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Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

"Your Favorite Chinese multi-sensor distributed spying platform".

I doubt they care much about you taking some videos on holiday! Probably don’t use it to fly over military sites and there is zero risk.

I worry that some of the worlds great companies get caught in the power wars of the US and China. Both countries working together has been so good for the world - nobody will be as prosperous without the other - but who cares as long as the powerful people in the US and China get to maintain or increase their power.

With the apps the issue isn’t the ability of China to harvest data on someone at a kids sports events or what not or what basketball team they like.

The issue is that for example with TikTok the American citizen/national with relatives has been watching videos on <sensitive topic> and now their relative back in China had a visit from the authorities, or this info gained from the app on this politician or journalists or their family could be used for leverage, or a number of scenarios like that.

The chinese authorities already illegally sets up “police” stations abroad in various countries. The authorities already do apply pressure to relatives still in China.

This is the beauty of a product like their drones that records detailed telemetry, and can upload video and images to their cloud service: you get loads, and loads of data that people with zero experience in intelligence gathering think is completely harmless. There really is no way of knowing how much sigint the drone is capable of gathering and sending back (it has an SDR chip).

Just in the area I live there are perhaps a dozen military and strategic civillian installations. This is going to be true for any city. You'd be surprised how much civil infrastructure is at least somewhat classified. Because compromising it can have serious consequences.

Some of these installations are even known to DJI and are geofenced off. In fact the DJI maps actually identify some military installations that are not identified on official maps provided by local providers. And both the maps and the geofences seem to be very actively maintained - much more so than the locally obtainable maps. But you can still get close enough to image a lot of these areas.

The fact that they have an SRD on board, and because there are probably on the order of a couple of thousand DJI drones in the city, AND they phone home, you could get drones to do targeted scans depending on what area a drone is in. I'm not saying that they do this - but I am saying that all the things China would need to leverage DJI drones as a global network of intelligence-gathering assets are already there. The safest assumption is that they do leverage the drones for intelligence gathering.

As for opportunities: Another good example is when there was a NATO exercise here last year. While down in the harbor to look at a US Marines ship (can't remember the name) that carries MV-22B Ospreys, I spotted what appeared to be a Mavic Pro of some description in the air. It probably wasn't the only drone trying to capture footage of the exercise.

So yeah, exploiting naive users to unwittingly take part in intelligence gathering is a pretty neat trick. And it is a bit surprising that the regulations for this are so lax given the immense potential these platforms have.

That’s why I fly my Mavic Air:To take up PRC spy CPU time analyzing the really boring stuff I do. I’m doing my part.

Do you have any idea if there are jailbreaks for these things or alternate firmwares?

There are. They tend to lag a little bit when a new model comes out, but AFAIK everything is eventually unlocked.

Got a link to share?

Why would a drone have any internet access? It may want it, but should not need it, nor given it.

It needs it to make sure it follows any local flight restrictions, like no-fly zones.

My drone stayed without connection for more than a year already. Sure it politely says at startup that said zones need an update but other than that keeps functioning without a hitch.

1) Other manufacturers don't have restrictive geofencing like DJI - it's not a regulatory issue, but liability.

2) DJI's flight restrictions are determined by DJI, not the FAA. They don't align with each other, so you end up having to keep track of and comply with two airspace systems.

That's why I abandoned DJI for my business use. I wasn't able to take off to cover an event at an airport for which I had FAA approval. DJI gave their approval... but the code didn't work, and it required that I have Internet access on the phone I was using to fly to boot.

This has been incredibly frustrating for me.

DJI arguably makes the best consumer drones - and as a platform I love my Mini Pro 3. It's small and light enough to easily put in a pack, easy to fly, and just works well apart from DJI's geofencing system.

HOWEVER - I'm heavily restricted from using it at my own property, not because of the FAA or any other government restrictions, but because of DJI.

I live about 10-miles from an airport. Per the FAA's on "B4UFLY" app - my rural property is clear of any restrictions, outside of the altitude restricted zone of the airport. However, DJI draws their own "FlySafe Geo" map differently, and places me in an altitude zone where I'm limited to 150-meters.

This wouldn't be so bad, except that I live next to a large hill/small mountain, that's a great place to fly over and take photographs.

If I were to go to the top of the mountain (also in DJI's altitude restricted area) and take off, I could fly out 150m from the top of the mountain, no issues. But since DJI takes no note of the ground height changing as you fly, if I take off from my property and try to fly my drone to the top of the mountain, I'd crash into its side long before I got there.

There's really no solution to this issue, besides hoping that someone creates a hacked firmware for my drone that ignores DJI's restrictions, like they have for other DJI models.

If another manufacturer developed a comparable drone that didn't suffer from DJI's restrictions, I'd buy it in a second.

> If another manufacturer developed a comparable drone that didn't suffer from DJI's restrictions, I'd buy it in a second.

Check out the Autel EVO Lite+. It uses the same camera+gimbal as my EVO 2 Pro, in a smaller and lighter package.

https://autel-robotics.myshopify.com/products/drones-evo-lit...

Autel's app will pop up a warning - a small warning that's easily dismissed and doesn't get in the way - if it thinks you're in restricted airspace, but won't prevent you from flying.

There's one Asian country - Japan? - where the Autel app does restrict based on geofences, but otherwise it's up to the operator to ensure regulatory compliance.

AFAIK in Norway (all of EU?) you need Internet in order to fly close (regulated, not closed, airspace) to an airport - the drone self-reports position and id to air traffic control, so they don't show up as unidentified blip on their radar.

In my home town basically the entire air space is regulated due to the location of the airport/flight paths.

I am way more concerned about domestic spying. I would not give a rat's ass if DJI steals my pics and locations. I photograph what I consider pretty places and that's the extent. They can have it.

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