I'm adjacent to the industry. This is dumb but I understand the reasoning. We're getting left behind in the electronics world. Nobody is creating hardware startups because every few months there's a viral blog post with a "hardware is hard" title on HN and none of the VC assholes want to fund anything but web based surveillance capitalism ad tech because it's a surefire way to make money. Even if you do get funded and you're US based you're absolutely doing all your manufacturing in China if you're remotely consumer facing (b2big-b has different rules). That means Chinese companies get all the benefits of all the labor from your highly trained engineers when they get the design files. If you try to build anything at volume in the US you have strikingly few options for boards and parts. Everything is whole number multiples of fucking PCBway and half the time it's lower quality unless you're paying aero-defense prices which is the only business anyone wants.
But why do we need to build stuff here? If it's cheaper elsewhere, let them build it and we'll do the higher paying work.
I guess there are national security concerns, but that sounds like we just need to make more friends and fewer enemies, as well as have redundancy in our supply chain (i.e. invest in other inexpensive labor markets, like LATAM, Africa, and India). The issue isn't that the US isn't making it, it's that China is making most of it. Diversify and the problem mostly goes away.
Because it leaves the industry vulnerable in case China decides to start withholding sales to the US. Especially if they invade Taiwan and trigger a chain reaction of treaties that launches into a huge US vs China slugging match. One which China would likely lose painfully to, but would inflict crippling damage to our military. Anything coming out of China will be stopped for as long as the war goes on, and then even longer depending on how much of what I'm China actually got destroyed.
Yeah, it's real nice and all to say you want to combat chinese business interests threatening to swallow american ones whole, but then I can't buy a house, and my rent is going up because these same business interests are buying houses in every major city by the thousands.
Then, they either renovate them, or let them sit vacant. The renovated ones get rented out at exorbant rates. And since they own such a significant number of these homes, the rents EVERYWHERE rise dramatically. And then you see all these vacant houses. Never rented. Never sold. They become drug havens for the cities homeless. But it doesn't lower property values, because it's all artificially high.
So now you're paying higher city taxes, and living near a house that has regular gunshots out onto the streets. The cops won't address it, because they know how dangerous those houses are. But you still have to rent an apartment near one.
But it's ok guys. The government is banning tiktok, and drones.
Those are all legitimate concerns, but I'm not sure the effort required to fix real estate prices, crime, and income equality is comparable to the amount of effort required to ban a social media site and some drones from a country that might not have our best interests in mind.
I'm trying to be optimistic about the ban, I'd love to see the drone industry take off in the us and I'd love to see what we could accomplish. It's not a huge industry and I honestly can't name a single US drone manufacturer, but I really hope that won't be the case in a year or two.
I'm viewing it more as "We have problem, and other related problem. We're only going to do surface level solutions to be able to say at least we tried when elections come up".
The general idea is that it's a potential cybersecurity concern, it's along the same lines as the Huawei ban from a few years back. Not entirely without merit, there have been vulnerabilities found in DJI hardware/software that could be used maliciously and some of them were fairly serious. I don't think anyone has ever found any proof those vulnerabilities were intentional, but I also think that would be super difficult to prove one way or the other.
Require licensing, registration, live gps tracking, and geofencing with a proprietary app because Freedumb people ruled that's what the free market needs.
They then rule, nah. Actually just ban em all.
And now even if you bought them, buy them elsewhere, or just try to use them on a US device you won't be able to. Selling them is illegal both from a company and on third party resale if it passes. Even police departments that are using them as spies and have the DJI alerting system installed all over town to track and log everybody in the sky, will need to get rid of it. But I doubt they will, of course it will be exempted for the pigs in blue.
If you can't beat em, or even match their capabilities, ban em or implement 100%+ tarrifs. New American motto of the "free" market.
Drone maker DJI is based in China and controls over 70% of the world's drone market share, a combination that threatens U.S. lawmakers. As we first reported in April, 6% of DJI stock lies in the hands of Chinese state-owned businesses, which has led to fears of Chinese government backdoors, national security risks, and other fears of Chinese surveillance using the company's drones.
Elise Stefanik, the Republican representative from New York who sponsors the anti-DJI legislation, said of the drones, "DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America." Of course, this unacceptable risk h
On one hand, the CCP fucking sucks. On the other hand, the US alternatives to some of these banned / tariffed Chinese products also really suck - especially when it comes to bang for your buck. ugh.
Problem is that, especially with the automakers, is that a lack of competition becomes an excuse to not invest in innovation. For example, General Motors is throwing billions into stock buy-backs, when they probably should be throwing that into EVs.
That only works if you have competition. We don’t really have free markets. The consolidation is so extreme that auto makers for example really don’t care if consumers want a high value budget EV. Why should they? They can make you collectively buy something else when you need a car to get to work.
Unfortunately anything open will cost extra, just because of the nature of it. Not to mention the colossal scale of how much product DJI ship, to cut costs somewhere
The reduction of monitoring is worth it. DJI calls home with your location and even provides tools for police to view the location of drones and drone operators in real time.
This could be a severe national security problem if the drones sent back the video to DJI as well, then a foreign power would get geotagged high detail video of areas of the part of SF you flew over, VERY useful to a foreign intelligence service.
And I am not just talking about your drone and your flight, all other people who own and fly drones in the area would also supply data to sutch a system.
I am not saying that this is what they are doing, but please remember that the Brittish government asked the public to send in their holliday photos of the coast of France to help them plan the D-Day invasions. This kind of information is useful.
If they wanted to, they could just send a few Chinese "tourists" over with their DJI (or American) drones and record specific footage instead of metadata about general footage. Or use their satellites. It's not the 1940s any more.
When I fly my drone it's not connected to WiFi, and doesn't even need to be connected to my phone. What network are they sending gigabytes and gigabytes of video data over when I'm recording people fishing on a lake in the middle of nowhere?
When I fly my drone it’s not connected to WiFi, and doesn’t even need to be connected to my phone.
And do you think you, and you alone are the sole target of chinese spy programs?
Do you think you speak for everyones behavior when they fly their drones?
You are whats known as the cost of business. You don't follow their plan unknowingly, but enough others do that it doesn't matter if your data is lost.
If gigabytes of video data is being streamed by every single DJI drone it should be easy enough to find out. Use the DJI Android app to control a drone and check the app's data usage before and after.
Also, China has been caught doing supply chain attacks by inserting chips onto circuit boards to make them easier to compromise. They could slip in a chip that enables a wavelength their satellites can access, for example.
At least that was consentual. The UK government basically said "Hey guys, the nazis are bad. So help us plan an attack by sending us your family vacation photos of some beaches on Frances beaches.
And everyone was like "yeah, alright. That sounds good"
China is basically like "lets set up spying EVERYWHERE! Even in countries we don't have claim to."
You missed the point. Whether it's consensual isn't important, what's important is that a foreign power has access to a lot of detailed information about an adversary. It's hard to quantify the value of a lot of "benign" data points when aggregated.
