Would be nice if there were some actual alternatives about the same price range and not using proprietary softwares…
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
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.
Every drone does that, since RemoteID got implemented.
I’m with you there. I opt into OSS and open hardware whenever possible
Oh no, not the location data that has to be shared publicly for safety reasons anyways! God forbid!
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?
Cold war politics is more important than the surveillance state.
I am confused then what is Congress’ problem here?
The data is also available to DJI, and through them the CCP.
So they’ll be able to see that I recorded some footage of some boats near San Francisco?
This could be a severe national security problem if the drones sent back the video to DJI as well, then a foreign power would get geotagged high detail video of areas of the part of SF you flew over, VERY useful to a foreign intelligence service.
And I am not just talking about your drone and your flight, all other people who own and fly drones in the area would also supply data to sutch a system.
I am not saying that this is what they are doing, but please remember that the Brittish government asked the public to send in their holliday photos of the coast of France to help them plan the D-Day invasions. This kind of information is useful.
How realistic is this though?
I thought most people slap a GoPro on their drone (admittedly know very little about the hobby) and how would China secretly be transmitting so much data (4k video) without anyone noticing?
Plus if they want surveillance video, they can just have someone fly their own drone here and capture exactly what they want without having to wade through tons of junk that isn’t important to them.
If they wanted to, they could just send a few Chinese “tourists” over with their DJI (or American) drones and record specific footage instead of metadata about general footage. Or use their satellites. It’s not the 1940s any more.
When I fly my drone it’s not connected to WiFi, and doesn’t even need to be connected to my phone. What network are they sending gigabytes and gigabytes of video data over when I’m recording people fishing on a lake in the middle of nowhere?
They definitely do not send video though. That would be super obvious.
At least that was consentual. The UK government basically said "Hey guys, the nazis are bad. So help us plan an attack by sending us your family vacation photos of some beaches on Frances beaches.
And everyone was like “yeah, alright. That sounds good”
China is basically like “lets set up spying EVERYWHERE! Even in countries we don’t have claim to.”
I have to inform you that that US has some of the best spy satellite networks on the planet.
People shocked that other countries play the spook game too is amazing.
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.
So the verge just took a foreign for profit company at their word, and called it “fact checking”???
Modern investigative journalism everybody!
DJI and an independent source both told us
And who is this independant source? How did they get their info? Did that independant source ALSO just call DJI?
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.
For the love of fucking fuck please goddamnit I was just starting to enjoy flying mine fuck everyone in congress who voted for this fuck everyone and everything in general rn fr
Meanwhile Ukraine: more drones for us
Ukraine isn’t really using DJIs as much (if any at all) as they are custom built FPV drones.
FPV drones are being used as kamikaze weapons. DJI drones are being used as spotters because they can hold position easily and zoom from far away.
Ah makes sense.
U.S. government simply hates its citizens.
I gotta wonder, the more this kind of stuff picks up steam the more risky Chinese companies are going to view investing in American exports. When, if ever, do we reach the tipping point where Chinese companies currently selling things that simply aren’t produced in America anymore stop sending them because the risk is too high?
I will say, had a chuckle when I saw these two posts in succession in your post feed
So to your own point, as long as there is at least one person with a credit card ready to go, probably no tipping point.
Did something happen or is this just, “Waaaahhh, China baaaaddd!”? It sounds like they actually had better reason to ban TikTok.
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.
Similar reason to why they banned Dahua and Hikvision cameras from US government facilities. No intentional backdoor have been found in those either, just some security vulnerabilities that have been patched. They’re still very widely used, and you should always have security cameras on a separate VLAN with no internet access, regardless of which country they’re manufactured in.
How’s all that freedom doing over there?
It’s pretty nice, I do mostly whatever I want every day.
I have a really old one sitting in the closet. Am I going to have to get rid of it if this passes?
No, this is only for new sales.
Thanks.
Good.
Bad.
The US is so inept at manufacturing, yet wants to fight China. We can pretend to punish them, but 98% of all products bought and sold in the USA are “Made In China”.
*Land of the free!
- ™
©®™
Copyright and Trademark symbols basically mean the same thing, the R symbol means Registered Trademark and is much more enforced.
Free to exploit the working class.
Again like the tiktok ban: Rather than passing real privacy laws we’re passing racism laws and pretending this helps privacy and security.
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”.
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?
You are looking at it from the perspective of a westerner post springtime of nations. As I understand it a lot of Chinese people see it more like the Romans, wherein they may be different but they are all Chinese. Also China has been committing cultural genocide and assimilation against groups within their borders for millenia, this has resulted in what can best be described as a very broad cultural and ethnic identity.
So you think the Chinese are just naturally genocidal? And that’s why the Yao and Zhuang and Bai and Mongolian people don’t count as distinct ethnic groups?
Meanwhile, the Welsh, the English, the Irish, and the Scottish do count because… the English have been historically so peaceful and egalitarian?
When the fuck did I say that their naturally that way? Its a control tool, the Romans also used it to a degree. Its pretty hard to keep an empire as big as China going for severap Millenia without doing that type of shit.
