Anybody know if there are considerations or plans for things like:
- Mandatory periodic ID transmit (via RF) by drones at specific altitudes or in specific areas
- Standardized visual marking schemes for drones by class, for example municipal, commercial, federal, etc.
Just wondering because for example my city announced that they'll be using drones for power pole checks, which will include a lot of backyard operation. I'd like to be able to identify them if needed.
> Mandatory periodic ID transmit (via RF) by drones at specific altitudes or in specific areas
Remote ID in the US will be in effect September 2023. It functions like a license plate: you won’t be able to identify the operator, but law enforcement will be able to. It will broadcast the location of the drone, the altitude, and the operator’s position.
All drones that need to be registered will also need Remote ID unless they’re flown in a (yet to be designated) FRIA zone (so sub-250g flying recreationally are exempt)
> Standardized visual marking schemes for drones by class, for example municipal, commercial, federal, etc.
None, unless it’s something required by their Certificate of Authorization, which a municipality may be operating under (otherwise it’s Part 107). Realistically, if such a requirement were stipulated it would likely be lights of a certain color / pattern.
There’s a randomization aspect to it to thwart that. The specs haven’t been finalized, but they’ve been given to ASTM to flesh out. The Federal Aviation Regulation basically spells out the requirements at this point.
I believe this is a draft [0] (it could be final too at this point). From there, here’s the specific ID randomization:
> UTM (UUID): A UTM-provided unique ID traceable to the Registration ID that can act like a “session id” to protect exposure of operationally sensitive information.
And again: so long as that's transmitted in the clear, ANY party may accumulate a database of UUIDs and locations over time, which would tend to identify the party(ies) associated with a specific drone. That might not be precisely the operator, but if drone ID "8daf5e654951a033175fb71e0a2ecc03"[1] keeps showing up at Your Fine City's Police Department ... or sewage department, or electric utility ... you might begin to draw some inferences regarding its likely owner/operator.
It might be easier to do so if the identifier had, say, a specific entity element to it (say, as with LDAP or X.500 entity attributes), but the lack of such an element to the identifier itself is at best a small hinderance to owner/operator identification.
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Notes:
1. md5sum of the randomly-selected string "random drone id"
I really don't mind if people can trace my drone back to me. I'm a licensed ham radio operator and my call sign is linked to my real identity. And I want to know who is flying drones over my property. The two police departments that regularly fly helos over my house use the same paint scheme as their squad cars to make it obvious who they are. They use the tail numbers N911DC (Washington DC) and N911PG (Prince George's County) for the same reason.
There’s a diversity of allowed identifiers to support different hardware. The fixed identifiers are intended for retrofit modules, since they need to have as little impact on the drone’s center of gravity as possible. Newer hardware will likely incorporate it into the receiver’s functionality.
You've made no credible representation that identifiers will be time-variable in a non-predictable manner.
Which is required to defeat any level of time-based observational collection and correlation by third parties. As is commonly the place with present aviation tracking systems.
You also can't drive your car onto my property without permission. There are valid reasons for a drone to do exactly that, and I'd like to know who is looking at my house. It would be nice to Google a drone ID and realize that it's just the power company looking for branches that might take down a power line.
A fairly classical example of readily de-anonimisable data is location, at postal-code resolution.
With nothing more than two postal codes (ZIP codes in the US), representing home and work, it's possible to individually identify about 90% of the population. That information is available via, say, geocoded location using mobile phone or tracking cookie data.[1]
In the case of device or vehicle tracking such as with drones, it's highly likely that a given device would be used within a particular jurisdiction or activity region. If you can pinpoint specific locations and times within those (e.g., police activity around an address + drone activity, activity following specific infrastructure such as power lines or gas distribution, training locations, etc., etc.) you can probably come up with a strong idea of who operates or owns the equipment.
1. The home+work ZIP anecdote is the one I recall. I'm not finding that specifically though this paper mentions four spatio-temporal locations sufficing for 95% of the population: Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blondel, "Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility", Scientific Reports volume 3, Article number: 1376 (2013) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376
If your city or local electrical grid utility is using drones for power line inspections they'll be operated by a FAA part 107 licensed remote pilot, who is familiar with all the legal requirements. No need to be overly concerned about it.
I gathered that the point of the question is whether one would be able to distinguish between a power company drone and some random person flying in their back yard.
The city worker carries credentials and is usually driving a marked government vehicle. Neither one gets to be in my backyard without talking to me first.
No, but I have underground pipes managed by a metro district. I've had people come by who were supposed to be inspecting a meter and they do have reasonable requirements for giving notice that they're entering or doing work. I've also had people come by to mark utilities who didn't realize they weren't in the right place until my dog's presence in the back yard made them talk to me first, so this is an expectation I care about maintaining.
