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Iranian Military Says It's Copying US Drone
New submitter skipkent writes "Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on Sunday. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported."
It would be funny if they Open Sourced it.
But not beyond China's. Iran and China are best buds, I'd imagine China is behind this, letting Iran wave their dick around since we've been harassing them endlessly for a while. This story http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/probe-traces-bogus-military-parts-to-china/2011/11/07/gIQAmxglvM_blog.html, talks about counterfeit Chinese parts making their way into the weapons supply chain, with all the outsourcing we do to China, I'm sure their taking our tech and applying it elsewhere.
Not inconsistent, actually. The theocrats put Khatami into power to test the waters, so to speak. Would the US (and the rest of the world) approach a pragmatist? The answer which Bush the Lesser provided was, "No". So they tossed Khatami out and put Ahmedinejad in.
Now, it really doesn't matter whether Ahmedinejad is capable of moderation or not. He is capable of playing (or actually is) a fanatic. And that's all that matters. The clerics gave moderation a chance and it failed. So they went with the hard line stance. Their position looks entirely logical. From their point of view, the USA has no consistent policy towards Iran, the Middle East, or the world, for that matter. It all depends on who we put into office every four years. And more often than not, that person is selected by the nuttiest of either of our political extremes. If I were Iran, I'd be building nukes, drones and anything else I could use to defend myself against such a manic-depressive political regime.
Dealing with the USA is akin to living with a woman who suffers from severe PMS.
Have gnu, will travel.
Here in Australia I heard a story about being able to buy fake Catapillar mining gear off the Chinese. Apparently you can't even tell from the serial numbers of the parts.
A couple of years back a mob got in the way of a shipment of chip card bank teller equipment from China to the UK, and inserted a few extra electronics, including WIFI. Then re-shrunk wrapped them and sent them on their way.
There is nothing that can't be reverse engineered/hijacked if it is important enough. And on the importance scale this would be right up there for both China and Iran.