Comment by Zealotux
12 days ago
Naive question: what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada? It's a physical product, so banning it like TikTok or big vehicles is impossible, or am I missing something?
12 days ago
Naive question: what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada? It's a physical product, so banning it like TikTok or big vehicles is impossible, or am I missing something?
Nothing, they could even buy it in US... the ban is on Chinese company using Federal Communications Commission frequencies and they have all the good ones or even all of them.
I can't imagine what it would take for them to enforce the ban, so people would highly likely continue using and buying DJI products.
>what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada?
Because if you choose to do this, and it's against the law, you open yourself up to sanctions and punishment?
Since the control apps tap into GPS so they know when you're in a restricted zone, the gov't could simply make them mark all of the US as a restricted zone and the drone will never fly. I have one, I'm not happy about this.
I'm going back to the first gen mavic here in memory, but...
Didn't they run Android, and you could root them to remove the no fly zones?
The old hack doesn't work anymore.
This is the correct answer. DJI will happily geofence any area in America to be able to keep selling their project here.
But will they happily geofence all of it if they are not allowed to keep selling their product?
This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were. GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.
The drone would look it up through a connected cell phone using a web service like this:
https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr_map_ims/html/
I think (hope) it would be a hard sell to send different data from faa.gov to DJI drone lookups versus other brands, but on the other hand this complete brand ban is apparently politically possible.
DJI's no-fly zone database is completely independent from the US government. DJI would have to be compelled to add the US as a no-fly zone, which, if their drones are banned already, seems like a rather difficult thing to compel as there's no carrot at the end of the stick.
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> This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were.
Nope, it happens in the control app on your device.
> GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.
No one said it could.
> what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada
Canada has significant regulations around purchasing and operation of drones [0]
[0] - https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2017/2017-07-15/html/reg2...
The US doesn't care if Americans buy them from Canada. The point of the law is to encourage US made drone manufacturing, because we'll need it during a war.
They don't care if a drone here or there slips thought, it's irrelevant to the point of the law.
Because Canada will follow every stupid decisions from its main partner.
Nothing.
But Canada is a long long distance for many Americans. America is pretty big and Canadian cities are sparse along the border.