Comment by burnte
12 days ago
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.
I mean, the carrot in the short term would be to raise public opposition to the bill. And possibly reduce support for the politicians pushing for the ban.
I've got a DJI drone and I've always been worried of some OTA software update essentially making the device useless. I've got a separate iPhone 8 that I don't connect to WiFi any more that I use only to control the drone. Though honestly my fear was more that the FAA would add dumber regulations and push them on DJI to enforce, which they seem to have already done quite a bit.
> 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.