334
DJI will no longer stop drones from flying over airports, wildfires, and the White House
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
334 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
60537 readers
5719 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This will last exactly as long as it takes somebody to fly a drone into the side of the White House. Not any kind of special drone, just some idiot trying to get a cool shot for their YouTube channel.
DJI is about to get banned anyways, so they just don't care anymore
We might get a video of the white house's defence systems shooting it down instead.
Okay that sounds cool and in my brain it's like having the turrets and starcraft spin around to shoot stuff down, but in real life I know it's just an EMF jamming field, if that much.
It would still need to be a turret with a focused beam as drone controls operate on the same frequency range as wifi and bluetooth so if you still want those to work in the building you can't just fill the air with enough noise to block a drone. And if you want to stop one on auto-pilot you need to scramble GPS signals which would be a very bad idea when nearest airport just 3 miles away with one one the runways aligned directly with the White House. And even that's all just assuming it's actually using standard frequencies and not something custom.
So while anti-drone systems don't go BRRRT, they can still end up looking like something that could.
It's a catapult of Trump steaks.
I've done some work related to the anti drone systems and I assure you even the best of the best is an absolute joke against all but the most naive operator. The ultimate drone defense right now is somewhere between magnum #6 bird and #4 turkey shot :/
If said work was more than a year ago then it is significantly outdated.
Watch perun's videos covering drone warfare in Ukraine it gives a good overview of what has been tried and its effective.
The us government absolutely can shoot down a couple hundred dollar drone its just a matter of if they need to use a half a million dollar intercepted to do it.
Ah a fellow perun addict.
Honestly I think he oversold the effectiveness of the systems. The work I did is still ongoing so I'm up to speed on the available systems, though mostly on the RF side. If you watch the stuff coming out of Ukraine the drones aren't really being impeded all that much and if you know how to use ardupilot and selectively enable your data link you can pretty much get away with whatever you want because the US isn't gonna allow anyone to jam GPS right next to multiple major airports. If you want to avoid even relying on GPS there are starting to be mature solutions out there too.
Ahh I'm sorry for doubting you.
I was under the impression argument for the drones not being impeded in Ukraine was an economic one.
Civdiv on yt has some very interesting content on the subject.
Automated #4 Turkey Turrets with AI tracking.
Only if you unnecessarily include a ChatGPT voice assistant
Unidentified Drone - identify yourself or we will shoot you down with feathers!
/operator/ feathers? Dammit, is there even a drone there or is that also a hallucination.
Hello friend....
I see you....
Acquiring target....
Good night.