DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

The short answer is yes. It would be about a billion times better than anything you can buy RTF but also a lot more expensive.

Some (if not most) of the open source hardware would probably be built in China but this hardware can be flashed with Open Source software like betaflight.

If you doubt, just look at companies that sell drone parts/kits like https://www.getfpv.com/fpv.html check out their goggles section, they are all high end.

You ask about video re cording/signal. How can you possibly beat being able to hand-pick your VTX/VRX chip, or your camera? How can any pre-built commercial drone possibly compete with that?

Same with control. You can buy the best motors, the best ESCs, the best carbon fiber frame, the best parts to build and secure all the above. You just cant compete.

But some people lack the time, skills or patience to learn how to build one, and learn the software.

If we establish that drone manufacturing is a matter of national security, it seems critically important to understand why domestic production keeps failing and fix those problems rather than just giving up.

Privacy protection is not the issue at the heart of these concerns: it’s national security.

Seems like a ban on all those apps (not just tiktok) is more appropriate or at least required in addition. From a security POV, the restriction really needs to be at the iOS or AndroidOS level.

It reminds me.. when someone is cheating on a partner, they are more likely to think they are being cheated on too. I have experienced this, being accused non-stop when actually they were the one cheating all along.

Just because USA likes tampering with proprietary code and using NDA’s with Silicon Valley to bug just about anything they want (because they can), that paranoia consumes them that other countries are doing the same.

The issue is even bigger than that. It doesn't matter what the device does now, nor does it matter whether it is open or proprietary.

When it comes to national security, ask yourself "what could happen in a time of war?" Some obvious answers are:

1. If it connects to foreign service providers, those services could be shut off or changed to be malicious

2. If the device uses parts/support/updates from foreign service providers, those could be discontinued, or changed to be malicious

3. If you need the product, but don't make them locally, they may no longer be available.

etc.

It is a national security concern. Whether the cure is better than the poison only time will tell.

I think the sooner the west (read US/Canada and Europe, some say Australia/NZ) realized and wake up from their denial the better. Gone are the days of the narrative we're not going to export to you our superior and more expensive products, but now the narrative we're not going to import your superior and cheaper products, how the table are turning 180 degree. It's not uncommon to watch western Youtubers praising the good quality DJI products and at the same being critical of GoPro sub-par quality products, and they're not even reviewing the products but just honest remarks from professional users going about their filming and recording routines.

> You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.

DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated factory if you're selling at a massive scale. Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.

And it's also dumb to fund your opponent's war production lines.

It will not.

> Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?

No.

This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing.

> Leaving the door propped open for everyone is also plausible deniability for doing bad things.

We completely agree here, see "sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware." I personally don't think this justifies a blanket ban on a technology; if it did, the world would need to be a very different place.

It's also worth noting that these restrictions aren't government imposed in countries besides China, and aren't government-linked besides a request-based "please make this location a no fly zone" process - DJI basically just exported a Chinese concept with hope of building goodwill internationally, and the no-fly zones were invented by DJI from public land use data. That's why other drones don't have no-fly zones but are still allowed for sale, there are frequent mismatches between DJI no-fly zones and real no-fly zones (both false positive and false negative), and why DJI disabled their own no-fly zone feature in much of Europe earlier this year (European mandated no-fly rules passed the responsibility to the consumer instead).

That is, if you opt out of data collection, they seem to be earnestly _trying_ to disable data collection. Unfortunately their apps are a spaghetti monster disaster and it's very difficult for them to get things right, so DJI frequently introduce new features or libraries which contain telemetry they've forgotten to disable. In my experience they do this more often in consumer apps than enterprise apps. I think they might actually have some kind of automated testing or audit applied to their enterprise apps.

Whether this is a conspiracy to introduce subtle surveillance bugs or simple hardware-company-making-software incompetence is of course an exercise left to the reader's paranoia level.

Anyway, I just use DJI RCs and forget network credentials. This limits the DJI bug/malice blast radius surface area to an acceptable range to me, and that's the advice I'd give others, too.

Do you think that e.g. FISA courts or the CIA kidnapping random civilians based on their name/watch type have a high threshold of evidence?

Not a very good comparison in terms of the state forcing companies to give out their customers' data...

Also love how, in your opinion, anyone pointing this out must of course be a conspiracy nut.

What's the legal recourse for a US Citizen served with a dodgy FISA-related subpoena/warrant?

Or if a government agency wants to purchase tracking data that includes my phone from a data collection agency? Say the state of Texas purchases geotracking data for app users who cross state lines.

You're deliberately overstating the issue, to the point of absurdity, to avoid legitimate criticism. Three-letter agencies do have a high level of access to this data, and in many cases that's because the companies involved just voluntarily hand it over (no need to get the courts involved). Even when the courts do get involved, these are secret courts where the decisions are classified, and in any case from what we do know they act as a rubber stamp anyway.

So, this is a matter of the US wanting access to that data in addition to, or possibly exclusive from, the CCP. Frankly, as I'm not currently under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party of China, I'd prefer they have unlimited access to that data as opposed to the US government, if I have to choose one or the other.

