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Comment by misterbwong | Hacker News Reader

Wow can anyone confirm this? I'm surprised that the drones themselves are running windows. If so, I presume it's win CE or a custom variant of?

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The way it works is some AF guy in Nevada remotely controls the drones flying half way across the world.

My guess is it's not the drones themselves running Windows, but the consoles used to communicate with the drones. It makes sense. AF guy gets to work, plugs in his USB drive filled with music and pulls up the drone control program...

Though, now that I think about it, I would be disappointed, but not entirely surprised, if the drones ran Windows also. Sigh.

Well, there was that case maybe ten years ago of the nuclear carrier that had to be towed back to port after a BSoD killed it dead in the water; its control systems all ran Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_ship...

> On 21 September 1997, while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing a divide by zero error in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_ship...

Wow. Reading more of the wiki article (and linked sources) reveals that the actual towing to port is a contested issue. Noone denies that a /0 error killed the whole ship though.

Ok I don't feel so bad now. I was stationed on a nuclear carrier and one day I accidentally deleted the entire supply/logistics/personnel/maintenance database cluster.

I mean come on, the menu option was labeled "Re-index databases". I thought it would make it go faster :)

I ended up just making something up and restoring from backup.

So the problem was actually the data validation logic in the application, allowing invalid data to get into the database (and why no constraint on the database field?) coupled with no exception handling on a division operation (always a red flag). None of that has anything to do with Windows, really, but it's an easy cheap shot to take.

No modern UAV has hardware capable of running an entire Windows installation. Think of arduino boards; those things can control huge robotics systems and they are very simple (and thus simple to debug). If you're designing a robot from the ground-up, why would you scale all the way to Windows? No one is going to be playing minesweeper inside the plane

No modern UAV has hardware capable of running an entire Windows installation.

I highly, highly doubt that you're right about this. If you happen to be right, you won't be for long. It might be that nobody wants to run Windows, but there is clear motivation, as well as hardware and software technology, to have a full-scale OS on an advanced UAV.

The google car is an exception where there is a lot of sophisticated software. UAV's like Boeing's and even the ones you buy online (with the open source software) are running on boards, not full-scale PC's with the ability to play a DVD.

UAVs are very complicated in terms of technology and engineering, but the hardware is simple because it's basically just running control loops on some board.

You're wrong to associate "UAV" with small "remote-controlled" airplanes. There are much more sophisticated things out there, and also in the works.

> why would you scale all the way to Windows?

For the only reasons such stupid thing happens: the clueless manager wants the machine to run a modern OS and thinks Windows is the most modern OS out there.

post-downvote edit: I am saying nothing about viruses like Stuxnet, designed as weapons tailored to infect specific systems, for which no OS would be safe, but how brain-dead is it to design critical systems that control airborne weapon systems around an OS that's vulnerable to each and every piece of malware known to man?

I'd say you're being downvoted because you're rather clueless about the qualifications of the manager designing unmanned drones.

Now I am curious. Why would Windows end up in such a system? I would expect an RTOS like QNX (which is not that hard to program).

I agree I am more familiar with corporate IT disasters where some pointy-haired boss decided Windows was the way to go instead of what would be the optimal choice, but I always expected flight-control software to be built with a great amount of attention to every detail.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/evaluate/eval...

spoilers: Microsoft has a significant enterprise support organization, which the military is probably already dealing with, and Windows scales farther down than you'd think.

"The way it works is some AF guy in Nevada remotely controls the drones flying half way across the world."

Not entirely true. They (can and do) use closer locations: http://www.military.com/news/article/report-secret-drone-bas...

Well the ISS uses windows [1] and there were reports of malware getting up there. They also had driver compatibility issues and were rebooting the systems that controlled the gyros a lot. One would think you could just write a mil-spec OS for their computers but government, and more specficially government procurement, doesn't really work that way.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/malware-detected-at-the-i...

There's no virus on the ISS. It was on the laptops the crew carries around. Big difference. The control systems of the ISS aren't windows.

To refute your statement that the control systems of the ISS aren't windows, there was a story in wired [1] where it talked about Windows problems on the station's on board computers. They linked to the commander's log [2] which mentions the NT problems. Generally infrastructure issues with specific software and such is redacted from this log for national security reasons but this tidbit survived apparently. The speculation from wired was "The network appears to be a mix between IBM AIX (Unix) and Windows NT servers and Russian laptops running an unspecified operating system." which correlates with what folks I know at NASA have hinted at as well.

[1] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/04/42912?...

[2] "At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back. (that really instills confidence in the stability of your network)." - from http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/exp1shepmarfeb...

I still disagree. 'Mail files' could be anything. Local mail clients on those laptops they carry on the ISS. It sounds like they have a local LAN which is not any type of control system. Most likely the ISS is run by some RTOS. Its typical in aircraft and ships and power plants to have a unsecure network for things like workstations and completely separate and often incompatible network for control systems. All the mail servers could crash and every laptop infected, but the ISS control systems would be fine.

Yes, we all know they use Windows on their workstations and it was assumed they had a file/mail server too. Why wouldn't they?

You can use differing definitions for "what the ISS runs" but a mail server is not a control server and its disingenuous to keep insisting it is. Its purposeful misdirection like this that leads Joe Sixpack into thinking the spaceships get viruses a la Independence Day and hacker kiddies can whistle a virus that'll send the ISS crashing into the Earth.

The control systems run XP, Vista, or maybe Windows 7 (not sure about 7 yet). This is true of almost all military desktops, and all office automation servers, and most specialized servers (well, Windows Server 2003/2008).

I'm not sure what OS is on the aircraft; I think it's probably a RTOS for flight control and possibly separate processors (running whatever) on a bus for sensor packages. A lot of UAVs have interchangeable sensors, and sometimes a special camera, electronics package, etc. costs more than the airframe, is developed independently, etc.

There are tens (hundreds worldwide?) of UAV platforms in the US military, ranging from tiny little throwable tactical systems up through almost U2-sized "real aircraft, minus a pilot" like Global Hawk.

I know the F22 runs windows on top of a RTOS. I imagine many other planes and such are similar.

I have never heard of a drone running anything other than an RTOS. However the ground stations for command/control/monitoring are typically run on traditional Windows-OS machines.

If the drone is running a RTOS, wouldn't the GCS need RTOS-like reliability as well to communicate with it? That's all I can say (I think)

No. Windows boxes can communicate to an RTOS like VxWorks over a network just fine.

The level of performance needed in the GCS is even less than you might think, too -- for most of the UAVs, you don't have direct flight controls -- it's more like a naval ship, where you instruct it to go to certain altitude and fly a flight path you plot on a map. Some of them have more stick/rudder style controls, mainly for landings, which are often controlled by another operator physically at the launch/recovery site (and who might be a contractor vs. soldier/airman).

it's more like a naval ship, where you instruct it to go to certain altitude and fly a flight path you plot on a map.

Woah, what Navy has ships like that? Bowser's navy?

But yah, I know what you're talking about.

I don't know myself but I'm willing to bet for sure it's Windows. DoD contractors prefer hardware that has simple-stupid .NET libraries, you won't find Linux drivers for most of it, nor a developer that can separated from the cozy comfort of Visual Stupio.

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