Some companies do use things like a mavic 2 pro for inspections, which consumers also purchase, there are no specific marking requirements (other than strobe if authorized for night operations) that a part 107 operated UAS would have that would be visible from the ground compared to the same hardware operated by a hobbyist.
If it's large and expensive the likelihood that it's some random person decreases, it's easy for a UAS with a thermal camera to be $8,000+.
I'd be vastly more concerned about the number of people dying from getting shot or in traffic accidents/drunk driving every year in the USA than people weaponizing hobbyist level drones.
> Threat modeling wise, these things could be bad & dangerous in one, two, three, four, more, different ways
I don't think anybody is going to break into my house because they surveilled the place with a drone. I do worry about feeling less secure on my property because someone keeps watching me in the backyard with a drone and I have no way of finding out who it is. There are plenty of fantastic things that drones can do, I just want greater accountability in knowing who is doing what. There's a reason trucks from Rando Contractor LLC carry a giant "VERIZON CONTRACTOR" sign on the side.
In my experience most modern QR decoders ignore the spec and gladly decode white-on-black codes as well. I guess people just started making them and then got mad when decoders couldn't handle them, so everyone just kind of went along with it.
2018 CES - I was really impressed by the Intel drone light show over the Bellagio fountain pool area. Thought it was some weird kind of Vegas wire-pulling effect at first.
There were no drone sounds, just strings of lights moving in increasingly strange and impressive ways.
Kept trying to figure out how they were able to pull such impressive moves until I saw some guy wearing a shirt that said something like "Intel drone team" and the penny finally dropped.
Intel did one in Walt Disney World for a short while in late 2016. I was completely amazed by it, and it was nowhere near as elaborate as the ones shown since.
Super cool. As someone who knows nothing about drones I would love to see a write up on how to do something like this. Where do you purchase that many drones cheaply, and how do you tell them to coordinate like that? How can you get the positioning so accurate?
I'm founder of https://and-lights.eu and it's not that simple of just purchasing. There are mainly three aspects.
First you have the hardware itself, your drones. Best is to create them yourself. As there aren't many of the shelf products and they are mostly coming from China where safety concerns aren't that high valued as US and EU. For example letting them do a return to home, is a nightmare. As they will just fly across your other drones and hit other while doing. We have also incorporated lots of redundancy, so that we have different ways to communicate with the drone. And also a manual override so that you can steer the drone personally into safety.
Next you have the software. That will steer the drones. You have two possibilities for that. Either pre-program all drones with a gps path and send a start signal. Or do it our way and realtime manage the drones (ofcourse with backup path if communcation fails). On the lower level of the software we have our red box that does collision avoidance. So even if you ask the drones to go through each other, that box will stop them before they hit eachother. On top of that we have the real route planning that should produce non-hitting paths. Real-time planning is harder to implement. But it makes sure that you can replace drones if pre-flight checks doesn't let the drone fly. And also makes sure you can adapt the show mid-air. For example to sync up with a live performance.
And then the 'boring' part. Getting a license. We have already created more than 800 pages of certification and safety procedures. Just to get a license. That is because in a lot of countries drones are certified as airplanes. So procedures are also like airplanes. Flying a normal drone is possible, but for drone shows you have to get 3 exceptions certified. Namely flying at night, flying in formation and automatic flying. And by creating your own drone, you also need to homologate and certify your drone.
Hope I gave you a little hint of what is needed ;)
But if one has to start where one to start. I assume it is more open and not just one firm.
And you need to hardware, software and license. No chinese unsafe components, but which is the safe to go to (> one). Software any open source. The license probably depend upon country but for us, Canada, uk and eu how hard it is?
Love Field is 6 miles from "downtown Dallas" and the article says they just hovered there. Maybe people living next to Love Field saw it but this is more of a marketing stunt than getting permission to fly 300 drones over downtown Dallas. Still, really cool and I click the little heart or upvote on any drone animation videos I see. The tech is super impressive and the article even talks about the kind of support equipment they need (trailers, rigs, etc). I am not downplaying the task, just surprised me with the headline.
I attended an aviation camp when I was 15 and I couldn't believe that the FAA allowed any pilot to fly VFR next to an airport. (Then I moved to Washington DC where you can't fly VFR anywhere.)
It would be even cooler to have a lot of drones with red, green and blue LEDs.
You could have them fly in a grid and coordinate the brightness of the RGB lights to play a video.
Only power and ground were supplied through the two wires connecting to each pixel. The pixels were PIC micro-controllers which contained the brightness levels for that pixel, which would play on loop independently. As I remember, the whole array would loose power intermittently to deal with clock drift.