Also did I say that I didnt recognize the Yao, Zhuang, Bai, and Mongols as distinct ethno cultural groups? I was talking on my understanding of how quite a lot of Chinese folks see themselves, if you want my opinion on it then Id say the Han identity is probably split them into at least a dozen groups and its just cultural genocide and colonialism all the way down. But I refuse to recognize the concept of an American culture so im a bit biased on that front.
And then finally I didnt know Irish, Scots, and Welsh thoughly identify with the English silly me. Seriously I will repeat myself, I was referring to the dominant groupsing in China not minority groups. But you do allow to make a solid point, who embrases and attemps to enforce the “British” identity the most is it the Scots, Irish, and Welsh or is it the colonialist bastards in the south of England? I am very aware of Englands tendency towards cultural genocide within Great Britain and Ireland, afterall half my ancestors fled to North America to escape the fucking Saxons.
If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.
CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.
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”.
I assume most race counters on a global would just consider Western European Descent as one, if they even differentiate between Caucasians at all, but if you go to Europe then you meet people with heritages from all over the world pretty regularly and if you go to China you mostly meet people from China whose family is Chinese going back many generations. Maybe it’s a cultural issue or maybe that’s just the result of their previous massive increase in population after industrialization and the legislative failures of the Mao regime meaning the naturally occurring ratio is skewed that far from the norm.
I don’t know, and I don’t really care, tbh.
if you go to China you mostly meet people from China whose family is Chinese
Where as when you go to Europe…
You will meet people with heritages from all over the world. For example, the UK has local heritage demographic around 74%, and of combined total white demographic of around 81%. That’s a much different number than the Chinese 91%.
You can cross the straight in from France or take a thirty minute flight from Spain and be counted as “non-local”. Meanwhile, traveling from Shenyang to Shenzhen means nothing.
The islanders of Hainan are no different than the mountain men of Inner Mongolia.
Lol you brought EU into the conversation but didn’t state the statistics for them. The large majority of Immigrants to an EU member state are classified as “Non-EU Nationals” meaning they come from outside of the EU. About 5.3% of all EU population are first generation Non-EU immigrants.
TBH I can’t even tell you what the race, ethnicity, and heritage stats are for the EU because they’ve got the worst demographics tracking imaginable.
European countries aren’t totalitarian states. This isn’t a question of culture, it’s an issue regarding the one and only state power that’s making decisions.
This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country. Yes, there are long histories in China and are (vanishing) diverse cultures in China but that’s irrelevant when talking about the actions of the state, which is all encompassing and overrules culture and diversity every time.
It’s the state that owns and controls these companies, it’s the state that dictates their policy and usage, and since the state is fascist and actively seeking to undermine democracy across the global, it is wise to treat the products of that state as a threat.
European countries aren’t totalitarian states.
I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia
Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.
This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country
I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.
It’s the state that owns and controls these companies
Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.
I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia
Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.
Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn’t a country I’d recommend taking tech from either.
Ireland is not comparable to China though, that’s an extreme reach. We’re not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we’re talking about uni-party state control.
I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.
Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled “cia misinformation” by the mods. It’s a throughly compromised instance.
Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.
Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.
Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.
Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it’s not really a question.
Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships
Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it. Never question the modem day police/surveillance state at home. Certainly don’t ask about our colonies abroad, or their paramilitary death squads and torture prisons financed with domestic capital.
Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation
It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.
Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business
Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority
Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it
No…totalitarianism is an actual distinct system of governance when the state controls every aspect of daily life, communication and economic activity. It’s an actual word with meaning.
It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.
Ok, I’m not sure if we’re talking through a translator app or something, but I didn’t get banned from lemmy.ml for being “pro-war” I got banned for mentioning a historical fact about the Great Leap Forward and acknowledging other atrocities like the genocide occurring in Xinjiang.
If someone is anti-war they would be against those types of things as well. Tankies instead deny that those events occurred/are occurring, that’s why they’re so easy to spot and how people know they’re on Lemmy – they literally can’t condemn the CCP for any of the things they purport to be against when it comes to other countries, since it’s counter-productive to their true goals to criticize the CCP.
By contrast an honestly anti-war progressive type of person would be just as clear-eyed about their own government as they are the CCP. That’s being anti-war, you can’t be selective or try to ignore degrees of difference just because it’s politically uncomfortable, that’s just being a mouth-piece for a specific flavor of authoritarianism.
Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority
Again, running public services is not the same as the state owning and controlling all businness and industry. If the Post Office was used to control speech, that would be totalitarian use of a public service.
I think you’re just being obtuse at this point. You might be down for totalitarianism and the abolishment of individual freedoms, most people are not. Since, you know, having no rights kind of suck ass.
banned
Believe it or not, also Rule 1. Wait, wrong instance.
I can see how this might seem like a hexbear or ml thread from the pro-ccp comments on this post, lol.
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.
Only in the US. The rest of the world buys them. It still is a major market lose, but China still makes Huawei phones.
Good point. Unfortunate that US consumers keep getting screwed by these bans
Idk if you vastly overestimate the available data on GIS or underestimate the data which can be obtained by drones.
