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US House votes to bar new DJI drones

45 points by jonbaer 2y ago

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Good. Cameras all over the country potentially feeding images back to the CCP sounds like a huge vulnerability. I feel they should restrict drones already sold as well.
- lazide 2y ago
  You do realize that is like 90% of every security camera that is bought on Amazon right now, right? DJI drones aren’t even a drop in that bucket.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    Cheap security camera data is very static and often only locally and temporarily relevant. Drones are often used to survey infrastructure; they provide information much more valuable and varied than a security camera. Until recently, DJI drones stored some keyframes and flight records in the cloud by default. https://viewpoints.dji.com/blog/dji-to-disable-flight-record-sync-in-the-us https://viewpoints.dji.com/blog/dji-to-disable-flight-record...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - nickphx 2y ago
      and just how are these consumer drones streaming the video to the CCP?
      - partitioned 2y ago
        Dont ask these questions
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - asah 2y ago
    -1: stationary security cameras are trivial to disable and can't do anything else(). Drones can disrupt supply chains and snarl traffic, among many bad things. () true, all IP-connected devices can be launching-points for other attacks.
    - bdcravens 2y ago
      Are DJI drones autonomous?
  - mopsi 2y ago
    Major Chinese security camera brands like Hikvision and Dahua have also been banned from critical infrastructure. They can be at least isolated at network level; more complex devices like drones usually require cloud connection to function.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      DJI drones[0] don't require any network connectivity at all to function, much less "cloud" they do have a "video platform" where you can upload videos to from their drones, but i've never used it and doubt i even have an account on it. [0] none of the ones i've used or seen, anyhow
      - mopsi 2y ago
        Functionality is crippled when using without a smartphone, and when you use it with a smartphone app, it acts as a proxy that provides network access. Collecting data on the smartphone and uploading it during firmware update or other network actions is trivial.
        genewitch 2y ago
        the phone i use with my DJI does not have network access so i am not sure what you're talking about. It does have an OLED screen so i can actually see it outside, but no sim card and where i fly it there's no wifi either.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  The iPhones manufactured in China don't have this potential? Ring cameras are also manufactured in China.
CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
> Congress has repeatedly voted to impose new restrictions on Chinese technology and in April voted to require China's ByteDance to divest to sell its TikTok U.S. assets by Jan. 19. Why are these restrictions happening in the first place? Went looking for reasons beyond "China may/may not be using DJI for spying" but beyond conspiracy theories, is there any factual arguments behind the ban?
- lazide 2y ago
  China bad, that’s all.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    China has been fighting a cyber war against the United States for quite some time. It is appropriate to respond to this.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Then ban their import and use. Oh wait, that’s not going to happen? Weird.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  Have you read any of the reporting about these companies? Tiktok and DJI both have significant ties with the CCP, and behave similarly. https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html It's definitely thin with actual data, but it's also likely we don't have the data that the Senate/House do. I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries.
  - CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
    > Have you read any of the reporting about this? https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html I've read the reporting about TikTok, yes. Not sure if you linked the wrong article here, it doesn't mention DJI at all it seems. > I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries. GDPR doesn't require all EU data to be stored in EU, it requires companies that do store EU data to follow specific guidelines and regulations regarding transit and storage. Before wanting something to be implemented in your country, you'd do yourself a service to read a bit more about it first :)
buggy6257 2y ago
I'm a little confused on what this means: > The bill [...] would prohibit the company's products from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure. It would not prevent existing DJI drones from operating in the United States. How could existing drones continue operating while prohibited from comms infra? Does anyone have a link to the actual bill or some other source that goes into more detail? I have multiple DJI drones and would like to know how this affects me since I was planning to upgrade soon...
- lazide 2y ago
  DJI drones don’t use any comms infrastructure, do they?
  - buggy6257 2y ago
    That was my assumption too but why specifically call this out? I'm just confused by this statement and want to figure out what's actually in the bill...
    - lazide 2y ago
      I’d assume it’s so they can look they they’re doing something while actually doing nothing at all.
    - yrxuthst 2y ago
