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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's obviously a copyright infringement. If we are lucky, maybe Iranians will just shoot them.
If only it were the RIAA or MPAA instead of the CIA, then Iran would be in serious trouble.
#1 I doubt it .....
#2 who is running things over there, Dr. Evil ?
#3 In the extremely unlikely event that they somehow figured it all out - why on earth would you tell everyone ?
It would be funny if they Open Sourced it.
Where Tony Stark pulls up the footage of other countries trying to duplicate his armor? Why do I have a feeling this is going to go something like that.
Now I suddenly understand the strategic importance of ACTA. If they'd signed ACTA, we'd nail 'em when they tried to sell their cheap knockoffs to the Chinese, the Russians, the North-Koreans, the Pakistani, the Venezuelans, the Cubans, the Jemenites, the Hamaz guerilla's, and ... .
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.
Why? Not all of them live in mud huts... Underestimating the enemy is dangerous.
They'll be thwarted once they discover all the measurements are in Imperial and not metric.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Why, because only Americans are ingenious enough to be engineers? Just because it's beyond your understanding doesn't mean it's beyond someone else's even if they are from a country you seem to judgmentally believe can't have smart people.
And good for them. What were we even doing sending drones into that country in the first place? Because "they're making nukes"? Even if Iran made a nuclear bomb, that would do nothing more than.. put them on equal footing with every country surrounding them who also has a nuclear bomb (most of which got theirs directly or indirectly from us). Frankly, any country spending $600 billion/year on the military doesn't get to cry when other people reverse-engineer the technology we're using to push them around.
Is it just me, or does copying a $100m spy drone that you easily captured seem like a bad direction to go?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
The Iranian Military just announced they are copying this comment.
While Dubya was in office in the U.S., Iran had a President named Mohammed Khatami. Unlike Ahmedinejad, Khatami was a moderate cleric in favor of womens' rights, political reforms, greater freedoms for Iranians, and other moderate ideals. Khatami also was no opposed to political cooperation with the United States, or at least the restoration of diplomatic relations. Bush could easily have reached out a (limited) hand of friendship, and Khatami might very well have shaken it. Relations between Iran and the U.S. could have improved markedly. What happened instead? Bush's Neocon advisers wanted no cooperation/relationship whatosever to develop with Iran. They wanted to maintain Iran's status as an "Enemy of the United States" (perhaps because Israel was also adamant that things be so, and Iran stay politically isolated). So Dubya never reached out to Khatami politically, and actually did the diametric opposite: Iran was included in post 9/11 America's new, and somewhat stupid concept of a "Axis of Evil" that's messing up everything for everyone. No relationship between the U.S. and Iran whatsoever flourished as a result. Not even a limited one. And what happened to Khatami? The moderate Iran President was eventually overruled by Iran's religious hardliners for being too "moderate" or "modern", and his post went to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. The window of opportunity for improving relations between Iran and the U.S./West to some degree was there. But the Neocons wanted Iran to stay on the "Enemies of the U.S." list, and did their best to ensure that no rapprochement with Iran would take place. -------- That brings us to today. Iran and the U.S. are currently enemies. Neither side sees any value in engaging in serious talks or toning down the jingoistic rhetoric. The Iran situation could, at any point, turn into another "Hot War" (Israel in particular seems to like that idea a lot). And all this because Dubya's advisers told him not to shake Khatami's hand. The situation could have been very, very different if the West had engaged in even "limited relations" with Khatami's vision of a more moderate Iran.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Hi Iran, we here at the US DoD notice you're trying to build a Predator UAV. Of course Predators are pretty toothless without Hellfire missiles. So to show there's no hard feelings, we decided to send you some. An entire shipment of Hellfire Missiles should be arriving at your reverse engineering facility in just about ... now.
I have worked for a number of companies that thought their employees were so much smarter than everyone else that no one could possibly understand their code by disassembling it. That's wrong.
In this particular game, yeah, they'd be right if they were talking U.S. programmers whose experience was Java, but people who had to deal with old hardware where memory locations mattered, no. I sometimes wonder at Apple folks who believe no one but them understands ARM assembly. I know at least three Russian programmers personally who can quote hex codes for ARM instructions for pretty much everything you'd want to do. I am guessing I am not connected enough to know them all.
People in the third world are at a significant advantage. They deal with the hardware and know what the hell they are doing. I personally blame the change in accreditation standards that caused U.S. people to concentrate on being rather than doing. Theory is great until you have to engage in total war.
