Yemen lets us go so far as to launch missiles inside their borders to toast Al-Qaida; somehow I doubt The Pirate Bay is going to be super-successful by virtue of hiding out in foreign airspace. Who's going to tell us no when we want to take down their drones? Nothing at all counts as 'an act of war' if the host country isn't willing to fight a war over it.
Yemen is a dictatorship you can buy off. Making a habit of doing the same thing in the airspace of, say, a western democracy is not going to be anywhere near as feasible.
Completely aside from the fact that there's just no way in hell copyright is worth using military might, and I don't mean that in the moral sense, but in the dollar sense.
Considering their previous plan to buy the micronation off the coast of England fell through, this is probably the cheapest and most technologically viable option.
I love that that was actually a thing. It's like they're plotting to become the worlds first super-villains.
That honor is reserved for the first person who uses orbital balloons to put nuclear weapons into the upper atmosphere.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
This thread introduced me to Alexa rankings. So I now know that Google undeniably owns the vast majority of the internet, Asia's most successful sites seem to be rip-offs of Google, Facebook and Youtube, xvideos and xhamster are at positions 55 and 59 respectively, and the forums are at position 3,353.
Although I can't help but feel like the US will probably responding by being like "fuck international waters, we'll shoot down your servers wherever we want!" At which point the question becomes whether the US can find the flying servers.
My guess would be yes? Pretty easily? The idea of a flying server for uploading and downloading large copyrighted files depends upon the platform broadcasting an electromagnetic signal continuously, and the technology for detecting a radio signal, identifying its azimuth and triangulating its location has been in existence since before the World War II.
I agree that what is essentially a floating radio transmitter should be pretty easy to find. Two things, though:
-These bots would presumably not be for transferring copyrighted files, since that is not what The Pirate Bay does. Rather, they would likely serve up the web page and users would point that data (magnet links) at their torrent client and process the transfer over normal (encrypted) channels.
-Regarding the ability of nations to disable these drones, I think that will only be feasible if it can be argued that they are only used for piracy. It would only take one case of use by freedom fighters or poor African communities to stream religious services before the Internet community was emboldened to protect this as another avenue of free exchange of ideas. Which is related to the greater mission of TPB.
Also, because they are not combatants, there is probably some way of taking them down without firing missiles at them. Liking physically taking them down with a helicopter or something.
And yet, all of these methods are far more expensive than the actual construction and use of these drones probably will be. Meaning TPB still wins.
Any method for going after the drones is likely to be more expensive than the cost of the drone, but a government has more resources to wage a war of attrition than a private organization.
Besides, even the goddamned Iranians know you don't target the drone itself -- you disconnect it from its control station so that the organization using it can no longer direct it. That takes a bit more technical expertise than firing a gun into the air and hoping you hit a target about the size of a beachball from a thousand yards away, but it also requires zero firepower and a lot less money.
Yemen lets us go so far as to launch missiles inside their borders to toast Al-Qaida; somehow I doubt The Pirate Bay is going to be super-successful by virtue of hiding out in foreign airspace. Who's going to tell us no when we want to take down their drones? Nothing at all counts as 'an act of war' if the host country isn't willing to fight a war over it.
Yemen is a dictatorship you can buy off. Making a habit of doing the same thing in the airspace of, say, a western democracy is not going to be anywhere near as feasible.
Completely aside from the fact that there's just no way in hell copyright is worth using military might, and I don't mean that in the moral sense, but in the dollar sense.
So instead we should expect the western democracy in question to fire said missiles instead, once they get tired of an independent body flying around in their airspace for the primary purpose of intellectual piracy. Which they will, after they get very quickly get tired of they flying around and said Pirates very quickly refuse to submit to governmental authority.
Don't get be wrong, I actually find them pretty entertaining and fascinating in their own way, and God knows I've used them before, but why would any government even think of tolerating them short of huge and regular payoffs?
Guess they better stand to international airspace in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or something.
All this talk about "taking control of the internet" if it works out is a bit hyperbolic, isn't it? Someone on the ground is still going to own the fiberoptic interconnects that truly power the internet as we know it. I'm not real clear on how this would really work out. Would this drones be access points isolating the actual servers on the ground from the internet so they can't be located as easily?