Apparently, despite having a population of 140,000, Flagstaff, Arizona has decided to become a "dark sky city" and succeeded well enough that you can see the Milky Way from downtown. And there are people working to preserve areas that are currently dark and reclaim night sky darkness in other areas.
2024: You're having dinner after a long day, winding down. An unexpected red flash comes from the window, an explosion? No, the blast never came, and now there's more red flashes, as if coming from the sky, oh please let this not be a meteor! You get to the window, and cautiously look up...
Way to make my thoughts turn to darker things again! I was just enjoying the prank aspect of it, but you pulled me back into reality. While a small part of me feels like drone displays in the sky would be awesome, it would of course be awful in practice (after the novelty wears off).
If they don't figure out holograms, seems like this is how they'd pull off those megacorp holographic displays of ads you see in media like Blade Runner/Cyberpunk 2077.
It's not entirely clear to me that this was legal in the first place - surely there are light pollution laws in Dallas? And also 'disturbing the peace' laws, etc. I wonder if there are any chance of legal consequences for stunts like this.
It's all fun and games until 300 drones form a QR code that send unsuspecting people (the same people who would scan a QR code for fun) to a phishing link.
With the resurgence of QR codes, it's only a matter of time until someone starts printing phishing link QR code stickers and sticking them over innocent looking QR codes for restaurant menus and such.
Or people that are placing sticker QR codes everywhere are disabled when someone pulls off part of the alignment corners or other destructive ways to make valid QR codes unusable.
Some of the local city parking lots have switched to mobile app payment systems expecting people to scan QR codes. These have been disabled by making the QR code unreadable.
However, it would also be "easy enough" for people to make a payment system that looks like the legit system, and scam unsuspecting people attempting to pay for parking only to find their cars towed because it wasn't a legit payment.
There are certain things where QR codes are NOT the answer.
No, it's just a flaw in people using QR codes poorly. Too many people assume the best out of other people which is nice and all in lalaland kind of way, but in the real world, people actively look to get one over on people. QR codes are just way too susceptible to being interfered with by anyone with just enough knowledge and inclination to do so.
If the app payment system is the way to go (why not? not expensive onsite equipment), then it needs to be something other than a QR code that is easy to manipulate.
The problem is, for most people a QR code is just magic, they don't understand that it's just an encoded URL nor have any understanding of how that can be exploited.
It's not just an encoded URL. It could be any data. If you encode the infamous AV test string as a QR code, you can cause some mischief for things randomly scanning for codes. There was a post here not long ago about it. So they can be way more dangerous than just a Rick-roll or spam redirect
Why steal the money completely? I bet it would last way longer if you just skim a bit off the top but then use the rest to pay for their parking so they're not towed and don't have reasons to question anything.
I feel the same way as restraunts forcing menus to be QR codes. Now, instead of anonymously reading a menu, you now are forced to read a menu with who knows what kind of tracking enabled to order. Such a stupid stupid thing
A gas station near me has stickers on pumps with a QR code that supposedly links to a rewards app. I may be wrong, but I think it says something about paying through the app. Seems perfect for phishing.
It's all fun and games until 300 drones form a QR code that send unsuspecting people (the same people who would scan a QR code for fun) to a phishing link.
I imagine he is now invited to perform at live Rickroll events...like i remembar was done once at a previous Macy's Thanksgiving's Day parade. So, my hope is that he is able to make a nice living off of his music (assuming it is his music).
am I the only one who has literally never thought Rick rolling was even slightly funny? It’s so bizarre to me every time it comes up and everyone reacts like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.
Same with the image of whatever football guy with the T-shirt over his head or whatever.
it is a meme for "made you look." "Made you look" is seldom "funny," but it _is_ a thing. Folks have fun with ever increasingly obscure ways for "made you look" in this context.
That's absolutely it. Insofar as it's funny, it is so because of the lengths taken to achieve the "made you look". It's the same reason why putting an Austin Seven on the roof of the Senate House in Cambridge* is funny, which is to say it isn't funny in any way you can explain, but is clearly hilarious for the pure whimsy.
Indeed. The people that want to spam propaganda were limited to newspapers and TV. I shudder to think what they’ll be able to do with this newfound QR power.
Pretty soon any random person will be able to put a QR code on their car.
I don't think it's any more effective than paying someone $15/hour to drive a billboard truck around town. I live in Washington DC, and I saw two of them near church this week.
the new "fly over and drop paper propaganda fliers in enemy territory" - just launch a bunch of drones to share your message and have them disperse before the authorities arrive.
- Mandatory periodic ID transmit (via RF) by drones at specific altitudes or in specific areas
- Standardized visual marking schemes for drones by class, for example municipal, commercial, federal, etc.
Just wondering because for example my city announced that they'll be using drones for power pole checks, which will include a lot of backyard operation. I'd like to be able to identify them if needed.