      Some of their higher end competition like the ACSL SOTEN [1] have LTE connectivity for remote control, this might just be to limit competition at the high end of the market. 1. https://product.acsl.co.jp/en/product/post-369/ https://product.acsl.co.jp/en/product/post-369/
      - CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
        > ACSL SOTEN [1] have LTE connectivity for remote control LTE connectivity that would use US infrastructure (LTE towers) for its connection. Unless the drones start shipping with satellite radio, I'm not sure what the scare is about, seems to be mostly about that Chinese products just shouldn't be available to the average American.
sorenjan 2y ago
What other options are there for consumers? DJI is market leading because they make the best drones as far as I can tell.
- buggy6257 2y ago
  In a previous thread about this, the conclusion people came to is that there simply isn't any equivalent competitors. They are either comically expensive, of have laughably low feature sets comparatively.
  - DataDive 2y ago
    Another datapoint to whether one can compete or not SkyDio, a US startup, entered the market producing drones with object avoidance so advanced that it was far beyond what DJI offered. Their consumer pricing was quite competitive ~ 1000, the drone was by far the best in the market. Nothing was even remotely as good as a Skydio at high-speed object avoidance! It seems like the US government became interested and probably funded them in some capacity, and with that, they exited the consumer domain. They only sell drones to governmental agencies now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydio > In March 2021, the company became a unicorn, becoming the first US company that both manufactures and sells its own drones to exceed $1 billion in value Saying that that no one can compete with DJI is simply not true. You can't compete with these companies because each are probably heavily subsidized. Drone technology, like chip technology is a national security issue.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >You can't compete with these companies because each are probably heavily subsidized. No. It's because they have much lower skilled labor costs. See how much it costs to hire an experienced mechanical, hardware, firmware and software engineer in the US vs in Shenzhen. You can't make a competitively priced consumer appliance or electronics product in the west anymore that's competitive to those coming from Asia and still expect to make western profit margins. Your profit margins will either be too slim to stay in business or to afford to attract any talent, or you can choose good profit margins but then your product will not be competitive on the "free market". Why do you think there are no western companies making phones, TVs or computers any more since 20+ years? Apple is the only exception now, but let's not forget that before them creating the iTunes and AppStore markets that made them wealthy today, they were months away from bankruptcy when they were selling just computers made to compete with cheaper PCs.
partitioned 2y ago
In the federal government we already deal with this xenophobic bullshit and your taxes get to pay 4x more for drones that literally break every 10 flights and get sent off for repairs that cost more than 2 brand-new DJI drones. Fuck congress
- deadlydose 2y ago
  Xenophobia? No, I read the bill. It singles out one Chinese company with ties to the CCP. When you loosely throw around words like xenophobia it dilutes the meaning of that word and makes it more difficult to call out legitimate xenophobia later. If you want a serious discussion about serious problems then you need to use precise language.
djohnston 2y ago
It makes sense over a 5-10 year time horizon. This will necessitate the formation of domestic DJI competitors, which will eventually be critical wartime infra.
- mcphage 2y ago
  I think it’s interesting that elsewhere we ban China from using our chips in order to prevent their access to our technology, but here we’re banning their technology in order to spur our own local industry. Same action, opposite desired impact. Both seem reasonable to me, but it seems like there an inconsistency in my brain somewhere.
  - djohnston 2y ago
    Hedging our bets XD
cabirum 2y ago
Free market lol
- adventured 2y ago
  Why would any nation allow China 'free' access to their market, when China doesn't allow free access to its domestic market? China is by far the most restrictive large economy in terms of foreign access, free trading with that as a context is economic suicide. It's a one-sided plunder given enough time.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    if china can do it cheaper or better (as in, <32nm chips, for example), then is the market really free? or is it only "free" for companies in the US with large amounts of money to spend on lobbying? capitalism for me and not for thee (or vice versa)
IshKebab 2y ago
Does DJI have any serious competition?
geenkeuse 2y ago
A self fulfilling prophecy. Make me the Boogeyman. Act surprised when I become what you fear. The biggest mistake that the US made, was to believe that their brains are somehow special. "Sir, the American workers refuse to work for less money" "Fire them and give the work to the Chinese. They are good at copying and following instructions, and cheap as hell. We are obviously smarter, so they can mass produce our designs, but will never be able to make any of it by themselves" A few moments later... "Sir the Chinese are starting to eclipse us in every major area" "Ban them. Ban their products. Tell our friends to ban them too." Sir, it is not working. They keep growing stronger and more independent." "Ready the nukes"