Beyond pirate bay's delightfully grandiose plans, the idea that we might be entering the age of geographically local little drones zooming around is itself very interesting. Launch one above a protest or have it doing figure-8s over a city to circumvent government Internet Restrictions.
Anyone trying to shut this down wouldn't even need missiles, would they?
Assuming weather keeps them close to ground-level. (You don't want your swarm to be swept away to another country, or worse, your competitors backyard)
On the sea they'll probably won't survive the harsh realities of stormy seas, and on land anyone with a bug-catchers net already poses a big threat.
I do like the idea of a swarm of self-contained drones just hanging out somewhere doing computations though, these are the things we've been promised in the 21th century, after all.
Yeah, the first flaw I can see is power. Keeping a drone in the air takes power, and constantly transmitting information (which will be needed to be a useful hub) takes power as well. I see from one of the articles in this thread that they will be battery-powered. So what happens when the battery runs out? Do you have staff people running to them to replace the battery (ridiculously expensive and impractical if the drones are deployed world-wide, not to mention that making the drones traceable to find them in this scenario defeats the whole "untraceable network" purpose that underlies this project)? Do you allow them to crash (dangerous to public safety) or self-destruct (pollution)? Or do you program them to use their last bit of power to land safely (no danger or pollution, but eventually people will find them, someone will hack one, and the whole network could potentially be compromised)?
Couldn't they just attach solar panels to the weather balloons?
Wouldn't be enough power. Its pretty clear its a pipe dream. They're talking essentially about 100Mps routers wirelessly transmitting 50 kilometers while simultaneously flying "kilometers in the air". Even if that was technically plausible - and its not, the longest an unmanned drone has been able to stay afloat is 14 days and that was without the demands of acting as a server and cost 5+ millions US$- it wouldn't do what they claim. You'd still need a way to connect to the drone over the internet and a way for the drone to redirect to the primary servers. Its pretty ridiculous on its face tbh.
Yeah, the first flaw I can see is power. Keeping a drone in the air takes power, and constantly transmitting information (which will be needed to be a useful hub) takes power as well. I see from one of the articles in this thread that they will be battery-powered. So what happens when the battery runs out? Do you have staff people running to them to replace the battery (ridiculously expensive and impractical if the drones are deployed world-wide, not to mention that making the drones traceable to find them in this scenario defeats the whole "untraceable network" purpose that underlies this project)? Do you allow them to crash (dangerous to public safety) or self-destruct (pollution)? Or do you program them to use their last bit of power to land safely (no danger or pollution, but eventually people will find them, someone will hack one, and the whole network could potentially be compromised)?
Couldn't they just attach solar panels to the weather balloons?
Wouldn't be enough power. Its pretty clear its a pipe dream. They're talking essentially about 100Mps routers wirelessly transmitting 50 kilometers while simultaneously flying "kilometers in the air". Even if that was technically plausible - and its not, the longest an unmanned drone has been able to stay afloat is 14 days and that was without the demands of acting as a server and cost 5+ millions US$- it wouldn't do what they claim. You'd still need a way to connect to the drone over the internet and a way for the drone to redirect to the primary servers. Its pretty ridiculous on its face tbh.
You're just being a nay-sayer because you're opposed to us having a little flying companion computer buzzing around our heads for all our computer needs and Enemy notifications / lock-ons.
Why do you deny us our technological wonder-pet? Will your grouchy-ness stop at nothing? Have you no wonder / decency / inner-desire-to-have-a-robotic-sidekick?
Beyond pirate bay's delightfully grandiose plans, the idea that we might be entering the age of geographically local little drones zooming around is itself very interesting. Launch one above a protest or have it doing figure-8s over a city to circumvent government Internet Restrictions.
pirate radio all over again indeed
I mean, there's all sorts of practical applications that have *incredibly little* to do with some people's latent desire to stick it to the Man. Imagine if within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the gulf coast, FEMA had been able to reestablish cell phone service in New Orleans by blanketing the city with an airborne mobile wireless communications infrastructure, just for instance. Or imagine if Verizon or AT&T could launch a fleet of drones to supplement their communications network during times when use was overwhelming the fixed network?
It's a very interesting idea to have in your back pocket for a temporary fix to communications issues. I don't think it's feasible as a long term anti-government tool because any government worth its salt will use a bigger, more powerful radio to either (a) flood the frequency the server broadcasts on to create so much background noise that your own wireless can't communicate with the server, or (b) flood the frequency used to control the drones so that the drones can't receive orders, at which point they'll just sit back and wait for the drones to crash themselves when they run out of power or blunder into an object.
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ArchonexNo hard feelings, right?Registered Userregular
This entire thing is hyperbolic, but I bet the idiotic suits are scared in the same way the soviets were scared of star wars
It's funny, because the claims that the internet is somehow going to sink major media companies or do a great amount of harm is vastly hyperbolic. Which is what scummy politicians and said media companies have been trying to claim as an excuse to ruin people's lives for years, now.
It is feasible, if not now, then probably in a few years, for these things to be running full-time. It would probably just be extremely expensive to put one up in the air due to production costs. De-centralizing the locations that control them would also help quite a bit in protecting them. Some companies already do this. They put part of their network in one country, and part in another, that way no one can easily screw with their electronic assets legally speaking.
If they get these things to where they can actually host a network of their own wirelessly (Not even sure how the mechanics of that would work.), then yeah, this isn't hyperbolic, but pretty much "completely fuck over anyone who wants a monopoly over the internet". Since at that point they have the capacity to create large-scale darknets that can geographically relocate themselves and are visually and technically very difficult to find and stop.
Darknets hosting illegal content are already a royal bitch for law enforcement agencies to stop, since most of the actually secure ones are "invite only". The only thing going for law enforcement agencies is that they're usually centralized and static in location. Removing that advantage pretty much means you could open them up and operate with impunity.
I mean, there's all sorts of practical applications that have *incredibly little* to do with some people's latent desire to stick it to the Man. Imagine if within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the gulf coast, FEMA had been able to reestablish cell phone service in New Orleans by blanketing the city with an airborne mobile wireless communications infrastructure, just for instance. Or imagine if Verizon or AT&T could launch a fleet of drones to supplement their communications network during times when use was overwhelming the fixed network?
It's a very interesting idea to have in your back pocket for a temporary fix to communications issues. I don't think it's feasible as a long term anti-government tool because any government worth its salt will use a bigger, more powerful radio to either (a) flood the frequency the server broadcasts on to create so much background noise that your own wireless can't communicate with the server, or (b) flood the frequency used to control the drones so that the drones can't receive orders, at which point they'll just sit back and wait for the drones to crash themselves when they run out of power or blunder into an object.
Just a guess, but I'm thinking The Pirate Bay is basically forcing the government to escalate the situation. If it gets to the point where we have to keep spending $TEXAS to placate hollywood it will force some uncomfortable public discourse that will probably not go well for the movie or music industry. Part of why they have been able to be so successful, up until now, was general public apathy and lack of knowledge regarding Intellectual Property/Technology issues. SOPA/PIPA and now ACTA are showing that this is not going to be the case for much longer.
By escalating the situation it will force a discussion the *AAs are almost certain to lose. It just needs to happen fast enough so that Pharma, big Tech companies AND Hollywood don't all get in bed over some TCPA/Palladium style scheme to destroy the general purpose computer.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Completely aside from the fact that there's just no way in hell copyright is worth using military might, and I don't mean that in the moral sense, but in the dollar sense.
This.
If the US was willing to shoot missiles over IP infringing, we'd have already launched them all over SE Asia.
Beyond pirate bay's delightfully grandiose plans, the idea that we might be entering the age of geographically local little drones zooming around is itself very interesting. Launch one above a protest or have it doing figure-8s over a city to circumvent government Internet Restrictions.
pirate radio all over again indeed
I mean, there's all sorts of practical applications that have *incredibly little* to do with some people's latent desire to stick it to the Man. Imagine if within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the gulf coast, FEMA had been able to reestablish cell phone service in New Orleans by blanketing the city with an airborne mobile wireless communications infrastructure, just for instance. Or imagine if Verizon or AT&T could launch a fleet of drones to supplement their communications network during times when use was overwhelming the fixed network?
Beyond pirate bay's delightfully grandiose plans, the idea that we might be entering the age of geographically local little drones zooming around is itself very interesting. Launch one above a protest or have it doing figure-8s over a city to circumvent government Internet Restrictions.
pirate radio all over again indeed
I mean, there's all sorts of practical applications that have *incredibly little* to do with some people's latent desire to stick it to the Man. Imagine if within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the gulf coast, FEMA had been able to reestablish cell phone service in New Orleans by blanketing the city with an airborne mobile wireless communications infrastructure, just for instance. Or imagine if Verizon or AT&T could launch a fleet of drones to supplement their communications network during times when use was overwhelming the fixed network?
