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Iranian TV Shows Downed US Drone
First time accepted submitter loic_2003 writes "Iranian TV has broadcast footage of an advanced U.S. drone aircraft that Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls. The BBC's James Reynolds watched the footage and said the fact that the drone appeared undamaged provided some evidence to support Tehran's version of events. The film was captioned 'RQ170 — advanced U.S. spy plane' and carried on the Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 channel."
There is nothing more dangerous to a drone than a TV show.
They have anti-aircraft TV shows? We're screwed.
...then I took an arrow to the knee
UPDATE: Iranian TV has upgraded their broadcast footage to FIVE (*very* similarly damaged) advanced U.S. drone aircraft.
...someone stole your sweetroll.
I seem to recall reading that the communications to the drones are largely unencrypted for some unknown reason, so if that's the case, I could see someone overriding the controls and bringing down the plane.
It seems very unlikely that an uncontrolled aircraft would come down in one piece, yet the US claims that the drone in Iran's possession is one they lost control and track of. The idea that the US could lose track of a piece of technology that size with all their spy satellites and spy planes doesn't seem very likely to me, further lending credence to Iran's story.
Methinks the US may have been caught red-handed spying on Iran. It's not a surprise that they would be doing so, but it is very surprising that they've been sloppy enough to get caught.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
They claim they got it down by overriding the control signal.
Captured US Drone Destroyed By US Drone Strike in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Breaking News: Iran now in possession of two US drones, a spy drone and a predator drone...
They probably forgot to put a password on PHPMyAdmin.
I like how they hang American flags with white skulls instead of stars beneath it as well as graffiti covering them. Real mature. Sort of makes me want to photoshop their flag with the tulip being one person stoning another person while blood drips down into the bottom band.
So you've downed a pristine intact drone from your mortal enemy. Do you A) keep it secret to have an upper hand and send it to a lab to analyze all of its weaknesses and offer this information to your allies or B) take pictures in front of it with propaganda surrounding it and show the world? Well, I guess when you don't know how to do A you have to go with B!
My work here is dung.
Originally there were reports by Iran that they shot it down. Iran seems to keep changing their story on how they acquired the plane.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Honestly a drone takeover requires you to be above it. They get control from satellites and AWAC's that are flying ABOVE Them. they do not get controls from ground based transmitters. Plus how did they get their hands on the C&C protocols?
IF they did this, then the USA military electronics is a complete and utter joke. But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
On most modern 2.4 Ghz R/C radios (such as Spektrum, etc), there is a 'bind' procedure that locks the transmitter and receiver together and prevents someone else from overridding the controls and to prevent interference from other transmitters. Granted the system used to control this drone is more sophisticated (hopefully), but you would think a similar system would be in place.
That may be a bad assumption seeing as there was an article recently reporting that it was possible to intercept the video feed from U.S. drones.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Wanna bet Chinese technical agents are already taking it apart?
Just FYI, most other reports are saying that the United States acknowledges this the only incredulity surrounds how the drone went down -- not whether it was there or not. US says technical malfunction. Iran says Allah helped them hack it and control it themselves.
My work here is dung.
Despite extensive covering on the underside, to me it looks TOO fresh and undamaged. It doesn't look used at all
I think this is a mold reproduction of whatever they did get, faired out the damaged areas, swapped over a few parts and the paint is is still wet. There is nothing underneath it, its just a surface shell that looks right.
Just like the CIA changed its story, you mean? "Drone, what drone?" to "It's possible we've lost one in Afghanistan, but no one took it down" to "Yeah, it's probably ours. But it didn't enter their airspace" to "Well, it might have strayed accidentally into their airspace." At some point in the future, when all is said and declassified, I'm sure we'll learn it was on a spy mission in the middle of Iran.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now I already realize these things must have some kind of scrambled frequency, but still generate enough interference and you have a drone.
An out-of-control drone. It's relatively easy to jam the control signal, but assuming there's any half-decent encryption involved, taking control would be much harder.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If by "offend," you mean "possibly start a fucking war by sending U.S. troops into Iran, all for the sake of a lousy drone" then yes.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What you call "offend" would more commonly be understood as war. I'm going to guess it was the President's decision not to engage in a war against Iran.
"Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls" Hey now. Espionage and sabotage are one thing, but that might be a DMCA violation!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wouldn't you expect that n hours after failing to receive commands, and if no coded 'safe' key input, a self-destruct system would trip in? Check that thing for ticking, guys; remember HMS Campbeltown!
It's impossible to prevent radio interference, no matter how fancy your "bind" procedure is. All you need is a simple jammer that broadcasts over the entire spectrum that the enemy is using.
The idea that you could replace human pilots in military planes with remote control was always idiotic.
I think we all know who made that decision.
Someone smart enough not to get into a shooting war with Iran?
It shouldn't be too difficult for them to take apart. The construction was probably outsourced, so the Chinese technical agents built it in the first place.
Maybe Iranian TV will show us a peak at the "Made in ....." label?
Those American flags don't convince me . . . I didn't see any pirate skulls on the American flags at the last Olympics . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Looks closer to 20 meters across to me. A plane doesn't need to be small to be stealthy, look at the B2 Spirit...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My current speculation is that they couldn't override the control signal, but they could jam it, and then the drone did some kind of emergency crash landing or whatever.
I guess the suits in Washington never had a hobby otherwise they would know this.
Their hobby is screwing people. I guess they did not get around to R/C model aircraft.
Guess that depends on your definition of "disposable". The Wiki article doesn't list the cost of this UAV, but the MQ-9 Reaper is estimated at over $30 million apiece. But with the way Obama and the other neocons spend money, I guess that's small change to him.
When this story first broke, it was cited as response to an American act of aggression. Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land. At the very least, the latter seems to me to be something that you'd have to be well prepared to do, in advance. So perhaps the drone was deliberately encroaching on Iranian airspace, but they must have been patiently waiting for their opportunity to pounce.
It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iran sent radio waves across the border to make the intercept. That's unknown. But by pateience and pouncing or by cross-border override, in either case it seems to me that they've given up the right to shriek in righteous indignation about being violated. The proper response to "Oh No!! Our airspace is being violated!!" would have been to shoot the thing down. There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.
For a recon platform, that's a pretty crappy fail safe mode.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
How do you expect to get modded up with a sane and rational comment like that?
The SR71 was rendered obsolete by satellites. The Wiki article on the RQ-170 is pretty sparse on details (since the thing is shrouded in secrecy), but at appears to have some weapons capability, something the SR71 never had.
The real element that makes aircraft like the SR71 more immune to being downed by the Iranians, however, isn't flying high and fast, it's having a human pilot in the aircraft instead of relying on easily-jammed radio for control.
It's going to be pretty funny if the US moves all its military aircraft technology to unmanned operation (which seems to be the trend at the moment), and suddenly someone figures out how to take control of them all electronically, rendering the US military completely impotent overnight.
The CIA "version" seems to have gone from "We don't think they have the capacity to do that, and they've lied about it before, so it's probably fake," to "Actually, we did lose a drone in about the right time period over Afghanistan near the border, we should look into that," to "Yeah, they seem to have intercepted our drone over Afghanistan." Doesn't seem to be the story changing, just them gaining new information.
Your not suppose to read the article until after you have commented.
Would it give Iran any great insight into US technology? Or anything of that nature?
Intelligence agencies think that China has been providing a lot of technical assistance to Iran (as well as other nations). The Iranians have some experience reverse engineering older, simpler aircraft (Their Saeqeh fighter is a virtual clone of Northrop's F-5. The only visual difference is twin vertical stabilizers), but no one thinks the Iranians have any experience with things like shaping, radar-absorbent coatings, or composite structures.
No, on something like an RQ-170... which is state of the art stuff... they're probably going to need Chinese help. China has a lot of advanced US tech already (recall the F-35 tech that fell into their hands), and is working on actual stealth aircraft themselves.
