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Iraq
ISIS fighter killed by drone bomb he was operating after it ran low on battery and flew back
2019-08-27
[TheSun] The idiotic killer was targeting allied forces after the Battle for Mosul in northern Iraq.

He had customised his weapon to carry plastic explosive and planned to detonate it by troops based in the city.

But his plan backfired because he had forgotten to sufficiently charge the device.

Civilian drones ‐ as weaponised by ISIS - automatically 'boomerang' back to their point of launch when they start to run out of power.

They are programmed to return to prevent owners losing their machines.

"We learned this idiot had wired up his drone with explosives but was killed when it’s batteries ran low and it flew home.

"With a weak signal for some reason it detonated over his head.

"This caused quite a laugh for us but the drone threat is very real. The fighter killed himself last year due to his own ineptitude, but is still keeping moral high today." ISIS has become advanced in its use of drone weapons, which it dubs its ’air force’.
Stupidity isn't illegal.
But it can be fatal.
Posted by:DarthVader

#14  Wile E. Coyote nods.
Posted by: The peanut gallery   2019-08-27 19:03  

#13  Did you know that after knife attacks in Japan in 2010, Japan created a visual identification system with a gigantic 'facial topology forms' weighted library from skull shape to position and shape of eyes, amount and pattern of facial hair etc aimed at picking out muslims, in a crowd. Everybody in the scientific community shut it down of course.

But it worked so well that China made a bid for the system with modifications to adjust for the Tajik and Uighur facial topologies. There has been lots of ML research since then into detecting a type of facial structure and ascertaining ethnicity. The chinese system is crude, because the facial types are near in-differentiable maybe, but it works like a charm with sufficient South Asian and mid eastern samples. But to even speak of it is taboo to humanist nerds.
The chin-chong research.

Posted by: Dron66046   2019-08-27 17:56  

#12  Make it so that after they detect "Allan Snackbar!" more than twice in a row they fly off, circle around a bit, and return to the controller.
Posted by: gorb   2019-08-27 17:24  

#11  Lord Garth, while only some of it is still CUI, the Chinese have been singing it from the rooftops for two years. It's practically common knowledge by now.

In 2014, the US Dept of interior had contracted the Shenzhen company DJI to procure survey drones and the sort. In 2016, the five-sided box looked into the safety of the data exchange taking place, and a GE (Govt. Edition) firmware and data saving system was jointly arrived at. That proprietary firmware was shared across the board and remained with you.

In 2017 when the ISIS uploaded videos of their drone attacks they were found to be DJI. Trump was already looking at ripping Huawei a new one (it was being investigated by many agencies in an industrial theft case since Obama's time) The Shenzhen Drone company had grown by 300% since 2014. Almost all aviation and law agencies everywhere got on its case and DJI was ordered from an anxious China to give all the help they could. That's the only way they could sell their drones in the US, they were told. The UK, Japan, India, some others followed. If a DJI drone is now spotted in a suspicious incident, caught with explosives or found at a blast site now, all these countries must go through the US to find out just how it got there.

The MDR for what DOD did with them was started by your own defsec, Jim Mattis in Aug last year I think, after he banned the use of DJI equipment from being ever contracted or used by military again. I don't know if the review cleared though, so details will have to remain dark.

Since then, a number of other competitors have picked up in the market and the DJI drones do sell in most countries but are impaired by the inability to register from remote places. New companies have GPS tracking and registry as standard protocols.
Posted by: Dron66046   2019-08-27 16:48  

#10  so this was an event in 2017

was it just declassified?
Posted by: lord garth   2019-08-27 15:19  

#9  Thanks, Dron, for fascinating analysis, and crew, for giggles.
Posted by: Lex   2019-08-27 14:17  

#8  Wow, a new category for the Darwin Awards, killed by safety features.
Posted by: Silentbrick   2019-08-27 14:01  

#7  The amusing part from a systems perspective is that the fatality was caused by a 'safety feature'.
"Let's make it return to base on low battery."
"Genius! What could go wrong?"
Posted by: SteveS   2019-08-27 13:20  

#6  Industrial accidents are getting more high-tech.
Posted by: Mercutio   2019-08-27 11:25  

#5  Karma. She's a bitch.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia   2019-08-27 09:29  

#4  [Wipes tear]. I love a happy ending.
Posted by: Bobby   2019-08-27 08:53  

#3  Proprietary DJI feature called Return to Home (RTH). It's triggered when the Intelligent Flight Battery is depleted to the point that it may affect the return of the aircraft. When this happens, a prompt will appear on your screen in the DJI GO/4 app, and the drone will automatically begin to ascend to the set RTH height and return if no action is taken after a 10-second countdown. If the battery power is critically low, then the drone will automatically land itself, and this can’t be canceled by the pilot. He can only yell 'Allyhoo' by then and hope someone was watching him go out with a bang.

ISIS are known to use modified consumer DJI drones, they are a Chinese company but have compromised or unauthorized resellers in Europe that keep shifting stores and locations to avoid sanctions and investigations. Some of these which had early release stock, have been closed down in America, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Belgium. Since 2017, they've had to keep a buyer registry and the US DoD have full access to it. Also, on the insistence of the DoD, the company modified the flight controller firmware to update to a 'registry censor'. Failure to register with DJI on purchase means the drone will have a height limit of 98 feet, and a radius of 164 feet (50 meters). I don't know if they can modify the battery charge though. Of course these things have workarounds, but such level of compliance to the US from a chin-chong company was only possible since after 2016.
Posted by: Dron66046   2019-08-27 07:46  

#2  Batteries... it's so often about the fok'n batteries.
Posted by: Besoeker   2019-08-27 07:21  

#1  Oops.
Posted by: Uleck Spererong9442   2019-08-27 07:20  

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