The standing record for the longest sustained flight by a drone aircraft is two weeks almost exactly, and that was set by a military-grade solar-powered prototype with a 70-foot wingspan. Realistically, the most TPB could hope to get from this if their facilities were seized would be their network staying active for an extra day or two. Balloons can't be steered and would all end up blown to Madagascar or something.
But hey, keep wanking about invincible sky pirates.
Technically, if these drones end up in the European Union economic zone they will have to comply to the R&TTE guideline under CE-marking and be properly tested before allowed to be used, I would laugh and laugh if these things get pulled out of the sky because of failing to comply.
I'm kind of amazed everyone is going straight for shooting it with missiles, while it's so much easier to just point an antenna at it and jam the fuck out of it. It won't be possible to make a machine this small, cheap, long-lasting and light-weight and make it immune enough to radiated disturbances at the same time with current technology.
The standing record for the longest sustained flight by a drone aircraft is two weeks almost exactly, and that was set by a military-grade solar-powered prototype with a 70-foot wingspan. Realistically, the most TPB could hope to get from this if their facilities were seized would be their network staying active for an extra day or two. Balloons can't be steered and would all end up blown to Madagascar or something.
But hey, keep wanking about invincible sky pirates.
Rigid airframes are actually pretty darn stable, additionally if you have overhead power lines in the area you can leach power without effecting the grid pretty easy and rarely ever dock if needed.
Also teaching a rigid airframe to go from point to point where it can be anchored, or just going down and latching onto the grid, is actually pretty easy as well. Also long as you are within range (2-3 miles) for a good solid data link just a few of these guys would be enough for redundancy. Especially if the ground based servers are doing the heavy lifting.
All the thing would have to do it follow the high power lines around from one dock station to the next. Would not have to be very big. And outside of a highly dense area it would be pretty invisible to most people.
This is besides the clearly illegal stuff they do and would have to do to keep something like this up in the air its not out of the realm of possibility.
The real answer is hidden servers on the ground or a distributed botnet of some type.
If you think of the Pirate Bay as a library of magnet links of total size ~100MB (search "magnet archive" if you doubt me, I'm not going to link it for obvious reasons) instead of a website that needs to be made constantly available, this project seems a little more sane. Broadcasting all the links at once means that the drones don't have to blot out the sun in their hordes, keeping costs down, and eases dissemination away from the coast via sneakernet or smaller, cheaper drones. The big drone (or a dude in a Cessna) flies the coastline once a week or month, and then little drones or dudes with USB sticks carry the data inland or to anyone on the coast who missed the initial broadcast.
What follows is probably the most fun I've had applying the Pythagorean Theorem, ever.
If a drone traveling in a straight line delivers this much data to a point that will be 20 miles away at its closest (so the receivers don't have to be on the beach and the drone doesn't have to skirt the border too closely), and the drone flies at 140mph (incidentally a Cessna's cruising speed), then with a 100-mile broadcast that coastal point will be in range long enough to receive it as slowly as 20KB/s. A 50-mile broadcast could do it at 42K. Slower drones would need proportionately slower data rates or less powerful broadcasts. At 70mph a 30-mile broadcast would only need to average 44K to deliver 100MB before flying past the same 20-mile-distant point. Uploading links is much less of a technical challenge, since it's a ground-based broadcast of a tiny amount of information.
This seems possible, but what doesn't is landing without getting arrested, whether you're the pilot of a Cessna or a big drone. It'd be another matter if the SolarEagle A) existed and was the sort of thing that a bunch of (admittedly rich) nerds in Sweden could procure, though... but at that point you're in the "if we had our own satellite" realm of plausibility.
The standing record for the longest sustained flight by a drone aircraft is two weeks almost exactly, and that was set by a military-grade solar-powered prototype with a 70-foot wingspan. Realistically, the most TPB could hope to get from this if their facilities were seized would be their network staying active for an extra day or two. Balloons can't be steered and would all end up blown to Madagascar or something.
But hey, keep wanking about invincible sky pirates.