I seriously doubt the Iranians brought the drone down with "cyber-warfare". Witness how they were absolutely owned with the virus in their nuclear facilities. It was probably a malfunction on the part of the drone that brought it down, but regardless, the technology is almost certainly going to be in Chinese hands soon. Maybe that's for the best, in a perverse way, as USAF puts entirely too much reliance on stealth technology (when there are much, much cheaper ways to counter that technology in combat). Perhaps the US will start to build fighters with traditional fighter attributes again, and ones that don't cost $150 million+ apiece. I'm not quite in the Pierre Sprey absolute-minimalist school of fighter design (Pierre thinks that things like radar are a bad idea), but I do think we should build military aircraft that are affordable enough (and more reliable) to buy in large quantities. 183 air superiority fighters... no matter how good they may be... ain't gonna get it. But when 5 fighters cost you over a billion bucks, right off the production line, well... that's all you're going to get.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Clearly the solution is to have the planes fly autonomously, so if the signal from the remote control is broken, the onboard AI can move and deploy weapons at its own discretion.
Actually, many drones are programmed to just fly home if the signal is lost. From Wired: "Like just about every spy drone operating today, the RQ-170 can follow GPS waypoints, instead of being steered by a remote operator. And when drones like the Sentinel loses radio or satellite contact with their human overlords, they are usually programmed to do something reasonable, ranging from circling until contact is resumed to continuing with the mission autonomously to flying home. Moreover, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby told reporters there was no indication the Sentinel was brought down by “hostile activity of any kind.”"
If you read the updates on this article, there's still some doubt:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/iran-drone-video/
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Captured US Drone Destroyed By US Drone Strike in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Breaking News: Iran now in possession of two US drones, a spy drone and a predator drone...
Good luck capturing the cruise missile that comes next...
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
There's a lot more to jamming than that. Unless your transmitter is absurdly more powerful than the one you're trying to jam out, spread spectrum transmissions can be extremely difficult to jam. The receiver is looking for (simplified here) modulation in a signal pattern. If you know the exact pattern you are looking for, you can very effectively filter out the noise. Then you just demodulate the signal to get your information out clean.
So when brute force isn't going to cut it, you have to really know what you're trying to jam, and more than likely you are going to have to be able to adapt, because critical control systems like this will have multiple fail-over procedures in place to automatically hop to a different band, modulation, whatever they care to mix up to render your jamming ineffective.
Providing a very simple example of why brute force doesn't work: get a whistle, and some really loud speakers and stereo. Have a friend stand by the speaker, occasionally blowing the whistle (maybe in a coded pattern that provides you with information), while the stereo cranks out the sound at ear-splitting levels. Standing 300 feet away, can you hear when the whistle blows? No you can't, the music is jamming you. Now get out a little handheld mic with headphones, and $15 in radio shack hardware for making a notch filter, tuned to the frequency of the whistle. Listen to that. You may hear a very faint trace of the music, but the whistle will be loud and clear every time its blown. Jamming is overcome. Doesn't really matter if you crank up the volume on the music either. Now what if the music happens to hit the note of the whistle and plays a solid or repeating tone at that frequency? So you start hearing that and can't tell when its the whistle or the music. Now your friend can see you waving your arms around indicating you can't hear him, so he puts that whistle in his pocket and takes out a different whistle. You flip a switch on your gear to switch the notch frequency for the next whistle. Now you're back in business. That's how jamming works, brute force often is ineffective.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Yes, most likely it's communication was jammed. I'm sure the flight control software for it allows for autonomous landing when control communication is lost after a designated period of time.
the SR71 was rendered obsolete because it was expensive.. it was to be the replace ment for the U2 but failed to be cheaper than keping the U2 (which is why the U2 is still in service).
Both the U2 and the SR71 are useful compared to satellites because they can be dispatched to an area for information far quicker than a satellite. (and cheaper for short term recon).
the Drones are the replacement for the U2 .. so far they are falling behind - one of the requirements of them - is that they are cheaper than the U2 program. (only time will tell with that one).
But the high and fast are feature+ for the U2 over the current drones.. Most missile systems are not able to identify and shoot down a U2 before it leaves the missiles operating range. (if you look at the U2's that where shot down, several of them went down not because a missile made contact but because the light air-frame broke up at altitude from the shock waves of the missiles blowing up lower int the atmosphere)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Roughly the same cost as an F-15. Cheaper than an F-22 (around 200 million a pop depending on how you count things) and about what a hit movie brings in on midnight showings. (Just for some perspective).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What I don't understand is why they didn't have it wired to self-destruct, at least the internal systems if not the entire aircraft.
