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Part of me wonders if this is a long term problem with solving - causing so much annoyance with so little effort - or if this is just a fad. Time will tell. One

Part of me wonders if this is a long term problem with solving - causing so much annoyance with so little effort - or if this is just a fad. Time will tell. One thing is for sure, it's very easy to cause a lot of harm. Much of our society relies on assuming people are good. Sabotaging infrastructure is as easy as loosening or cutting bolts on a bridge.

rdtsc 8y ago
> Sabotaging infrastructure is as easy as loosening or cutting bolts on a bridge. The issue there is that someone has to walk up a bridge with tools and start loosening bolts. Drones are somewhat remote, in that they could hide in the bushes some distance away. And most of all, I can see drone operators thinking "it's fun" as they are not damaging or deliberately flying into planes. It's wrong of course, but in their minds they don't see it equivalent to cutting bolts on a bridge.
- beezischillin 8y ago
  Thankfully a lot of more modern drones have no-fly maps implemented so you're forced to download it and you can't mess around there. But for years it's been pilot etiquette not to do dumb things to mess it up for everyone else, I guess that's slowly ending, unfortunately. I hope most countries will still try and be sensible about their drone laws. Mine isn't: you're required to register your drone and tell them a month ahead (!!!) where you're going to fly, even if it's in the dead middle of nowhere, which is why people ignore all of it. The other thing is that drones are exceedingly hard to regulate because the barrier of entry to just building your own is becoming lower and lower. Anyhow, enough of my rambling. It's really sad to see things take such a negative turn for everyone involved (both drone pilots and regular people).
atombender 8y ago
There's also the related observation, demonstrated in Eric Frank Russell's Wasp [1], that merely leaving behind the signs of tampering is enough to cause fear and panic. In the novel, which is written as a deliciously dark satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a single agent causes havoc in a foreign country by subtly creating evidence of a mass sabotage by an underground guerilla force: Spreading rumours, distributing provocative stickers and posters, leaking assasination target lists, strategically leaving surveillance equipment to be discovered by the authorities, and so on. He doesn't actually perform any acts of sabotage. If Wasp had been written in 2019, flying drones at airports would have fit right into the narrative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel)

rdtsc 8y ago

> Sabotaging infrastructure is as easy as loosening or cutting bolts on a bridge. The issue there is that someone has to walk up a bridge with tools and start loosening bolts. Drones are somewhat remote, in that they could hide in the bushes some distance away. And most of all, I can see drone operators thinking "it's fun" as they are not damaging or deliberately flying into planes. It's wrong of course, but in their minds they don't see it equivalent to cutting bolts on a bridge.

beezischillin 8y ago
Thankfully a lot of more modern drones have no-fly maps implemented so you're forced to download it and you can't mess around there. But for years it's been pilot etiquette not to do dumb things to mess it up for everyone else, I guess that's slowly ending, unfortunately. I hope most countries will still try and be sensible about their drone laws. Mine isn't: you're required to register your drone and tell them a month ahead (!!!) where you're going to fly, even if it's in the dead middle of nowhere, which is why people ignore all of it. The other thing is that drones are exceedingly hard to regulate because the barrier of entry to just building your own is becoming lower and lower. Anyhow, enough of my rambling. It's really sad to see things take such a negative turn for everyone involved (both drone pilots and regular people).

atombender 8y ago

There's also the related observation, demonstrated in Eric Frank Russell's Wasp [1], that merely leaving behind the signs of tampering is enough to cause fear and panic. In the novel, which is written as a deliciously dark satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a single agent causes havoc in a foreign country by subtly creating evidence of a mass sabotage by an underground guerilla force: Spreading rumours, distributing provocative stickers and posters, leaking assasination target lists, strategically leaving surveillance equipment to be discovered by the authorities, and so on. He doesn't actually perform any acts of sabotage. If Wasp had been written in 2019, flying drones at airports would have fit right into the narrative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel)