this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 143 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Would be nice if there were some actual alternatives about the same price range and not using proprietary softwares..

[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately anything open will cost extra, just because of the nature of it. Not to mention the colossal scale of how much product DJI ship, to cut costs somewhere

[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 months ago (4 children)

The reduction of monitoring is worth it. DJI calls home with your location and even provides tools for police to view the location of drones and drone operators in real time.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I am confused then what is Congress' problem here?

Aint this where they are taking us anyway? Or they are worried commie police also getting the same info?

[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 months ago (21 children)

I am confused then what is Congress' problem here?

The data is also available to DJI, and through them the CCP.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking

Something that stuck out to me:

The AeroScope signals are not encrypted, despite what we wrote in a previous version of this post — even though DJI and an independent source both told us they were encrypted, and DJI insisted they were when we did a fact-check, DJI now admits that they aren’t encrypted at all. So they could be picked up by other kinds of receivers.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Literally all of the alternatives are open and much more capable for it. You can go buy a pixhawk and basically any frame and have something much more powerful for much less money, you just have to be willing to bolt two or three parts together.

[–] [email protected] 98 points 5 months ago (25 children)

I'm adjacent to the industry. This is dumb but I understand the reasoning. We're getting left behind in the electronics world. Nobody is creating hardware startups because every few months there's a viral blog post with a "hardware is hard" title on HN and none of the VC assholes want to fund anything but web based surveillance capitalism ad tech because it's a surefire way to make money. Even if you do get funded and you're US based you're absolutely doing all your manufacturing in China if you're remotely consumer facing (b2big-b has different rules). That means Chinese companies get all the benefits of all the labor from your highly trained engineers when they get the design files. If you try to build anything at volume in the US you have strikingly few options for boards and parts. Everything is whole number multiples of fucking PCBway and half the time it's lower quality unless you're paying aero-defense prices which is the only business anyone wants.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We let almost all manufacturing jobs go overseas just to cut labor costs and now we're suffering the consequences and our government completely incapable of doing what's necessary to bring that manufacturing capability back to the US. At this point basic Keynesians economic policy is tantamount to heresy for anyone but the far left. Its like we've adopted the economic policies we forced on third world nations, and found ourselves with a third world economy.

Being able to produce cheap drones as good as DJIs is far more important for national security than whatever espionage risk they pose. Cheap, easy to use, drones like the dji phantom are omnipresent in current wars. Banning them prevents us from learning via competition or basic reverse engineering.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago

Its like we've adopted the economic policies we forced on third world nations, and found ourselves with a third world economy

Foucault's boomerang at work, just like US counter insurgency tactics now being employed by US police.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

People shit on China all the goddamn time here but they've done a prolific job becoming the tech and manufacturing leader in a handful of decades.

Blame it on tech espionage if you want but there's a reason the US is deadset on targeting Chinese imports, and it's hardly for any of the security reasons they might be tempted to claim it to be. The US is about to be left behind and it's noones fault but our own.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Again like the tiktok ban: Rather than passing real privacy laws we're passing racism laws and pretending this helps privacy and security.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The CCP might be all Chinese and the Chinese Populace might be +91% Han Chinese but that in no way makes laws which target a hostile foreign dictatorship equate to "racism".

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (17 children)

the Chinese Populace might be +91% Han Chinese

I'll never understand how a country with 1.4B people gets labeled "homogenous" by race counters, but a continent with with 800M, like Europe, is able to recognize dozens of cultures and subcultures.

Would you even guess that China has over 300 living languages inside its borders?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Because not many europeans primarily identify as "european first". This is slowly changing but for the most part, people identify by whatever european nation they inhabit. But i bet most chinese identify as "chinese first" instead of whatever region/city they are from.

In fact, China likes to brag about how "advanced" they are, that they solved this "issue" centuries ago, while the EU is currently trying to "copy them".

TLDR : If you ask a chinese tourist "where are you from?", they will answer "China". If you ask a european the same, noone will say "Europe/EU".

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (18 children)

This is honestly ridiculous. The security concerns are unwarranted. Any surveillance that these drones could accomplish if hacked can just be bought off of any GIS website.

"But military bases" go fly a drone by one and see what happens. This already isn't a surveillance concern.

This is going to set the hobbyist and professional drone market back a decade.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Only in the US. The rest of the world buys them. It still is a major market lose, but China still makes Huawei phones.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 5 months ago (15 children)

This is a loser's game US is playing. Historically it used to innovate above the rest, now "we ban them, because their tech better"

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Regulatory capture go brrrrrrrrrrr.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 5 months ago (3 children)

On one hand, the CCP fucking sucks. On the other hand, the US alternatives to some of these banned / tariffed Chinese products also really suck - especially when it comes to bang for your buck. ugh.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago (14 children)

On the other hand, with more money going to the US alternatives, there's more potential for a US company to step into that niche once it's open.

Not that it'll necessarily happen obviously, but it does make it a bit easier at least.

Also, I feel like I should add the disclaimer of "I'm not American." I wish I could show my country next to my username or something lol.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Problem is that, especially with the automakers, is that a lack of competition becomes an excuse to not invest in innovation. For example, General Motors is throwing billions into stock buy-backs, when they probably should be throwing that into EVs.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

That only works if you have competition. We don’t really have free markets. The consolidation is so extreme that auto makers for example really don’t care if consumers want a high value budget EV. Why should they? They can make you collectively buy something else when you need a car to get to work.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Yeah, it's real nice and all to say you want to combat chinese business interests threatening to swallow american ones whole, but then I can't buy a house, and my rent is going up because these same business interests are buying houses in every major city by the thousands.

Then, they either renovate them, or let them sit vacant. The renovated ones get rented out at exorbant rates. And since they own such a significant number of these homes, the rents EVERYWHERE rise dramatically. And then you see all these vacant houses. Never rented. Never sold. They become drug havens for the cities homeless. But it doesn't lower property values, because it's all artificially high.

So now you're paying higher city taxes, and living near a house that has regular gunshots out onto the streets. The cops won't address it, because they know how dangerous those houses are. But you still have to rent an apartment near one.

But it's ok guys. The government is banning tiktok, and drones.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago

I'm so glad they are focusing on the things we really need

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How’s all that freedom doing over there?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

"The Chinese oligarchs are taking over!" - American oligarchs probably

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Software problems require software solutions.

//not affiliated, not endorsing

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Meanwhile Ukraine: more drones for us

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

If we had a real SCOTUS then both this and the TikTok ban would be dead on day one for clearly violating the prohibition on Bills of Attainder in the Constitution.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

I'm getting so tired of this red scare, cold war shit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Did something happen or is this just, "Waaaahhh, China baaaaddd!"? It sounds like they actually had better reason to ban TikTok.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The general idea is that it's a potential cybersecurity concern, it's along the same lines as the Huawei ban from a few years back. Not entirely without merit, there have been vulnerabilities found in DJI hardware/software that could be used maliciously and some of them were fairly serious. I don't think anyone has ever found any proof those vulnerabilities were intentional, but I also think that would be super difficult to prove one way or the other.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Drone maker DJI is based in China and controls over 70% of the world's drone market share, a combination that threatens U.S. lawmakers. As we first reported in April, 6% of DJI stock lies in the hands of Chinese state-owned businesses, which has led to fears of Chinese government backdoors, national security risks, and other fears of Chinese surveillance using the company's drones.

Elise Stefanik, the Republican representative from New York who sponsors the anti-DJI legislation, said of the drones, "DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America." Of course, this unacceptable risk h

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