AFAIK, manned Air Force aircraft are equipped with labels on the sensitive avionics and components saying something like "in case of imminent capture, shoot here to destroy." I'd think that self-destruct would be an absolute requirement for a drone.
I mean, the USAF is pretty darn good at destroying things. You'd think if you were flying it over hostile territory you'd at least equip it with enough thermite to make the electronics and optics go away should the drone lose contact with HQ for longer than some preset time period.
Or maybe that's what happened in a kinder, gentler fashion. Maybe a self-destruct did happen to the internals, including the flight controllers. The "my-controller-has-melted" control-arm position might be preset to a glide configuration so that it will cause the least amount of civilian damage if it goes down.
Or maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it's a Trojan horse with a secret compartment filled with VX or anthrax or something, on a remote control that can be triggered by an operator when Ahmadenijad gets close enough to gloat. "Remember the tooth."
John
Blowing stuff up (even your own drones) in another sovereign nation is usually considered an act of war. This sovereign nation happens to have Russia and China as allies.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Evidently you think American engineers are idiots. The frequency hopping patterns for drone communications are produced by a cryptographically-secure random number generator with a pre-negotiated seed. Snoop it all you like; this isn't your neighbor with unsecured wifi, it's your neighbor with AES512 and a fifty-word passphrase surfing over a VPN tunnel.
What battlefield advantage? Anything they MIGHT have will be wiped out by B2 stealth bombers before any other shots are fired.
If anything, Iran gets to wave this at the Security Council (china and russia are pals with veto power) when the US wants to "librate" them. Nukes or not, Iran has not attacked the US or Israel directly, or violated any airspace under their operation. The US can't exactly say the same, can they.
Iran is not going to make the same mistake playing chicken with the US like Iraq did. Israel has already played our hand with the unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear development (pissing off China and Russia)
Their goal is to talk smack to get Israel to keep stepping over the line... They are not attacking anybody right now.... Playing "fair" is not the same as violating international law and Iran is playing very carefully.
If your engine cuts out, there's not much else you can do.
The US flies lots of these things all the time. One had to have a critical failure and go down sometime.
The revolution failed.
The US military is pulling out of Iraq.
The propaganda "Iran is a terrorist" is ramping up. Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran.
UN resolutions to fill the requisite paperwork so it's all "legal".
Economic sanctions on major exports.
There have been softening up attacks on the defences and other strategic targets.
All that's left to do really is have some "event" which will be seen as an act of war on the part of Iran as justification. Some Arch Duke Ferdinand.
Deleted
You are describing signal jamming tech (single-channel, sine-wave) that is decades old.
Modern EW platforms are capable of covering entire RF bands, adapting and following hopping schemes, and efficiently spreading their energy over seemingly pseudo-random code-schemes.
In the end, there's only so much you can do with modulation techniques - it comes down to signal strength - and the inverse-square-law pretty much says that who-ever gets closer wins.
The control signal from the US base comes likely via LEO sat-link or over-the-horizon AWACS-type platform - both of which are going to be hundreds of kilometers away. You're not going to need "absurdly more powerful" anything to interfere with that. I have a wide-band I/Q generator able to modulate any mathematically describable code-sheme - which I could then hook up to our MIL-STD-461 susceptibility testing-chamber-amp - and knowing something about the signal band I could easily get the right high-gain antenna to track the bastard off the sky... and all this is with off-the-shelf COTS equipment!
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Nice, I enjoyed your input and would agree with you. "It just doesn't add up". Honestly the way I see it, if "I" were in charge of a way to capture one of the most sophisticated spy equipment that the CIA has. I wouldn't try to "out smart it" by jamming it or cracking the it. I would just figure out that these things are probably slow due to it's ability to stabilize as a "wing" object, figure out the max speed and turning G's then create a bunch of rockets built to outrun and "capture" it by using some sort of primitive harsh net with parachutes. Outsmarting the CIA isn't the way to go. Usually simple and cheap is the best way to go so you might as well go cheap and go rough if your going to play dirty!
