Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
Maryland police are using drones from a Chinese company that were banned in four states::One Maryland officer told a local news station that they have searched for other manufacturers of drones and none live up to the quality of DJI.
California LEO and 107 pilot here. Just about every UAV program I know of has DJI products in their fleet. Our fleet is 100% DJI currently. The officer quoted is right, other companies can’t beat the price and quality of DJI drones.
Have you considered that they are cheap for a reason? There is no secret to building quality components, it just costs more. DJI is able to produce better quality for a lower price, and it ships with free proprietary firmware. Pay no attention to those encrypted packets scurrying off to who knows where.
That doesn’t appear to be a thing.
Their security seems to be a bit flaky though.
Funny how it being not legal is merely an inconvenience. “Yeah we know but we cant find better ones” is not an excuse, at least not for the rest of us plebs
Just because it was banned in 4 states doesn’t mean it’s banned in Maryland. Beyond that, bans were in states like Florida who are simply trying to rile up anti-China sentiment. Like banning Chinese from buying land in Florida.
Free market, free trade, open society. Opposite of what Republicans believe in these days.
This is my favourite season of The Wire
It’s like when USA police agencies only bought Harley Davidson motorcycles because it was politically correct to source equipment from domestic sources. Once they realized what over-priced and poor performing machines they are, they gave up on the idea and went to foreign sources.
Personally I think the taxes we pay to support government organizations should go toward domestically sourced equipment. They should be supporting the local economy, but it’s so one sided now they don’t really have a choice. However with some industries it can be a slippery slope. There was a recent USA ban on telecom equipment from Huawei related to this.
I don’t think this is an economic decision. Chinese companies have been caught putting malware and spyware into their hardware. Not all of them of course, but a couple. Lenovo did it, and they’re probably the most well known.
For consumer goods, that’s probably fine. No one cares if China spies on grandma. But for law enforcement, we really don’t want to be using spy bots.
RobotToaster@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Interesting that there’s more outrage at the UAVs being Chinese, than there is at the police using UAVs to spy on people.
soviettaters@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean…if you think that UAVs will help police spy on you then you’re just paranoid. They don’t have time for that, and even if they did they would just be more blatant since they have that right.