Hackers able to turbo-charge DJI drones way beyond what's legal

Re: DJI can't police this.

DJI aren't the only route to drone ownership and at least should be commended for having a stab at drone safety restrictions for the uninformed masses.

I dont fully agree. DJI cant police people misbehaving with drones but they can police what happens with their own code and drones. They have obviously felt the need to put some application code in place to limit the drone but haven't felt it was worth doing this properly.

This is probably the worst option for them to take.

Re: DJI can't police this.

Even if DJI was the only company that made drones, they couldn't stop this. Sure, software hacks are really easy, but if you couldn't do that you could do hardware hacks instead. Say, hack the altimeter to display all values over the limit as their high - the limit. You can't really totally control a product that's out in the user's hands. This is a job for law enforcement.

Re: Conspiracy or cockup?

I expect the number is going to be quite limited.

Personally I would imagine that were you caught breaking a no fly zone with a bit of equipment that has deliberately been modified to allow you to break that no fly zone then your going to end up in trouble. A lot of trouble.

Re: Conspiracy or cockup?

"I wonder how many sales are the result of this hack being there?"

I do remember when DVD players were new, the ones with the region lock override hacks "leaked" in the public domain were the ones that everyone wanted.

Re: underground groups of drone users

It's Iain (M) Banks, some Scotts use a second i in Iain, but at least it's more parsable than some Welsh uses of the letter to this philistine English monoglot. And yeah, drones that look like mosquitos would have an impact on our ideas of privacy. I believe Arthur C Clarke explored a post-privacy world, where the agent of change was millions of wormholes crossing the Earth... Hmm, maybe he spent more time chatting to beat poets in the Chelsea hotel than he claimed.

Re: unfortunately unsurprising

Reminds me of walkie talkies when I was a lad. One of my friends had a set that he was going to use to communicate with his girlfriend. Unfortunately his parents didn't approve of her and when they realised that he was doing this bought a set themselves. That way they could hear exactly what was being said and deal with any use after lights out. Being a geek even back then and having read about radios, antennas and frequencies I did some research in the library (remember them?). If you took the back off the things there was a tuning pot (from memory) and you could fine tune the frequency. So I basically tuned them them so that they were still broadcasting on very close to the original frequency but far enough away that his parents couldn't intercept the signal. All you heard was static and what sounded like garbled interference not two lovebirds chatting.

Then looked at the antenna the range wasn't up to much at all, about 50ft was usable where the voice was still understandable - which was frankly crap. I looked at the antenna and spotted that the length bore little resemblance to the frequency used. I don't know who designed them but it looked like they had just produced the unit and then thrown some spare antenna in regardless of the performance it would give. Maybe they had a job lot unused from another model. So I soldered a bit of extra wire on the end of the antenna to match the frequency and they had a much better range and you could be understood at either end (i.e. her house). They then had a perfect method of communicating clandestinely with each other. Nowadays you'd just use a mobile that could probably be bought for the same money as the walkie talkies cost him. Back then this was for someone just turning 13 a neat solution although probably illegal.

Re: unfortunately unsurprising

My first successful homebuilt radio control transmitter used to draw around 5W from its batteries, when legal ERPs were 0.5W max and typical hand held units transmitted 100mW or less...and single channel receivers were so broadband only one could fly at a time...

..on the flying field a younger lad was yelling 'I can't control it, its out of range' and I looked at the dot fast vanishing downwind

'switch off, I'll bring it back'..

..'what frequency are you on?'

..'It doesn't matter'

And I did..and it didn't.

Actually drones with GPS dont need to be within radio range to fly. Most are programmable to go miles away and then come back.

And any competent person can build there own from arduinos, GPS units and model receivers and gyros.

They are here to stay, and moderately out of (political) control. I suspect the answer is to simply say that any drone is fair game oir a 12 bore or localised EMP or gigahertz jammer.

Re: "It's a bit silly to leave debug code in production apps"

I think at least one of the Mars rovers was saved because debug code had been left in the production software.

Re: "It's a bit silly to leave debug code in production apps"

This is an issue with some languages which doesn't allow to remove code from releases easily because they lack a mechanism to allow for it, like "ifdef" or the like (and, of course, interpreted languages where the source code is deployed). Using "if" statements still lets hacked code to execute debug code.

Debug code is also different from tracing code. The former may give access to functionalities that may be dangerous when used outside a test environment. The latter will just collect enough information to pinpoint bugs origins quickly.

Re: Is it really hacking...

Well, this is hacking of the purest kind ... reverse engineering and then modifying software so that it behaves the way you like ... they had to fool the code into spitting out debug info, dev passwords etc ...

Re: Sooner or later

Just because someone could drive on the wrong side of the road on a motorway doesn't make it a good idea or a "cool" thing to do.

Even though drivers can do all of those bad things, we accept that it is not really possible or practical to design cars smart enough to pre-empt evil/stupid drivers.

Why? Because cars and roads were invented long before IT made mass surveillance possible!

Today, "It Has Been Decided" that every possible known risk or abuse (and a few imaginary ones, I bet) somehow has to be foreseen and forestalled by "smart" software to thwart all those morons and terr'ists. Which of course doesn't work in practice.

Re: Sooner or later

If DJI was actually fast and expedient with adding and/or removing no fly zones and updating airspace structures I would agre with you about those removing DJI restrictions from their devices. However, DJI is known to be slow and sluggish in getting anything changed, leading people to being unable to fly where they SHOULD be able to fly. I can undertand people removing DJI restrictions for that very reason. This DOES mean that the responsibility for safely and legally operating a multicopter should lie with the operator/pilot, not with the company selling it. And it means those flying their craft well above safe altitudes in busy airspace should get a good clobbering before being arrested and thrown into a deep dark hole for a few years for endangering the lives of others.

I've recently had to explain the same thing to someone flying a DJI Phantom over my home city. "But I'm staying very close to the roof level of the houses, nothing comes over here". 'That doesn't matter. You're under the CTR of the local (international) airport, that goes from ground to 1500 meters, above that is more class A airspace. And the police helicopter HAS been known to fly that low over here due to the local football stadium. I really don't care what you do, but YOU should realise you are risking a very heavy fine at best and a long prison sentence at worst. Decide for yourself it that is worth getting some shaky low level footage of your neighbourhood.'

(Weirdly enough it seems to have worked because I haven't seen him fly the thing since)

Re: Sooner or later

You could build a car that has a built in GPS, works out what road it's on and then automatically limits your top speed to stop you breaking the speed limit... But how many times have you driven down a highway only for the GPS to think you're on a different road nearby, such a system would cause crashes when it forced your car to suddenly brake from highway speeds down to the speed limit of the road it thought it was on.

MacOS automatically sets your wifi regulatory zone to the country code being broadcast by the first access point it sees... If someone has a misconfigured access point nearby your wireless settings could become suboptimal or even completely broken.

All of these features designed to restrict what users can do in the name of safety or legality end up causing problems, and they cause these problems for legitimate users. Those who intentionally want to do something illegal will go out of their way to find a way to bypass any restrictions put in place.

Re: "underground groups of drone users"

Caverns

Re: "underground groups of drone users"

It's a big cave...

Re: "underground groups of drone users"

Tunnels! Mate. Tunnels!