I like to call this "Ohkams rockets".
So I am asking all you nerds out there if you were to design a way to bring down the most sophisticated remote controlled spy plane how would you do it? Jam it? Shoot it? Hack it? Or force it to watch fox news until it becomes stupid enough to land on an enemy airstrip?
At least they provided some evidence to their claims.
It would seem likely that drones have inertial navigation systems as well, for just that eventuality.
Sure, INS isn't the most accurate system around, but having some sort of fail-safe "If GPS is jammed and control signal is lost, go to $ALTITUDE and turn toward $DIRECTION until communications are restored (presumably by being out of ranging of the offending jamming)." rule would be a sensible thing to have programmed into the drone's control systems.
If I were designing a drone that was supposed to be uber-top secret, I'd fill it with C-4 and program it to explode if signal was lost after a designated period of time.
Free Martian Whores!
With frequency hopped spread spectrum, even if some of the hop frequencies are jammed, the transmitted symbols will not necessarily be because they can be spread over multiple hops. It does not have to be a transmitter that dwells on a single frequency long enough to send some information. A single symbol can be spread over multiple hops.
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
— Otto von Bismarck
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Remember this story from back in October?
Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
Ever since I read Iran claimed they didn't shoot it down, I've been wondering if or how much that virus and this "cyber warfare" attack might be connected...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Further, this sort of thing exposes in a very blatant way how the DoD and the contractors responsible for developing these vehicles have made little to no effort to safeguard them from radio interference
According the NYT, it is exceedingly unlikely that Iran captured the drone with some of cyber attack.
Of course, at this point, who knows who's lying. But I would not take Iran at their word.
Also, before you get all pissy about the US invading Iran's airspace, maybe you should look into Iran's recent history.
Recent leaked documents have revealed the email sent by CIA to the Iranian officials, it reads:
"These are not the drones you are looking for, move along."
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The aircraft shown on Iranian television today was not the American stealth drone that crashed in Iran last week, as the Iranian government claimed, but was likely just a model, U.S. officials told ABC News.
Minutes after a Pentagon spokesperson said that military personnel and others were examining the footage broadcast today of what appeared to be an undamaged stealth RQ-170 Sentinel, multiple U.S. officials said that based on inconsistencies with the design of the drone, along with clues from imagery of the actual drone's crash site, the drone shown was not the Sentinel. U.S. officials previously confirmed that an RQ-170 did, in fact, crash land somewhere in Iran.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-rq-170-sentinel-stealth-drone-shown-iran/story?id=15115781#.TuEsofJbeV0
Specifically the period of time when the enemy arrive to pick it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
People have built hobby quadcopters with built-in GPS that autonomously travel from one place to the next. How difficult could it possibly be to give a drone an instruction that says "in the event of loss of contact with the base station, ascend to altitude and return to base".
Or if you wanted to discourage jammers, "in the event of a loss of contact with the base station, lock hellfire missiles onto the nearest potential targets and fire, then RTB" Then we could have the "scumbag jammers" meme. Scumbag jammers: Jam drone to prevent possible attack. Jamming causes attack.
Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.
It works *nothing* like an R/C model, aside from the fact that radio signals are somehow involved. R/C models are flown "by hand", i.e. the pilots manipulate the elevator/ailerons/throttle etc directly. The drones are almost entirely flown by the on-board autopilot, flight management computer, and inertial navigation. These are indeed connected via radio to the control center but rest assured, it is not being intercepted or overridden by external agencies.
This one had a malfunction, went into a fail-safe mode, ran out of fuel, and landed more-or-less intact. Of course they are claiming more than that.
Brett
No. This is exactly your neighbor with unsecured wifi.
From the wall street journal, Dec 17, 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html
"Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter."
What could possibly go wrong?