Rigid airframes are actually pretty darn stable, additionally if you have overhead power lines in the area you can leach power without effecting the grid pretty easy and rarely ever dock if needed.
Also teaching a rigid airframe to go from point to point where it can be anchored, or just going down and latching onto the grid, is actually pretty easy as well. Also long as you are within range (2-3 miles) for a good solid data link just a few of these guys would be enough for redundancy. Especially if the ground based servers are doing the heavy lifting.
All the thing would have to do it follow the high power lines around from one dock station to the next. Would not have to be very big. And outside of a highly dense area it would be pretty invisible to most people.
This is besides the clearly illegal stuff they do and would have to do to keep something like this up in the air its not out of the realm of possibility.
The real answer is hidden servers on the ground or a distributed botnet of some type.
Yeah I imagine this would be smoke and mirrors to distract from other efforts. Have a couple of these flying around being visible...
If you think of the Pirate Bay as a library of magnet links of total size ~100MB (search "magnet archive" if you doubt me, I'm not going to link it for obvious reasons) instead of a website that needs to be made constantly available, this project seems a little more sane. Broadcasting all the links at once means that the drones don't have to blot out the sun in their hordes, keeping costs down, and eases dissemination away from the coast via sneakernet or smaller, cheaper drones. The big drone (or a dude in a Cessna) flies the coastline once a week or month, and then little drones or dudes with USB sticks carry the data inland or to anyone on the coast who missed the initial broadcast.
What follows is probably the most fun I've had applying the Pythagorean Theorem, ever.
If a drone traveling in a straight line delivers this much data to a point that will be 20 miles away at its closest (so the receivers don't have to be on the beach and the drone doesn't have to skirt the border too closely), and the drone flies at 140mph (incidentally a Cessna's cruising speed), then with a 100-mile broadcast that coastal point will be in range long enough to receive it as slowly as 20KB/s. A 50-mile broadcast could do it at 42K. Slower drones would need proportionately slower data rates or less powerful broadcasts. At 70mph a 30-mile broadcast would only need to average 44K to deliver 100MB before flying past the same 20-mile-distant point. Uploading links is much less of a technical challenge, since it's a ground-based broadcast of a tiny amount of information.
This seems possible, but what doesn't is landing without getting arrested, whether you're the pilot of a Cessna or a big drone. It'd be another matter if the SolarEagle A) existed and was the sort of thing that a bunch of (admittedly rich) nerds in Sweden could procure, though... but at that point you're in the "if we had our own satellite" realm of plausibility.
It's actually much, much less than that because you really just need the delta between the last flight and the next flight... and one of the links included can be "last flight's database" or "deltas from last flight" and you can chase the links back to get the whole thing.
Also, you may have confused mph with knots, but there's only a small difference there
A few friends and I [a handful of electrical, computer, and mechanical engineers] kicked the whole flying server idea around for fun when we heard about this, with the aim to figure out what's the most likely cheapest and practical way to do it. I personally liked the idea where you build a few heavy-lift hexacopters that pick up and drop off solar-powered microservers on the tops of buildings, moving them around every few days. Almost no one would notice them unless they checked their roofs routinely, and costs are kept down by operating only a few drones to do the actual moving bit. An alternate choice was quadrotors with a "startle" reflex, where they stay stationary almost all the time charging & transmitting but fly to a predetermined - but still random - next location if they detected more than a certain amount of movement nearby.
People here seem to not know how accurate and simple having something as dumb as a cellphone with its bits and gizmos could be in navigating one of these.
No, I'm serious. You could build a drone with a GPS nav system, with simple echo location based avoidance systems (Yeah these exist for drones already, and I mean the kind you can buy at Brookstone and pilot with an iphone.)
So you stick the brain with the flight path in a sealed shell. EMP, Radiation and interference based attempts to disarm it are thus rendered moot. The drones themselves only have to land for roughly 2 minutes to slap in new batteries, and it isn't like the government has the time to follow them around constantly to see when they do land. Have it plop down on someones balconey at random, slap in new batteries, it takes off again, and no one ever knows.
This really isn't as super future as everyone is making it out to be. I mean hell, people are making things that self pilot based on images captured with cameras. Making a stable drone that transmits a small packet of data and avoids objects while navigating from GPS position A to B? That's like, radio shack and new egg levels of garage technology.
ehh... unless you are using purely inertial navigation, you can't stick the brain in a sealed shell. Otherwise you have a sealed brain with wires(aka antennas) leading into it, and a dependence on signals(gps), which leave it susceptible to electronic countermeasures.
