Cocodapuf

Well when they crash the company needs to replace the whole drone, so they are probably going to try to avoid that when possible.

That said, they should have to obey faa regs, but while the laws for private use are pretty clear, the commercial use regulations are layered and sort of in flux. Major operators are always pushing to have laws adjusted, and because leadership in the US is generally overly supportive of big business, those changes often go into place.

In other words, there ARE laws, but you know, it's the US, so they can probably change them.

Well, it may depend on your phone and os version, it wasn't always the case.

Ok, another idea.

Admittedly, this is not exactly a low tech solution, but...

One could use an fpv drone with a paint covered sponge duct taped to the front. Once the lens is covered in paint, you can either call the job done or go in closer without worrying about being seen by the camera.

You could use a can of spray paint instead, but then you need some kind of system to activate it, which complicates things.

Do you happen to know how sensitive these sensors tend to be? Because I honestly don't, but it's possible it may not take much...

That's fair. Yeah some Halloween costumes are all well and good, but for the rest of the year, it would be great if there's a way to destroy these cameras without getting caught on camera yourself.

The thought behind the laser idea was just that it might not draw a lot of attention.

If anyone has better ideas, please do share them. My goal is to come up with less risky ways of dismantling them than getting right up there with a ladder. The .22 might be the simplest solution so far.

Are there good ways to kill a flock camera from a distance?

Could aiming a laser at the lense damage the ccd in the camera?

Agreed, that's a great trick, except sometimes emitting less isn't really an option if you need the afterburner to keep running. And in fact, being able to radiate that heat away quickly can be important to avoid parts melting. You can dump heat into the exhaust, but that isn't always helpful. Leaving the only real alternative to just make something else emit more (a flare).

As another user said below, the biggest problem is making sure you're using a good prng. There are really simple algorithms for generating "ok" random numbers, that's the kind of thing you might get when you use a rand() function in a programming language. Those rand functions are plenty good enough for deciding dice rolls in a video game, but they aren't robust enough for cryptography.

Outside of that, you're correct that the next problem is the seed, and how much total entropy is in that seed. In this context, entropy means the total search space for the seed ("hello" would be a low entropy seed, "RPSTl6HF7mPo3g" would be a much higher entropy seed).

Like you suggested, sometimes your seed is a long timestamp combined with other factors, that makes for a great high entropy seed! But sometimes, like with a Bitcoin key, you want your seed to be recreatable, should you lose it. That's when you tend to use a password as a seed. So the way that actually works, is that your key is a long string of binary bits, say 256 bits, and that string of bits is generated using your password as a starting seed. This process is the hashing algorithm. And this is where there tends to be a problem. Your hashing algorithm may produce 256 bit keys (high entropy), but whether it's actually secure will depend on whether your seed phrase (password) is high entropy. You can create a key based on anything, it could be (should be) a phrase with more entropy than the key itself, for instance "my special long password with 1 secret word Brathrok" that's a very long seed and it includes a word that won't be in a dictionary, that'll be hard to brute force, but easy to remember. Or... it could be a single word with low entropy, like "fool", which is a good way to lose your bitcoin, so please don't do that.

I guess it depends on the context, initially I was making comparisons to heat seeking missiles. In that context, one might use the radar absorbent materials to defeat radar guided missiles, but that trick just doesn't work with heat, as you can't "permanently" absorb heat the way you can other kinds of energy. If your vehicle is also generating heat, hiding that is quite difficult.

So with that last part, I get that in theory, but practically, you can only really absorb IR temporarily, right? Because it all gets released again as heat eventually. Like, say you have a mostly inert object, that isn't creating any meaningful amount of heat. If you hit that object with 10 joules of thermal IR, over time, wouldn't nearly all of that energy be either reflected or emitted off it as IR radiation?

Yeah, this has actually been a known thing for a while. The government has been sneakily getting their hand into NIST standards and trying to ensure they have back doors in the commonly used "best practices".

So as a result for instance, encryption based on pseudo random numbers generated with hashing algorithms are actually safer that these theoretically "actually random" numbers generated in dedicated security modules in hardware.

Holy shit, I see Lemmy make jokes about guillotines all the time, but it turns out, that may actually be the answer!