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Hate to break it to you buy the Predator and first run Reaper drones have completely unencrypted communications links, the com links on later drones might actually be up to snuff but there's no guarantee of that since they aren't public. The drones with unencrypted communications are still in the field since they're too valuable to pull for an overhaul.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"That's called an act of war"
Yes, that's generally what one is engaged in when flying ARMED drones in a given airspace. The drone in the story was an unarmed surveillance drone however. I was just speculating on a useful protocol for discouraging jamming of a drone's control signals during said war.
"you stupid Americans"
Presumptive, aren't we? I'll give you a hint: I live in a NATO country that actually provides health care for all.
Snoop it all you like
Ok so you've got this unbreakable communications connection between drone and control...
Please explain the completely undamaged big beige plane sitting in the Iranian hangar.
Deleted
You don't need to blow it up. Just hold the control surfaces in extreme positions.
The cost isn't surprising for what it is. It can carry 14 Hellfire missiles for 14 hours. AT$68K a pop, that's up to almost a million dollars of ordnance *per mission*.
That's actually cheap considering what it does for you: it gives you the ability to spy on then kill an enemy at essentially zero tactical risk.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I would NOT want to be the guy who does routine refuelling and maintenance checks on a C-4-packed drone.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A flying-wing does not "glide". It's an inherently unstable design. I can almost guarantee it was a controlled landing.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Better have a gyro on board as the GPS signal could also be jammed around it.
Life is not for the lazy.
You kidding, right?! Ok, I'm going to have to call you out on this (head asplodes in disbelief). Cite please.
Life is not for the lazy.
I have some friends that are ex military (USAF and US Army) that sent all their buddies that were still in and I can back up what you are saying, as nearly all of them wanted me to load games and apps on big flash drives. I had never heard of a "game stick' as they called it and it was explained to me that while there are PCs everywhere the connections are locked down and spotty so they just load games on the sticks and that way when they have down time they can "data dump" as they called it and unwind with some games.
Looking at the video in TFA I have to agree that it doesn't look really damaged so either a computer bug from those bazillion flash sticks brought it down or they had an engine malfunction and it autoglided itself to a landing. maybe its because i'm not a military guy but I was amazed that they all just walk around popping sticks in everywhere, that is the kind of crap i would have brought to a screeching halt when i was working corporate and i can't believe that the US military just lets them go around popping sticks. Hell with the kind of money we spend on the military they ought to just contract out to one of the OEMs to have a nice ruggedized AMD netbook handed out to each soldier and then epoxy all the USB ports on the work machines.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You can only get a quick look with a satellite as it goes past.
You send a U2 if you still haven't found what you're looking for.
Don't kid yourself. They're military grade, and they're military-grade priced. And the tech inside is all American sourced chips, as they don't trust foreign chip foundries for this kind of stuff.
But a few ounces of thermite or C4 are cheap insurance. Not being remote commanded while inside enemy airspace? Blow it up.
The Iranians didn't remotely operate this device. They might have jammed its frequencies, as that's within their technical capabilities. But nobody's breaking the military encryption. It's not a Panasonic web cam being remotely operated and subject to URL tampering.
John
Everyone is missing the really obvious point: the control signals are sent via satellite from ABOVE the aircraft, which flies at 50,000. Any attempt to hijack the controls would require the broadcasting of the signals from ABOVE the aircraft. The chances that Iran tracked this really small stealth drone, then decided not to shoot it down, but rather to track it with radar, then to fly an airplane above it to transmit cyberwarfare signals to it, are very small.
More likely, the drone crashed because, well, shit happens. Iran is getting screwed over by cyberwarfare (LOL, Stuxnet) so it decides to retaliate by talking about cyberwarfare.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
If I were in the iranians shoes, I understand why they did it. Hell, here in Mexico with the raging drug war and the ATF supplying weapons to the drug cartels and a lot of human rights abuses done by the security forces fighting a war in USA's behalf, is a testament of how much we like american people that the USA's flag is still respected.
In the short time I was in USA I was well treated and all the americans that I have personally meet are really nice people, but I simply can't understand the lack of empathy of a significant majority of americans that think that foreigners don't have a problem if USAF start dropping bombs in their cities or that we can have democracy only as long the leader we choose put USA's priorities before the interest of our nations.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!