Unintelligible.

Rewrite as “in China it’s very hard to avoid turning over data to the CCP.”

Is this an assumption or do you have first-hand knowledge of how this works operationally, in practice?

My points were:

* DJI's use of Secneo on Android isn't hiding a "sendAllYourPhotosToTheCCPServerNow" function. This seems obvious but I've seen this take everywhere.

* However, DJI's apps are loaded with telemetry that's indistinguishable from malware. They ARE full of shady things.

* I wouldn't run a DJI app on my own phone.

* I would use a standalone DJI remote for most low to medium assurance applications, because while the shadiness remains in many ways, the threat model is easy to understand and boundaries are pretty easy to draw.

They're foot-nuking themselves this way, as well. Due to their poor security, DJI are also easily compromised by Western interests and collect a ton of data about Chinese drone operations. I suppose someone could argue they decided that this is worth the cost of the operation, etc., but it seems... odd.

> hire product managers from a pool trained on CCP-sponsored university programs and industry media sources, that have those product managers parroting "useful" beliefs like "more analytics is always better."

The CCP don't need to do any work to make this happen. I totally agree that they benefit, thus my "indistinguishable from malware" comment. But this is how product management works worldwide. Maybe the modern obsession with product telemetry has been a years-long deep intelligence op, but I think it's easier to attribute to standard corporate behavior.

[0] https://www.dji.com/rc

Now, in an ideal world, I want neither China nor the US monitoring me, nor anyone else. But for me personally, the downside from the US monitoring me is larger.

That line of reasoning seems sound to me. If you see a flaw in it, state what the flaw is, rather than just labeling it "BS".

Once these were overcome they have bounced back and are looking stronger than ever, their revenue has now risen above the pre-sanctions peak.

The year after? Poof, very small percentage of the global market.

Need a phone with a great camera? Then Huawei is much better than anything Samsung, Apple, and Google makes. Huawei market share was taking off at crazy speed before the bans on both the software and hardware side.

- GDP [0]

- Total wealth [1]

- Military

- Demographics (US - growing, China - aging and shrinking)

- Soft power

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/

[1] [https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/glo...]

There was never a "one election will fix everything" in the US and people who pretend that's the only path and use that to discount the possibility of change were never serious about change to begin with. Had they been serious, they'd have studied history enough to see you rarely get what you want with one election cycle.

It's the quitters that got us into this uniparty situation on so many issues. Don't be a quitter, get active and stay active until you see the change you want.

Yep: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/business/china-drones-anz...

Nope, it happens in the control app on your device.

> GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.

No one said it could.

From my understanding / research, the approved suppliers are largely focusing on the LE, Military markets.

Current list of cleared UAS https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list

And by the way, have you heard of good manners? They make discussions much more productive than smug comebacks.

Yes exactly. If some companies are doing things that you don't like, like misusing personal information and transferring it to other countries, it is much better to enact general laws that prevent that, as the EU is doing, rather than passing laws that ban individual Chinese companies.

It would be as if rather than regulating car safety, we had a situation where lots of cars by both US and foreign automakers had massive safety problems, but rather than fixing that in general, we simply chose to ban specific Chinese car brands on supposed national security grounds while ignoring that cars made by US companies had the exact same problems.

The saddest thing about these decline of American manufacturing, and the fragility of supply chains is that all of this was predicted 30 years ago, but Wall Street and the billionaire management class did their typical shortsighted profits taking instead of sustainability, soured on by ideological capture of both parties.

I often think about how the world would be different if the people actual won the Battle of Seattle.

Lots of people want to do this but the place for it is like a DARPA challenge not in the general hobby. If the authorities got wind of it then down come the regulations and no more hobby.

Only for targeted attacks. The Russian way of prosecuting war is still a shower of shells, rockets, and a mob with guns. Drones are retail, Russians do wholesale.

That said, I don't think this law has anything to do with war, just simple economic protectionism driven by Skydio and other US drone lobbyists. Getting rid of DJI's excellent $7,000 enterprise drones lets Skydio sell their $15,000 + cloud-subscription enterprise drones instead.

As others point out, DJI can't control what buyers do (a good default).

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say DJI won't manufacture drones for offensive war use. This sharply limits their usefulness to the US Military.

Either way, using US Mil as an excuse doesn't make sense for a ban. They won't be buying gear they have reason to mistrust.

As ever, reasons for the ban seem to be evidence-free speculation. Articles that omit this key part of the story aren't serving their readers.

See: chipmakers, telecom tech, aerospace tech, etc.

Is it any different than China wanting data access from U.S companies that attempted to open their business there? I'm not in favor of this ban. I think they should've at least forced DJI to keep the data local before going for an outright ban.

If I build something in California, to California's laws, and it becomes a success, I can immediately sell it across the entire rest of the US, and I can expand across the US, using the same employment contracts as in california, same lawyers as in california, etc.

Sure, later on I can save money by making the Delaware version of my product with more cancerous chemicals, or have stricter NDAs in my Florida contracts.