45 points by jonbaer 2y ago

Good. Cameras all over the country potentially feeding images back to the CCP sounds like a huge vulnerability. I feel they should restrict drones already sold as well.

lazide 2y ago
You do realize that is like 90% of every security camera that is bought on Amazon right now, right? DJI drones aren’t even a drop in that bucket.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  Cheap security camera data is very static and often only locally and temporarily relevant. Drones are often used to survey infrastructure; they provide information much more valuable and varied than a security camera. Until recently, DJI drones stored some keyframes and flight records in the cloud by default. https://viewpoints.dji.com/blog/dji-to-disable-flight-record-sync-in-the-us https://viewpoints.dji.com/blog/dji-to-disable-flight-record...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickphx 2y ago
    and just how are these consumer drones streaming the video to the CCP?
    - partitioned 2y ago
      Dont ask these questions
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- asah 2y ago
  -1: stationary security cameras are trivial to disable and can't do anything else(). Drones can disrupt supply chains and snarl traffic, among many bad things. () true, all IP-connected devices can be launching-points for other attacks.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    Are DJI drones autonomous?
- mopsi 2y ago
  Major Chinese security camera brands like Hikvision and Dahua have also been banned from critical infrastructure. They can be at least isolated at network level; more complex devices like drones usually require cloud connection to function.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    DJI drones[0] don't require any network connectivity at all to function, much less "cloud" they do have a "video platform" where you can upload videos to from their drones, but i've never used it and doubt i even have an account on it. [0] none of the ones i've used or seen, anyhow
    - mopsi 2y ago
      Functionality is crippled when using without a smartphone, and when you use it with a smartphone app, it acts as a proxy that provides network access. Collecting data on the smartphone and uploading it during firmware update or other network actions is trivial.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        the phone i use with my DJI does not have network access so i am not sure what you're talking about. It does have an OLED screen so i can actually see it outside, but no sim card and where i fly it there's no wifi either.
bdcravens 2y ago
The iPhones manufactured in China don't have this potential? Ring cameras are also manufactured in China.

CaptainOfCoit 2y ago

> Congress has repeatedly voted to impose new restrictions on Chinese technology and in April voted to require China's ByteDance to divest to sell its TikTok U.S. assets by Jan. 19. Why are these restrictions happening in the first place? Went looking for reasons beyond "China may/may not be using DJI for spying" but beyond conspiracy theories, is there any factual arguments behind the ban?

lazide 2y ago
China bad, that’s all.
- skhunted 2y ago
  China has been fighting a cyber war against the United States for quite some time. It is appropriate to respond to this.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Then ban their import and use. Oh wait, that’s not going to happen? Weird.
Schiendelman 2y ago
Have you read any of the reporting about these companies? Tiktok and DJI both have significant ties with the CCP, and behave similarly. https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html It's definitely thin with actual data, but it's also likely we don't have the data that the Senate/House do. I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries.
- CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
  > Have you read any of the reporting about this? https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html I've read the reporting about TikTok, yes. Not sure if you linked the wrong article here, it doesn't mention DJI at all it seems. > I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries. GDPR doesn't require all EU data to be stored in EU, it requires companies that do store EU data to follow specific guidelines and regulations regarding transit and storage. Before wanting something to be implemented in your country, you'd do yourself a service to read a bit more about it first :)

buggy6257 2y ago

I'm a little confused on what this means: > The bill [...] would prohibit the company's products from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure. It would not prevent existing DJI drones from operating in the United States. How could existing drones continue operating while prohibited from comms infra? Does anyone have a link to the actual bill or some other source that goes into more detail? I have multiple DJI drones and would like to know how this affects me since I was planning to upgrade soon...

lazide 2y ago
DJI drones don’t use any comms infrastructure, do they?
- buggy6257 2y ago
  That was my assumption too but why specifically call this out? I'm just confused by this statement and want to figure out what's actually in the bill...
  - lazide 2y ago
    I’d assume it’s so they can look they they’re doing something while actually doing nothing at all.
  - yrxuthst 2y ago
    Some of their higher end competition like the ACSL SOTEN [1] have LTE connectivity for remote control, this might just be to limit competition at the high end of the market. 1. https://product.acsl.co.jp/en/product/post-369/ https://product.acsl.co.jp/en/product/post-369/
    - CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
      > ACSL SOTEN [1] have LTE connectivity for remote control LTE connectivity that would use US infrastructure (LTE towers) for its connection. Unless the drones start shipping with satellite radio, I'm not sure what the scare is about, seems to be mostly about that Chinese products just shouldn't be available to the average American.

