Article

2019-08-27 Iraq

ISIS fighter killed by drone bomb he was operating after it ran low on battery and flew back

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Posted by DarthVader 2019-08-27 00:00|| || Front Page|| [7 views ] Top
File under: Islamic State

#1 Oops.

Posted by Uleck Spererong9442 2019-08-27 07:20|| 2019-08-27 07:20|| Front Page Top

#2 Batteries... it's so often about the fok'n batteries.

Posted by Besoeker 2019-08-27 07:21|| 2019-08-27 07:21|| Front Page Top

#3 Proprietary DJI feature called Return to Home (RTH). It's triggered when the Intelligent Flight Battery is depleted to the point that it may affect the return of the aircraft. When this happens, a prompt will appear on your screen in the DJI GO/4 app, and the drone will automatically begin to ascend to the set RTH height and return if no action is taken after a 10-second countdown. If the battery power is critically low, then the drone will automatically land itself, and this can’t be canceled by the pilot. He can only yell 'Allyhoo' by then and hope someone was watching him go out with a bang.

ISIS are known to use modified consumer DJI drones, they are a Chinese company but have compromised or unauthorized resellers in Europe that keep shifting stores and locations to avoid sanctions and investigations. Some of these which had early release stock, have been closed down in America, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Belgium. Since 2017, they've had to keep a buyer registry and the US DoD have full access to it. Also, on the insistence of the DoD, the company modified the flight controller firmware to update to a 'registry censor'. Failure to register with DJI on purchase means the drone will have a height limit of 98 feet, and a radius of 164 feet (50 meters). I don't know if they can modify the battery charge though. Of course these things have workarounds, but such level of compliance to the US from a chin-chong company was only possible since after 2016.

Posted by Dron66046 2019-08-27 07:46|| 2019-08-27 07:46|| Front Page Top

#4 [Wipes tear]. I love a happy ending.

Posted by Bobby 2019-08-27 08:53|| 2019-08-27 08:53|| Front Page Top

#5 Karma. She's a bitch.

Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2019-08-27 09:29|| 2019-08-27 09:29|| Front Page Top

#6 Industrial accidents are getting more high-tech.

Posted by Mercutio 2019-08-27 11:25|| 2019-08-27 11:25|| Front Page Top

#7 The amusing part from a systems perspective is that the fatality was caused by a 'safety feature'.
"Let's make it return to base on low battery."
"Genius! What could go wrong?"

Posted by SteveS 2019-08-27 13:20|| 2019-08-27 13:20|| Front Page Top

#8 Wow, a new category for the Darwin Awards, killed by safety features.

Posted by Silentbrick 2019-08-27 14:01|| 2019-08-27 14:01|| Front Page Top

#9 Thanks, Dron, for fascinating analysis, and crew, for giggles.

Posted by Lex 2019-08-27 14:17|| 2019-08-27 14:17|| Front Page Top

#10 so this was an event in 2017

was it just declassified?

Posted by lord garth 2019-08-27 15:19|| 2019-08-27 15:19|| Front Page Top

#11 Lord Garth, while only some of it is still CUI, the Chinese have been singing it from the rooftops for two years. It's practically common knowledge by now.

In 2014, the US Dept of interior had contracted the Shenzhen company DJI to procure survey drones and the sort. In 2016, the five-sided box looked into the safety of the data exchange taking place, and a GE (Govt. Edition) firmware and data saving system was jointly arrived at. That proprietary firmware was shared across the board and remained with you.

In 2017 when the ISIS uploaded videos of their drone attacks they were found to be DJI. Trump was already looking at ripping Huawei a new one (it was being investigated by many agencies in an industrial theft case since Obama's time) The Shenzhen Drone company had grown by 300% since 2014. Almost all aviation and law agencies everywhere got on its case and DJI was ordered from an anxious China to give all the help they could. That's the only way they could sell their drones in the US, they were told. The UK, Japan, India, some others followed. If a DJI drone is now spotted in a suspicious incident, caught with explosives or found at a blast site now, all these countries must go through the US to find out just how it got there.

The MDR for what DOD did with them was started by your own defsec, Jim Mattis in Aug last year I think, after he banned the use of DJI equipment from being ever contracted or used by military again. I don't know if the review cleared though, so details will have to remain dark.

Since then, a number of other competitors have picked up in the market and the DJI drones do sell in most countries but are impaired by the inability to register from remote places. New companies have GPS tracking and registry as standard protocols.

Posted by Dron66046 2019-08-27 16:48|| 2019-08-27 16:48|| Front Page Top

#12 Make it so that after they detect "Allan Snackbar!" more than twice in a row they fly off, circle around a bit, and return to the controller.

Posted by gorb 2019-08-27 17:24|| 2019-08-27 17:24|| Front Page Top

#13 Did you know that after knife attacks in Japan in 2010, Japan created a visual identification system with a gigantic 'facial topology forms' weighted library from skull shape to position and shape of eyes, amount and pattern of facial hair etc aimed at picking out muslims, in a crowd. Everybody in the scientific community shut it down of course.

But it worked so well that China made a bid for the system with modifications to adjust for the Tajik and Uighur facial topologies. There has been lots of ML research since then into detecting a type of facial structure and ascertaining ethnicity. The chinese system is crude, because the facial types are near in-differentiable maybe, but it works like a charm with sufficient South Asian and mid eastern samples. But to even speak of it is taboo to humanist nerds.
The chin-chong research.

Posted by Dron66046 2019-08-27 17:56|| 2019-08-27 17:56|| Front Page Top

#14 Wile E. Coyote nods.

Posted by The peanut gallery 2019-08-27 19:03|| 2019-08-27 19:03|| Front Page Top

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