But if I start with California regulations, I can expand to the entire US with a small team of employees.

There's nothing like that in Europe. If my product works in Germany, I'll need a french, spanish, italian translation to sell it in these countries. I can't just hire people from these countries either — they've got different holidays, different work hours, different unions I'll have to deal with. Different tax codes and agencies. And often these are conflicting with one another.

In the US, I need one or two support shifts in one or two languages. In the EU I need 27. In the US, I need one version of the product, with one plug. In the EU, unless I'm okay with 10A and a plastic chassis, I need a dozen different versions.

And even if the product can be used universally, European culture is significantly more diverse than US culture.

Is a phone call at 7am or 8pm more appropriate? Depends on whether you're in Germany or Spain. When a job applicant includes a photo of themselves and lists their parents' degrees and jobs on their own CV, is that appropriate or not? In Germany, that's often expected, in many other regions, a huge no-go.

To be successful in the US, I need to build one company. To be successful in the EU, I need to build a multinational corporation with 27 local branches.

Say all you want about "speculative public trading stocks", but I trust public markets' pricing more than private markets[1] or the government[2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-26/what-h...

[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/25/c...

Also, it's funny that you mention Goebels. It's ironic even when you repeat the same tropes about the US and how it's supposedly beholden to the capital markets and speculators.

Europe has its giants. Europe usually does not attack its giants. That's why you get megacorps like Maersk or Airbus or Volkswagen. The entire point is that it only attacks other giants (ie, not homegrown giants), hence the focus on legislation that mostly affects them but leaves European corporations mostly unscathed. Or why green legislation curiously doesn't affect German coal extraction (what a coincidence!) that much. Or all the other double standards Europe and some Europeans love so much.

The delusion here is this weird narrative of good, noble Europeans who are somehow only guilty of not being greedy.

It's so much that it literally pushes young people to have a non-risk taking mindset. I have a friend who has some knife sharpening and tooling skills and she's been figuring how to do something with this (some kind of a business). I suggested why not get a garage and get the machinery you want and get started. She listed down all the regulations and how even thinking about it is not allowed.

Starting a business/startups is hard. The EU just adds 10-20 more hurdles to cross to get even with the US startup ecosystem. At least that's been my observation in the few weeks.

> a couple hundred years behind

But the fact that goofus fails at doing X doesn't make doing X always the wrong choice.

Lumber prices rose because at the start of the pandemic, the industry predicted a housing crash and took drastic steps to downsize and then the exact opposite happened. And we were left with a garden-variety supply vs demand situation.

If it was just protectionism, prices in Canada would not have had sharply increased lumber prices at the exact same time: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lumber-prices-covid-19-cost...

I was just talking about my experience with DJI. Where you buy a product, can use it for a bit, and then it stops working, because you haven't connected it to the internet or created an account.

It is often the 'market leaders' that are so afraid to loose customers and their market position to implement customer hostile processes into their products.

This whataboutism ignores one very important point.

When you connect a device to an American company they might do things that we consider privacy violations, while still staying generally within the bounds of the law. We like to joke about data going to the NSA or something, but in the extremely limited cases where it does protections exist with oversight.

Contrast this to Chinese companies where by law every company is part-owned by the government itself. The Ministry of State Security literally has employees who show up to these companies every day like normal workers, but their job is to find and exploit intelligence on foreign individuals and businesses.

I don't mean this as a political issue, but in your comment I see one of the reasons Trump appeals to people. He promotes a mindset of "stop handwringing and just fix the damn problem."

Here we know the following:

1) DJI devices have an always-on connection

2) Chinese government is unfriendly to US and exerts strong control over Chinese companies

3) China regularly blocks US companies for whatever reason they decide.

So yeah, we can say "but banning DJI won't solve the general problem of bad companies; we shouldn't just focus on China; is a ban really fair? etc etc. Or, we can just say "screw it -- China treats US companies like shit and we're not gonna just hand over all our drone info"

The same cannot be said of the Chinese government who may be happy to get extensive drone footage of everyday US infrastructure which can be used in a future war.

Meanwhile, China won't even let Google provide a valid map of the country... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Google_Maps_in_Chi...

But tell us all more about how we should be more concerned about a US company requiring an internet login.

China funded all that pretty infrastructure on massive local debt that the fees are not covering. Will be interesting to see how that works out long term.

Edit: I love China. I love the chinese people. I loved Shanghai of the 2010s. I've worked with a ton of amazing chinese developers in the Bay Area that were stranded after tiananmen, and I'm sad for their tragedy but they were definitely a boon to the USA. I don't think Americans are superior to Chinese in any way. I also don't think a new building/infrastructure being nicer than old buildings/infrastructure proves anything anyone who upgraded to a new car from an old one doesn't already know.

Again, China's high speed rail utilization is not even able to pay for it's initial build out, and is very under utilized as it goes to tier 3 locations that don't justify it. Will be interesting to see how it plays out once 'maintenance debt' (technical debt but for infrastructure) gets added to the 'build out debt'. If those tier 3 cities turn tier 1 it will look like genius investment, but I don't see it happening.