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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.
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.
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
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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