Worries Mount Over Drone Safety After Venezuela Attack | Hacker News Reader

Worries Mount Over Drone Safety After Venezuela Attack

wsj.com

Frankly I'm amazed that it's taken so long for someone to try something like this. Drone tech has been available to any halfway competent hobbyist for over a decade and you can now buy very, very capable machines off-the-shelf.

I'm slightly surprised that it took this long for someone to try a drone assasination of a public figure. Drones have already been weaponised in Syria.

Of course, there are at least three competing suspects for this one - Colombia, Venezuela itself (false flag or internal opposition), or the CIA.

Edit: for "drone" read "quadcopter or similar multirotor electrically propelled craft"

The US military has been using drones to kill people for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator

They’re referring to the use of an inexpensive, commonly available drone, not a four million dollar weapon.

I think theandrewbailey is maybe talking about the relatively low likelihood that the CIA would use a cheap and ineffective drone to assassinate a South American leader. Especially when there are so many more clean ways to do so.

I think a few years back a whole slew of South American leaders came down with cancer for instance. Not that the CIA was behind that, it may have been coincidence and happenstance, but you get the idea. When you decide you need someone dead, then you need them dead. You can't "miss". I don't think it likely at all that the CIA would do something so ham-handed as using a hobbyist drone to attempt an assassination.

The world is quite lucky that the current batch of terrorist orgs are relatively unsophisticated - mostly using small arms and driving cars into crowds.

The mass terror potential from even just slightly more sophisticated methods is chilling to consider.

One of the biggest hurdles is control, it's pretty easy to jam or just lose connection to these devices navigating to hit their target after that isn't trivial. GPS doesn't really work because that's also readily jammed and the small payload capacity requires more accurate targeting to be effective.

I think whoever might want to kill a public figure has at least few better ways to do it discreetly. Drone attack is either some amateurs with limited budget or an attempt to attrack attention and stir shit up.

Bypass Paywalls is the extension you are looking for.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypasspaywall...

https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/wo...

That didn't work (I didn't log into facebook)

Are you using something like noscript or a referrer blocking addon?

Yes- uBlock origin. Does that screw things up?

strange. I use ublock and it works fine for me.

Paywall, no thanks.

I feel like there is a pretty long established history of wsj paywall articles being ok to make the FP.

But they aren't fluff pieces. I want to read this one. If it keeps happening enough, I'll pay to read good stuff. For me it's not even about the money - if it's once in a blue moon it's not worth my time to figure out how to pay.

Oh god, I bet the crazy US govt is gonna ban drones instead of firearms.

Guns are not the problem. Crazy people are the problem. Same applies to drones

Fucking ninja edits on HN all the time. Good job justaman.

Said by no one in any place other than an internet forum. It's not exactly as easy as picking up a can of pringles - even for hunting rifles, you have to wait at least an hour on average for them to run the federal background checks.

And unless you're only buying a hi-point every week you're quickly going to go broke buying guns on a whim.

Also, the original comment was:

>"Hey hun, when you finish shopping can you catch me a new gun in the gas station/walmart/bank?" Said no one ever, living in a country with decent gun controls and laws.

To which your reply was perfectly apropriate.

I'm not sure you read the parent comment as it was intended.

I have read your comment and the parrent 4 times in 4 different ways. Can we please get some clefication.

1) Parent is anti-gun and thinks US Gov is crazy because they would ban drones before banning guns when guns are actually killing people. And you are pro-gun and think it is actually crazy to to ban firearms. Thus you both disagree, and are now mortal enemies.

2) Parent is anti-gun and thinks US Gove is crazy because they would ban drones before banning guns when guns are actually killing people. And you are anti-gun and make your comment in a attempt of sarcastic humor. Thus you both agree, and can now be friends for ever.

3) Parent is pro-gun and thinks the US Gov is crazy because they would ban drones and consider banning guns because people kill people, not drones, or guns. And you are pro-gun and think its actually crazy to ban firearms.Thus you both disagree, and are now mortal enemies.

4) Parent is pro-gun and thinks the US Gov is crazy because they would ban drones and consider banning guns because people kill people, not drones, or guns. And you are pro-gun and make your comment in a attempt of sarcastic humor. Thus you both agree, and can now be friends for ever.

In any case this thread is confusing af. Please fix.

Thanks, now if the parent can please clarify, and if found to be #4 mods can swiftly remove the flame war sure to come of this.

Then we find out whether a gun fitted with propellors counts as a "drone" or a "firearm".

Technically a drone does not require propellers.

Drone "a remote-controlled pilotless aircraft or missile."

So one might be able to argue that the gun is actually the remote control for a drone ... aka the bullet?

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Federal government of the United States will never repeal the second amendment.

Article seems to be behind a paywall :(

Still, the first thing that came to mind when hearing of this attack was the "slaughterbots" video ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots )

Too bad it failed if it was a real attack. They didn't even manage to rip the umbrella: https://twitter.com/nukestrat/status/1026564955087228928

Extrajudicial killings and assassination attempts rarely help democracy. Quite the contrary they are the perfect environment for strongmen to grab and consolidate power. Look at the Erdogan coup, the burning of the Reichstag, the Arab revolutions that turned violent, the rise of ISIS in destabilized areas, the violent history of postcolonial Africa and so on.

What makes Maduro possible is a political system that even has a strong popular component. If you remove the exponent, that system will produce another even stronger strongman, poised to "defend" the country.

I think you are overestimating the predictive power of the cited historical events.

Whether or not killing Maduro would bring back democracy is irrelevant, the bottom line is if people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin were removed from power earlier in their lines it's reasonable to imagine that tens of millions fewer people would have suffered and died.

Maduro hasn't quite reached the level of those despots yet but his removal from power would certainly be a good thing for Venezuela. I've seen pictures of babies starving to death. The guy has turned the entire country into a concentration camp through his ineptitude.

Case in point: The Communist Party of China has ruled the mainland uninterrupted since 1954. Look at the phenomenal progress that's been made since Mao's death in 1976. There's no democracy in China, but different leadership has made a huge difference. There are no more famines in China.

> if people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin were removed from power earlier

It's a bit ironic that you criticize the predictive power of my examples, then go full time machine to kill known mass murderers before they had the chance to do their deeds.

There is little doubt that killing Hitler would have changed the course of history for the better - as much as alternate historical timelines make any sense in a discussion. The problem we are trying to solve, however, is not "how to use a time machine"; it is preventing future dictatorship without full hindsight of who will turn out to be the dictator. The year is 1933 and a new, 44 year old Chancellor is using political violence as a pretext to suspend democracy. As it would later turn out in this story, democracy matters quite a lot.

Wikipedia puts the dates of the holocaust at: 1941–1945; according to a broader definition, 1933–1945

You don't need a time machine. It's a documented fact that people around the world knew by 1942, and some well before then. It's hard to slaughter millions of people without other people finding out about it.

  > The problem we are trying to solve, however, is not "how 
  > to use a time machine"; it is preventing future 
  > dictatorship without full hindsight of who will turn out 
  > to be the dictator.

Nope, I'm just saying that Maduro's gotta go. If you can't figure out that he's a dictator that's on you.

So were Saddam and Gaddafi. Their elimination directly led to tens of thousands of preventable civilian deaths and ongoing civil wars. Again, a simplistic world view can lead to trying to solve the wrong problem.

Venezuela is still at the 'restoring democracy by any peaceful means' stage.

You don't need to start a war to drone one guy.

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