Slashdot Mirror
Drone Maker Enforces No-Fly Zone Over DC, Hijacking Malware Demonstrated
An anonymous reader writes A recent incident at the White House showed that small aerial vehicles (drones) present a specific security problem. Rahul Sasi, a security engineer at Citrix R&D, created MalDrone, the first backdoor malware for the AR drone ARM Linux system to target Parrot AR Drones, but says it can be modified to target others as well. The malware can be silently installed on a drone, and be used to control the drone remotely and to conduct remote surveillance. Meanwhile, the Chinese company that created the drone that crashed on the White House grounds has announced a software update for its "Phantom" series that will prohibit flight within 25 kilometers of the capital.
Somehow this reminds of photocopiers refusing to copy things which resemble some random selection of paper money bills.
Sooner o later our whole civilization will go down in a huge steaming mess of stinking Rube-Goldbergness. A perverse variation on Dr. Strangelove's theme.
Looking forward to the showdown. Will be interesting, if somewhat messy.
>. Either way a lot of large metro areas already have limits on flying a drone in urban areas, either from federal or municiple laws.
Yeah there's a federal law that covers "populated areas". The law passed by Congress gives the FAA authority to make rules regulating airspace. As I recall, for model aircraft the FAA rules reference (or incorporate verbatim?) the rules of the Academy of Model Aeronautics, the primary hobbyist association*. The AMA bars flight over populated areas, encouraging people to find a cow pasture IR something.
* It may seem odd that a private club has effectively been given authority to make law, but it has worked quite well for 60 years or whatever. The hobbyists have made good rules for themselves. This is analogous to the other AMA, where doctors make rules for themselves and any doctor violating these generally accepted standards is likely to lose any court case.
Ok, I'll give it a go:
Drones are better than high power telescopes because... you don't need line of sight. A Drone can go over hedges/bushes/walls, or round corners. Things that would render a telescope useless. Drones can also theoretically go inside buildings.
Also, if you spot someone watching you with the telescope, you can see who is doing it (just look back at them with your own optics). The drone operator could be inside a building, or someone over the internet. You could not easily work out who was the operator just by looking at the drone itself.
(on the flip side, people are less likely to notice someone 500m away with a telescope than a drone buzzing above you).
Drones are not better than mortars, but they make for very good artillery spotters, giving you GPS co-ords to calculate trajectory for your target, again without the target risking finding out who is behind it.
I didn't know that. It actually bothers me that they would intentionally make their product un-flyable in areas to 'prevent' me from breaking the law. Is it a law that they have to do it?
Why should it bother you? What is it preventing you from doing that you would otherwise do? You have no actual need to fly a drone near the white house or in other restricted airspace. Given the safety concerns involved what you want (versus need) to do is pretty much irrelevant unless you can articulate a coherent reason for what you hope to accomplish. And for the record, no we should not by default trust you or anyone else to necessarily make good choices in this matter. I'd certainly be willing to listen to good arguments in favor of flying in controlled airspace but I doubt there are any.
I'm looking at car manufacturers: how would people feel if they governed their cars to the posted speed limits on the roads?
Probably annoyed but for a very different reason. We have nearly 100 years of history of the public being able to control the speeds of their cars but the consequences of that precedent are very different and well understood. Very few people have actually piloted an aircraft, manned or unmanned.
I'm not surprised that a Chinese company took this route: it's par for the course in China to be under the governmental thumb.
Not really so different here. People have this illusion that the government in China is this all pervasive authoritarian entity but in reality it has less control than most westerners realize. Conversely, the US government is more pervasive and intrusive than most people seem to be willing to acknowledge. That's not always a bad thing but it definitely causes problems sometimes.
gps modules almost always use low speed serial (ttl) comms.
it would be trivial (50 lines of C code, maybe much much less) to have a cpu (even attiny) in the middle between the gps module and the rest of the brain. when the x,y values come back and its inside a 'nfz' it could easily be remapped (in simple ascii) to NOT be in nfz. perhaps if you are near a nfz, it would go into auto-offset mode and add a fixed x,y value so that it thinks its miles away. then you compensate for it at the ground level when you program its course.
would not be hard at all.
waste of time to try to disallow x,y values for things like this. anyone here who spent a few weeks on even a simple arduino could do this remapping in an afternoon.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."