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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

I feel the other commenters being dismissive of this are overlooking that there is massive proliferation risk with drone technology.

The next time a western country has a civil war, you can expect that one or both sides will be using drones, at least for surveillance if not for offense.

While it's true that the things on AliExpress could be built by a dedicated hobbyist, a typical large city would only have 100 to 1,000 people even capable of putting together a computer vision module in a couple of months' time. Selling a computer vision module on AliExpress puts that capability in the hands of anyone that wants it at the speed of FedEx.

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> you can expect that one or both sides will be using drones, at least for surveillance if not for offense

How is this any different than the risk that is currently present? Surveillance technology, in this day and age is ubiquitous and cheap. Attaching it to a drone is convenient for the offense, sure, but the technology described in this article is only a marginal improvement to what a stock drone can provide.

> cameras that use object recognition to identify humans and road vehicles at long range

Is nothing more than a software improvement to a stock drone with a camera, but nobody complains about the massive proliferation of consumer drone devices.

This article, to me, reads like Red Scare propoganda. Regardless of where people are buying this technology, there are much more lethal "weapons of war" currently available to people with very little legal oversight (i.e. you can buy a semi-automatic rifle in most US states without a permit or background check).

Small, local law enforcement knows how to deal with people with guns (putting aside Uvalde) - that's one of the few things they are prepared for.

Investigating or preventing a small drone attack is probably way beyond even a large city's police force.

Isn’t the investigation difficulty a function of its novelty? I figure after the first few drone bombings cities will learn how to deal with them.

It's not clear to me how the police will track down who operated what drone, especially if the drone operator is several kilometers away, perhaps not even near the launch site, and even if caught, only has a controller and headset.

This is much more like the DC sniper than a typical gunman.

Also we're already looking at a) onboard autonomy, so control is not needed or b) rebroadcast hardware that runs over LTE or WiFi. Satellite comms on the way, at least for the civilian market.

the current risk are all government created highvtech artifacts. this has the potential to be as destabilising as the ak was fot teibal societies .

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