Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Hide from a Drone

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 121 posts

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#61

Post by tinus_hn »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #45
01100011 wrote: post #3

I don't know if it would be effective at hiding you beyond the next few years when more comprehensive systems are in place, but I think a simple circuit that randomly blinks an IR LED would be handy. Something like an an LED throwie, but with random cycling. Put a bunch of them around and you'll probably screw up most cheap CCDs by forcing them to constantly adjust their exposure. Sure, a cheap filter can defeat them…

a) Having a large blinking marker draw attention to your area would already be highly noticeable. b) that IR LED would have to be extremely powerful to overwhelm a camera that is looking at a larger area

You could send something like the macrovision signal that hinders the automatic exposure correction.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#62

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

squarefoot wrote: post #8
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #5

For reference here is footage from an apache gun killing a civilian reporter in Baghdad in 2007: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AColla... So I'm fairly certain this is what most drone operators will see on the screen. This video is over 13 years old though, so current optics are probably much more advanced than what was deployed in iraq. Near-future drones can also probably use 5G networks to t…

That video was taken from far distance because the drone had to operate unnoticed in enemy territory; pretty sure that they had much better optics and transmission capabilities even back then, but it had to be very far from action. The distance can be roughly measured, if the bullets speed is known, by counting the time between the shots audio (assuming it's properly synced) and when they're seen hitting the area. To…

>That video was taken from far distance because the drone had to operate unnoticed in enemy territory

That video is not taken from a drone at all. It's from an AH-64 Apache, a manned attack helicopter with a flight crew of two.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#63

Post by wazoox »

IshKebab wrote: post #55
wazoox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good friend of mine had the chance to see such a van while working for the French Navy. The operator even showed him a (somewhat blurry) real-time view of my friend's Mac desktop in the building next door... (This happened in the early 90s in Toulon arsenal).

That sounds like Tempest, and I somehow doubt that they actually showed him that.

Why not? They didn't explain how it works. And he was an officer at the time.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#64

Post by cosarara »

DarthGhandi wrote: post #57
01100011 wrote: post #3

I don't know if it would be effective at hiding you beyond the next few years when more comprehensive systems are in place, but I think a simple circuit that randomly blinks an IR LED would be handy. Something like an an LED throwie, but with random cycling. Put a bunch of them around and you'll probably screw up most cheap CCDs by forcing them to constantly adjust their exposure. Sure, a cheap filter can defeat them…

This is the insanely stupid top voted comment I've come to expect from this site. > How to hide from a drone? "Shine bright IR flashlights at it in a 100m radius around your position" Get the feeling if someone was dropping 100yr old mortars on you this still isn't a viable option. I try my best not to get personal but this is so fucking dumb that it almost feels like malicious advice for the current hot warzones tha…

TFA is not about warzones but police surveillance.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#65

Post by motohagiography »

The idea that we all live as future fugitives now seems like something worth changing. If your plan is to hide, does it really matter how well? The best way to defeat drones is to engage in culture and policy making, and to vote.

The next best way is to use RF to triangulate their C2 location and either jam it or destroy it.

"Hide." Kids today, no valour.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#66

Post by londons_explore »

XMPPwocky wrote: post #39
ezconnect wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also thought of this and how do military hide from satellites. Do they use powerful lasers to saturate photon sensors. Since military satellites have existed for so long now military probably implemented a way to hide from them.

Ceilings, and (knowing when satellites are passing overhead) when things need to be under ceilings.

I assume that most militaries have satellites with radars that can penetrate most ceilings to see planes in hangars etc.

Most militaries also have access to some high orbit satellites that have 24x7 coverage of an area, and then some low orbit satellites which fly overhead every few hours and can grab high res shots. The combination makes it very hard to sneak a secret plane from one building to another between orbits, since the 24/7 coverage will see it (albeit at lower res).

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#67

Post by fake-name »

motohagiography wrote: post #65

The idea that we all live as future fugitives now seems like something worth changing. If your plan is to hide, does it really matter how well? The best way to defeat drones is to engage in culture and policy making, and to vote. The next best way is to use RF to triangulate their C2 location and either jam it or destroy it. "Hide." Kids today, no valour.

> The next best way is to use RF to triangulate their C2 location and either jam it or destroy it.

That doesn't do jack when the drone is autonomous.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#68

Post by londons_explore »

sbierwagen wrote: post #32
intc wrote: post #12

> It’s smart to avoid using wireless devices like mobile phones or GPS systems, since they have digital signatures... Could someone explain how a GPS receiver (especially one which doesn't utilize DGPS of any sorts) would have any sort of digital signature which could be measured from a drone?

There's a few ways to detect radio receivers, some of them based on listening for incidentally radiated intermediate frequencies (which have to be a multiple of the received frequency) from the amplifier in the receiver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van It would be a heck of a trick to detect a GPS receiver that way, though. Probably be easier just to listen for the RF noise from the switching regulator…

> Probably be easier just to listen for the RF noise from the switching regulator in the power supply.

Natural things give off very little RF... Pretty much anything electronic gives off far far more. It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility for a military to use antenna arrays to try to track every nearby electronic device of any kind. Sure - identifying the device might be tricky, but you gain a lot of intel simply knowing where electronic devices are clustering and headed.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#69

Post by londons_explore »

ashtonkem wrote: post #54
alacombe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the US has pretty much been kept at bay from Irak and Afghanistan, go figure... In general, the US army is not equipped for guerilla-style warfare, and especially not on US soil. Local PD are another story on this point, but far less equipped.

On one hand it’s clear that a guérilla campaign is fully capable of resisting a first class army for a long period of time; this has been clear since the 1970s. What people tend to ignore is that the defenders do this while sustaining much higher casualties . Oh, and civilian casualties are typically an order of magnitude higher because high explosives aren’t very discriminatory. On one hand, that’s an interesting di…

I prefer my politicians to bow down to US demands and not start a war in the first place.

Re: How to Hide from a Drone

#70

Post by dylan604 »

londons_explore wrote: post #66
XMPPwocky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ceilings, and (knowing when satellites are passing overhead) when things need to be under ceilings.

I assume that most militaries have satellites with radars that can penetrate most ceilings to see planes in hangars etc. Most militaries also have access to some high orbit satellites that have 24x7 coverage of an area, and then some low orbit satellites which fly overhead every few hours and can grab high res shots. The combination makes it very hard to sneak a secret plane from one building to another between orbit…

There are materials and building techniques that do not allow radar signals to reflect cleanly which severely weakens the radar image. It just so happens the military is pretty aware of this. If the military wanted to hide from a radar scan, they would have the know how, the means, and the desire to do it.
Post reply on HN