I personally expect a wave of smart people to wash over the U.S. any time soon. The only question is whether they will have U.S. visas or if they will be employed by a foreign power.
-- Terry
-- Terry
Drones over Israel? Over the US?
I'd love to see either of those things happen, just to watch the reaction. The US seems to think it is fine to send spy drones over Iran, so presumably it's just fair game to send them over the mainland US too.
The US has spy satellites watching every corner of the earth, presumably the collective EU and China do too, Japan has some... Naturally Iran will be putting its own up at some point, and North Korea will too eventually. Fair's fair, right?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They didn't capture a drone intact, they displayed a mockup, and a bad one at that.
All this talk about creating their own drone is more propaganda to prop up the Iranian government's "rep" in the middle east among Islamic countries, who pretty much buy everything Iran's news agencies pump out, clonebrush photoshops, crappy models and all.
The most I can see them doing is build a mockup that looks like it, showing it flying, and then the entire world concluding, "OMG, they copied the US drone!!!111" — except that it won't contain any of the systems and technology aboard the RQ-170.
Would be a great propaganda victory for Iran, though. Which is exactly the sort of thing they're looking for. Iran's playing up the drone story again, this week saying that Russia and China are aggressively seeking information about it, and then two days later making this "announcement"? With Iran claiming it used a force field and "advanced space technology" to down the drone (and no, this isn't simply a failure of the translation), nothing is too surprising.
Of course, US drones have been flying over Iran for years, and drones are still flying over Iran after the RQ-170 incident.
Interestingly, as the Western press and pundits hyperventilated over the loss of the drone, Iran's state-controlled media and spokesmen repeatedly changed and finessed their story to fit with the most panicked narratives of "what might have happened".
Logic would dictate that the drone simply malfunctioned and crashed, or at absolute MOST had its control link jammed — a known vulnerability of UAS — and was not brought down in a controlled fashion, nor has been "reverse-engineered".
Iran isn't a backwater. They have a robotics industry and a space program. Maybe not as sophisticated as Japan, and the US, but pilotless drones aren't designed with cutting edge technology. I don't see why this would be outside Iran's current capabilities.
They claim they jammed the control signal and spoofed the GPS (jammed the encrypted signal and spoofed the unencrypted signal which the drone fell back on). The drone then circled (possibly) and eventually decided to return to base and land, which happened at the spoofed location inside Iran. Do you really find that so extremely difficult to believe? Why do you think "logic dictates" that this is a lie? Alternatively, why do you think this doesn't qualify as bringing the drone down in a controlled fashion?
Why, because only Americans are ingenious enough to be engineers?
I've met some very smart and capable "Persian" engineers. They don't live in Iran, though :)
Seriously, a lot of the smartest and best-educated Iranians no longer live in the country, and probably won't unless the place changes politically.
Think about it - if your home country had a regime like Iran's and you had the means to live just about anywhere else, would you stick around? And if you did, would you work for that regime? There are selfish smart people (duh), but a significant portion of smart people want nothing to do with such a regime.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They're just going to take the one they have and put gold curtain rods & blue carpet in it.
(South Park)
Less-geeky computer repair alternative for Lansing, MI
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.
Brain drains don't include everyone in a country. In fact, particularly in Iran's case, I suspect that many educated people REFUSE to come to the west because of how they've been treated their whole lives by us. And what about Iran's "regime" is any worse than recent American regimes? (I don't think I need to point to our last president, who's responsible for 100x more deaths than 9/11, while simultaneously using 9/11 as an excuse).
You're also assuming that being smart automatically gives someone the means to leave the country. They need money for that first, and that means even those prospective emigrants need to work in their own country before they can do that. And those who DO emigrate are more likely to go to China than the US, because of China's good relations, treatment, and trade with Iran relative to the west's.
And "Selfish?" If we're getting into broad generalizations, then I'd bet that those STAYING in Iran are likely to do so for less selfish reasons than those leaving it. Those leaving it are just trying to make better lives for themselves (which is understandable); those staying--with the freedom to go to richer, less barren countries--are doing so to make better lives for their neighbors, co-workers, friends, and complete strangers. But that's only assuming that someone from their perspective would have the CRAZY opinion that the giant rich country bombing them, spying on them, threatening them with trade embargoes, and actively supporting their regional rivals doesn't have their family's (or 80 million fellow Iranians') best interests at heart.
