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The political and ideological discussion in the USA about gun control laws and the 2nd Amendment has been a hot topic for decades. Usually, the topic remains in a glowing, hot-ember state. The heat and light emanating from this hot-ember pulses and intensifies when fanned by the news of mass murder involving guns. As drones become more prevalent in society, I fear the hot-embers of this age-old debate will fan into flames. While one must have a license to operate either machine, that legal requirement will not deter those with harmful intent.
Putting aside the political and ideological debates, how would soylentils implement a no-fly zone for drones - especially ones with harmful payloads or in areas containing volatile substances?
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Ask Soylent: Drones and the Right to Bear Arms
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innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:41PM
so what do they use now? Wi-fi? cell phone signals?
Hmm it depends on how much of a piece of shit it is. If it is a Parrot Bebop it uses WiFi and they are trivial to attack at the 802.11 level, take over the craft, and remotely operate it instead of the pilot. I've seen a hacked Parrot that flew around, auto-hacked other Parrots, and formed a fleet of compromised aircraft. I've never heard of anyone using cell phone signals.
It seems you think that the control signal for the aircraft can be disrupted to the point where a pilot can no longer control it. When you get to machines like the DJI Phantom or any hobby class craft the radio transmitters used both frequency hopping and direct sequencing spread spectrum. If we lived in 1995 you could quite easily destroy the EM spectrum in the frequencies used by r/c transmitters but it would have been illegal because jamming is illegal and it'd be dangerous because the jammed signal would be interpreted as valid control signal and the only predictable action would be eventually the machine will hit the ground in a totally uncontrolled manner.
Right now you would have to completely destroy the entire 2.4 GHz part 15 spectrum to knock the drones out of the air. If you could even achieve it (because both forms of spread spectrum operation are jam resistant) you would also successfully kill WiFi and a bunch of other stuff around it.
I'm not just an r/c pilot I'm also a ham radio operator.