Also, DJI has 70% of the global drone market share, so banning this company might actually help innovation.
DJI has 70% of the global drone market share, so banning this company might actually help innovation.
That’s… Not how innovation works. Why would other companies want or need to innovate if their main competitor disappears? If anything, the opposite will happen - they won’t have to try as hard to make a great product, since they no longer need to be better than the market leader.
Lmao you think destroying a global monopoly will decrease competition?
You heard it here, folks, drone production is over forever. Nobody will ever make drones again without the Chinese and their superior cheap plastic and tiny electric motors. It’s all joever. /s
Show us one example where shutting down a company increased competition among the remaining companies. That’s just not something that happens.
Smaller companies compete by building products that are better than the current market leaders. If the market leader disappears, they no longer have that incentive, as people are going to buy their products even if they don’t improve them in any way, since the customers don’t have a choice.
I’m not saying there won’t be drones any more. I’m saying that they won’t be competitive with DJI in terms of quality or value of money because they don’t need to be.
Show me one example of shutting down a company who held a monopoly? Generally they just get broken up into smaller companies which directly increases competition but that is in no way analogous to our current situation.
We know that in every single example so far that Monopoly and Competition inversely correlate by definitions.
We know that in every single example so far that Monopoly and Competition inversely correlate by definitions
A direct (not inverse) correlation between them happens all the time in tech. Smaller companies get sick of the market leader or monopoly for some reason, produce a better product, and people switch over.
For example, Internet Explorer had a web browser monopoly. Around 98% of web users used it. It lost that monopoly not because it was shut down, but because other, better browsers were released and people organically switched over. Increasing the competition reduced its monopoly.
The same could be said about Teamspeak users moving to Discord. Teamspeak had a monopoly on real-time gamer chat, but people moved to Discord because it was better.
So you’re saying it stopped being a monopoly when competition was created, and you somehow construe that as “monopoly equals competition” ??
I have a DJI drone and I agree. I would know if it’s collecting weird telemetry I have a DNS filter which would spot it all. It doesn’t. Just normal shit.
I have pulled mine apart too. I have an old one from before the tracking law and I didn’t find anything nefarious. The one I have from after the tracking law went into effect is transmitting its location and ID but I didn’t find much else even on a network intercept.
Maybe there is some way to open a stream to China buried deep in the firmware, but I don’t see what use China would have for that. They have other methods of surveillance
Sry for the late response but agreed!!
Not hobbyist. There is high chance hobbyists drone makers will benefit from it.
makers maybe, but what about users?
Maybe they will learn drone making at least from off-the-shelf parts. Making own drone gives greater freedom than buying prebuilt.
I can assure you that we won’t. There has not been a time in the history of this country that lower competition has resulted in improved products or prices.
There is zero US based competition in the hobbyist and consumer spaces unless you DIY. US companies mostly do products for emergency services, large commerical operations like spraying pesticides, or military. There are a handful of brands making smaller drones, but they’re all a decade behind DJI in features and quality control, or they cost $20,000.
I’d be fine with a ban if there was a legitimate security concern, but there isn’t, this is just part of the trade war and it only stands to harm US consumers and small businesses. The entire aerial photography industry is going to collapse and one’s only option will be large companies with hex rotor drones and Red cameras.
unless you DIY.
I was thinking about DIY.
but there isn’t, this is just part of the trade war
True.
Oh if you’re thinking diy then yeah this won’t affect DIY at all. DIYs are all Frankensteins anyway
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”
Regulatory capture go brrrrrrrrrrr.
Capitalists hate competition.
Competition for the labor market on the other hand? Hell yeah fucking let’s use slaves in a prison or other country!
Oh no! The USA will fall behind in terms of expensive hobbies unless it can make their own plastic toys for lonely adults! /s
Yea, there is absolutely no reason to have a good drone industry at all. In Ukraine for example they don’t use any drones. /s
According to Sukharevskyi, 99% of Ukrainian military drones are produced domestically.
My comment was supposed to be sarcastic
Yes you were sarcastic about Ukraine not using Drones. You were therefor saying Ukraine uses Drones. As if that means fuck all in a discussion of the CCP run company DJI who produces Drones which are not the ones used in Ukraine.
DJI drones are used in ukraine tho. But that was not my point, my point was that a drone industry is nice to have, even though you think it’s an overpriced hobby.
We have a special annotation for that, you just slap a “/s” on the end of your comment. Here is an example:
There is one true god and he demands women be beneath men. /s
See, without the /s we just assume you’re that stupid.
Eh… I did add a /s? Read the comment again XD
Ah right right, sorry, I didn’t go back through the thread when you informed me of the sarcasm.
From Chinese parts
This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.
DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.
It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.
Whats it feel like to be obsoleted by Lidar on planes before you even existed?
Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.
In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:
-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time
-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly
-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS
-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need
-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive
-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis
Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.
I am in fact not interested in the hobbies of people who defend companies like DJI, TikTok, Kapersky, etc.
I’m getting so tired of this red scare, cold war shit.