'Undamaged' is relative. Remember they didn't show the undercarriage in their pictures, it was all gussied up with banners. Either the Iranians have decided that the drone is female and has to be modestly dressed, or the thing crash landed / wheels up landed and has a fair bit of damage.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Funny how "un-innovative" Japan manages to have 10x our internet speeds for the same costs, or how they're largely responsible for video games (one of the most innovative ideas ever made) even existing today. For such an innovative country, America is strangely behind Japan and China in terms of public transportation and high-speed rail.
Sony isn't very innovative today, but really, do you think Microsoft or Google or (oh god) Dell or HP are any better? All the new tech you're hearing about in the news is made by STARTUPS, which are just bought out by big tech companies. One of the only big American companies that still "innovates" (how I hate that word now) is IBM. Meanwhile just look at the Japanese auto industry compared to the American auto industry.
But since we're talking about software innovation, I guess we should just forget about a little thing called Linux that was written by a college kid in Finland. You don't hear about software innovation outside the US because most of it isn't big enough to be news all around the world. Do you think Instagram receives much media attention in Europe?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-57414373-64/sonys-fall-and-japans-hang-ups/?tag=mncol;editorPicks http://www.firstpost.com/business/sony-gets-beaten-by-apple-samsung-innovation-sees-2-9-bn-loss-201493.html I was there, I know how business is done in Japan, its not efficient. The Chinese simply lack the know-how, I'm sure they'll catch up though.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
So why aren't they bringing down every UAS that continues to fly surveillance missions over Iran?
Common sense doesn't have a bias.
Believing a drone whose undercarriage is completely obscured, probably due to significant damage, is "undamaged" is what's biased. The US asking for the drone back doesn't verify it didn't crash. It verifies they have our drone — which they do.
Why? Not all of them live in mud huts... Underestimating the enemy is dangerous.
But popular. Especially when you're trying to convince yourself that invading them would be easy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Invading would be easy, sure. I have no doubts that regular Iranian army would get steamrolled within a week. Unfortunately only after this "victory" real war would begin.
It must. I see many highly rated comments that are farcical if you know much of anything about the topic under discussion.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Iran is a different strategic problem to Iraq or Afghanistan.
1. It is four times bigger (80 million people.)
2. It is an old culture, like Egypt, China, India.
3. There are not any "friendly" adjacent states (like Turkey, Pakistan).
After assessing these factors, I suspect US military planners advise against overt action.
That makes a lot of sense. For the Same reason, during WW II, the US got great minds like Einstein.
However, due the incessant prattle of race baiting fascists on Fox News, and they Xenophobia promoted by Dominionist religions, we are probably LOSING a lot of great minds to countries that aren't becoming a bunch of fascist pricks.
I was ready to bail on this country if McCain/Palin were chosen as our leaders -- and I might be ready to bail if the re-elected Obama is still a Republican door mat. By any measure, this country has been SECURED up the wazoo. We have a 40 year low in crime but the police forces around the country are still gathering up drones, body armor, and pepper spray as if they had to deal with some sort of siege war.
Before November of 2008 -- a lot of laws and banks seemed to be VERY READY for the problems ahead -- and it strikes me that things like the Patriot Act and NDAA bills are all about preparing for an expected problem that someone worked really hard to create. You know, like Scott Walker needing to fire teachers because he had an economic shortfall in his state, that was about a million dollars less than the money he gave away to corporations to reward them for being in the state.
Disaster capitalists are creating the justification for their austerity measures, and anyone who is truly insightful, is already aware of where this country is headed. Perhaps I'm not that smart -- because I'm still an American. How fucking sad is that?
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Now Iran will be invaded on the pretense of copyright infringement, the worst of the atrocities known to man!
If you are BaHai, things are much worse for you in Iran than anywhere else in the world. Many of the Persians in the west are Baha'i.
Well, let's see — not only is Iran Times is not state-owned, it is published in the US. It is also just repeating a Washington Post story. Further, the fact that the US is continuing to fly drone missions over Iran unabated runs counter to the Iranian government's narrative that they have the capability to "take down" a US drone in the first place.
Is FOX News a better source?
How about:
Stars and Stripes
Business Insider
although if you are going to drive a car that gets such dismal gas mileage as a Lambo then living in an oil rich country is probably a good move - come to think of it when I was going to college the first Lamborghini Countach I ever saw was being driven by some rich kid from Saudi Arabia
Oh man, this is great.
UAS have some known, long term vulnerabilities that are intrinsic to UAS and cannot be "patched". There are ways some of them can be mitigated or minimized, but we're not talking about "patching a vulnerability" on a Linux host, here. I'm also not sure you're aware how long it takes to get ANY changes into operational ISR systems.