plan here? Try to be somehow competitive by piece by piece banning the place you literally built up with your excessive imports?

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

#600

Post by katbyte »

luma wrote: post #246
mcculley wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US made a very serious mistake by Was it a mistake if the goal was to get cheaper products at the expense of foreigners losing fingers? I agree it is myopic policy for the long term, but certainly many voters are happy to push safety problems somewhere else.

It is bad policy long term, and this policy has been around for a long time. At some point we need to address bad policy.

It was great for short term profit and stock value and everyone involved in making those choices is either dead or soon to be dead and doesn’t have to deal with the fallout.
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