I was once testing a quadrotor that we built for IED detection with a group of marines, and we discovered that the metal detectors that the IED teams were carrying were able to completely fry our electronics from a couple of feet away. I'm guessing the power required to do this from 100s of feet away is significant, and the FCC doesn't take kindly to these sort of activities, but it doesn't seem crazy if you only need a short but intense burst.
I could imagine some interference though.
And the FCC would be having a word with you they don't allow civilians to run things that hot you'd be looking at 20-24 dbi
Maggie Jauregui did a talk at defcon about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT9LwyjpfzI
Wired did a write up about that talk: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/this-hackers-radio-can-fry-your...
http://www.tested.com/tech/robots/461486-maker-faire-2014-mu...
Drones seem to be one of the most polarising new technologies. On the one hand, they have the potential for numerous beneficial applications. Just a few that I've seen seriously proposed or actually implemented are:
- searching large areas or dangerous locations for survivors after a natural disaster
- improving farming efficiency
- (my personal favourite so far) transporting an AED to a patient having a heart attack much quicker than any ground-based emergency vehicle can get there
- delivering more everyday items like books or groceries in the on-line shopping era.
Obviously there are practical concerns around safety and efficiency, but hopefully in time we'll develop good ways to address those.
On the other hand, there are inevitably people lining up who want to use the same technologies to build more powerful weapons or more effective surveillance systems. All of the usual concerns about the ethics of those applications arise. And then all of the usual concerns about corrupting the otherwise beneficial applications in order to turn drones into threats or surveillance tools even though those devices were never created with such intentions will arise as well.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a kind of drone/anti-drone arms race for a while in those cases, particularly if non-military organisations like police forces and local councils start routinely and ubiquitously deploying these tools in civilian environments. I suspect that if they do then it will work against them in the long run, in the same way that mass surveillance on-line has prompted technological counter-measures that probably do make it harder for genuine security service investigations to monitor legitimate surveillance targets in some cases.
In some ways, I think the bigger danger will be the corruption/mission creep problem. For example, large-scale drone "postal systems" might develop, and maybe they'll offer much more efficiency and/or be more environmentally friendly than today's driver-and-van networks. On the other hand, if they also happen to fly around people's properties with high resolution cameras recording all the time, they make concerns about Google's Street View or local authority CCTV camera networks look like child's play. The answer here is probably better transparency and regulation, but we aren't very good at either of those right now, so again I could see the potential for a lot of people being upset and a few (but probably enough) of them being willing to take direct action in response, legal or otherwise.
IMHO it will be very unfortunate if that's the way our culture goes, but in this of all issues I could see the technology becoming shunned because of fear (legitimate or otherwise) of abuse.
Only then can we have the drone wars we deserve.
we should stop upvoting such clickbaits