sorenjan 2y ago

What other options are there for consumers? DJI is market leading because they make the best drones as far as I can tell.

buggy6257 2y ago
In a previous thread about this, the conclusion people came to is that there simply isn't any equivalent competitors. They are either comically expensive, of have laughably low feature sets comparatively.
- DataDive 2y ago
  Another datapoint to whether one can compete or not SkyDio, a US startup, entered the market producing drones with object avoidance so advanced that it was far beyond what DJI offered. Their consumer pricing was quite competitive ~ 1000, the drone was by far the best in the market. Nothing was even remotely as good as a Skydio at high-speed object avoidance! It seems like the US government became interested and probably funded them in some capacity, and with that, they exited the consumer domain. They only sell drones to governmental agencies now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydio > In March 2021, the company became a unicorn, becoming the first US company that both manufactures and sells its own drones to exceed $1 billion in value Saying that that no one can compete with DJI is simply not true. You can't compete with these companies because each are probably heavily subsidized. Drone technology, like chip technology is a national security issue.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >You can't compete with these companies because each are probably heavily subsidized. No. It's because they have much lower skilled labor costs. See how much it costs to hire an experienced mechanical, hardware, firmware and software engineer in the US vs in Shenzhen. You can't make a competitively priced consumer appliance or electronics product in the west anymore that's competitive to those coming from Asia and still expect to make western profit margins. Your profit margins will either be too slim to stay in business or to afford to attract any talent, or you can choose good profit margins but then your product will not be competitive on the "free market". Why do you think there are no western companies making phones, TVs or computers any more since 20+ years? Apple is the only exception now, but let's not forget that before them creating the iTunes and AppStore markets that made them wealthy today, they were months away from bankruptcy when they were selling just computers made to compete with cheaper PCs.

partitioned 2y ago

In the federal government we already deal with this xenophobic bullshit and your taxes get to pay 4x more for drones that literally break every 10 flights and get sent off for repairs that cost more than 2 brand-new DJI drones. Fuck congress

deadlydose 2y ago
Xenophobia? No, I read the bill. It singles out one Chinese company with ties to the CCP. When you loosely throw around words like xenophobia it dilutes the meaning of that word and makes it more difficult to call out legitimate xenophobia later. If you want a serious discussion about serious problems then you need to use precise language.

djohnston 2y ago

It makes sense over a 5-10 year time horizon. This will necessitate the formation of domestic DJI competitors, which will eventually be critical wartime infra.

mcphage 2y ago
I think it’s interesting that elsewhere we ban China from using our chips in order to prevent their access to our technology, but here we’re banning their technology in order to spur our own local industry. Same action, opposite desired impact. Both seem reasonable to me, but it seems like there an inconsistency in my brain somewhere.
- djohnston 2y ago
  Hedging our bets XD

cabirum 2y ago

Free market lol

adventured 2y ago
Why would any nation allow China 'free' access to their market, when China doesn't allow free access to its domestic market? China is by far the most restrictive large economy in terms of foreign access, free trading with that as a context is economic suicide. It's a one-sided plunder given enough time.
- genewitch 2y ago
  if china can do it cheaper or better (as in, <32nm chips, for example), then is the market really free? or is it only "free" for companies in the US with large amounts of money to spend on lobbying? capitalism for me and not for thee (or vice versa)

IshKebab 2y ago

Does DJI have any serious competition?

geenkeuse 2y ago

A self fulfilling prophecy. Make me the Boogeyman. Act surprised when I become what you fear. The biggest mistake that the US made, was to believe that their brains are somehow special. "Sir, the American workers refuse to work for less money" "Fire them and give the work to the Chinese. They are good at copying and following instructions, and cheap as hell. We are obviously smarter, so they can mass produce our designs, but will never be able to make any of it by themselves" A few moments later... "Sir the Chinese are starting to eclipse us in every major area" "Ban them. Ban their products. Tell our friends to ban them too." Sir, it is not working. They keep growing stronger and more independent." "Ready the nukes"