How’d You Like One of These Bad Boys Chasing You With 8oz of C4 on Board? |
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| By: wigwam Friday April 13, 2012 12:27 am | |
If you like/fear drones, you’ll love/dread this.
DARPA has been fantasizing mechanical humming birds for over two decades, and now Aerovironment is selling them. But, they’re expensive and inefficient. The quadrotor, by contrast, is simply a very dangerous toy that can be stamped out by the hundreds of thousands and can do everything a drone can do, i.e., carry video cameras and explosives, but in miniature, e.g., flying through windows. Think of the quadrotor as a flying landmine. ’nuff said.
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6 Comments
So we have come to this now.
… And you can’t repeal technology.
But, if you want to build your own quadcopter, you can buy a kit for less than $100.
One is disturbing enough, but coupled with artificial hive intelligence this is worse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YQIMGV5vtd4#!
Wow! Thanks.
The technology is/will be ubiquitous and uncontainable. Imagine white hat Anonymous type geeks with fleets of these cheap devices able to penetrate “secure” environments to surveill with impunity. Attach remote sensors with either a live telemetry link or onboard data storage and instructions to return to a predetermined set of spatial coordinates at a predetermined time for downloading the collected data. We may have the tools here to some significant degree counter the asymmetry of security state capabilities. You could use these to plant and retrieve eavesdropping devices and collect real time intelligence on all sorts of interesting targets. Or consider you are running a secret service protection detail and have to game countermeasures for all the conceivable possible uses they could be put to. This is a low cost, ubiquitous tech tool that could actually be very empowering in the right hands. The bad guys will have these; the good guys should as well.
Government secrecy gets much harder to maintain when secure conversations can only be conducted in highly secured safe rooms. And even that “safe” room can be compromised by just leaving a door or a ventilation duct open a few seconds too long. Imagine cops or politicians thinking no one was listening having their incriminating conversations livestreamed on the internet! Once these are scaled down to insect size and consumerized, and that cannot be too far off, they will be insertable almost anytime and anywhere and extremely difficult to detect.
Any reporter worth their salt must be giddy at the thought of getting their hands on this capability. Where’s the Koch brothers’ supervillain plotting HQ? Or the room where Bloomberg instructs the NYPD heads to beat up and falsely arrest lawful protesters? I want to hear what they say when they think nobody is listening.
Kurt, I like the way you think. ;-)
Imagine what a lip reader could do with detailed close-up video.