I doubt it is something worth worrying about. Most nations aren't going to risk killing plane loads civilians just so they can prevent people from pirating movies, which is an unavoidable risk of any real attempt to jam a drone.
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Completely aside from the fact that there's just no way in hell copyright is worth using military might, and I don't mean that in the moral sense, but in the dollar sense.
That honor is reserved for the first person who uses orbital balloons to put nuclear weapons into the upper atmosphere.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
I laughed. God bless that man.
I agree that what is essentially a floating radio transmitter should be pretty easy to find. Two things, though:
-These bots would presumably not be for transferring copyrighted files, since that is not what The Pirate Bay does. Rather, they would likely serve up the web page and users would point that data (magnet links) at their torrent client and process the transfer over normal (encrypted) channels.
-Regarding the ability of nations to disable these drones, I think that will only be feasible if it can be argued that they are only used for piracy. It would only take one case of use by freedom fighters or poor African communities to stream religious services before the Internet community was emboldened to protect this as another avenue of free exchange of ideas. Which is related to the greater mission of TPB.
Any method for going after the drones is likely to be more expensive than the cost of the drone, but a government has more resources to wage a war of attrition than a private organization.
Besides, even the goddamned Iranians know you don't target the drone itself -- you disconnect it from its control station so that the organization using it can no longer direct it. That takes a bit more technical expertise than firing a gun into the air and hoping you hit a target about the size of a beachball from a thousand yards away, but it also requires zero firepower and a lot less money.
So instead we should expect the western democracy in question to fire said missiles instead, once they get tired of an independent body flying around in their airspace for the primary purpose of intellectual piracy. Which they will, after they get very quickly get tired of they flying around and said Pirates very quickly refuse to submit to governmental authority.
Don't get be wrong, I actually find them pretty entertaining and fascinating in their own way, and God knows I've used them before, but why would any government even think of tolerating them short of huge and regular payoffs?
Guess they better stand to international airspace in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or something.
pirate radio all over again indeed
Assuming weather keeps them close to ground-level. (You don't want your swarm to be swept away to another country, or worse, your competitors backyard)
On the sea they'll probably won't survive the harsh realities of stormy seas, and on land anyone with a bug-catchers net already poses a big threat.
I do like the idea of a swarm of self-contained drones just hanging out somewhere doing computations though, these are the things we've been promised in the 21th century, after all.
Wouldn't be enough power. Its pretty clear its a pipe dream. They're talking essentially about 100Mps routers wirelessly transmitting 50 kilometers while simultaneously flying "kilometers in the air". Even if that was technically plausible - and its not, the longest an unmanned drone has been able to stay afloat is 14 days and that was without the demands of acting as a server and cost 5+ millions US$- it wouldn't do what they claim. You'd still need a way to connect to the drone over the internet and a way for the drone to redirect to the primary servers. Its pretty ridiculous on its face tbh.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
You're just being a nay-sayer because you're opposed to us having a little flying companion computer buzzing around our heads for all our computer needs and Enemy notifications / lock-ons.
Why do you deny us our technological wonder-pet? Will your grouchy-ness stop at nothing? Have you no wonder / decency / inner-desire-to-have-a-robotic-sidekick?
I mean, there's all sorts of practical applications that have *incredibly little* to do with some people's latent desire to stick it to the Man. Imagine if within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall on the gulf coast, FEMA had been able to reestablish cell phone service in New Orleans by blanketing the city with an airborne mobile wireless communications infrastructure, just for instance. Or imagine if Verizon or AT&T could launch a fleet of drones to supplement their communications network during times when use was overwhelming the fixed network?
It's a very interesting idea to have in your back pocket for a temporary fix to communications issues. I don't think it's feasible as a long term anti-government tool because any government worth its salt will use a bigger, more powerful radio to either (a) flood the frequency the server broadcasts on to create so much background noise that your own wireless can't communicate with the server, or (b) flood the frequency used to control the drones so that the drones can't receive orders, at which point they'll just sit back and wait for the drones to crash themselves when they run out of power or blunder into an object.
It's funny, because the claims that the internet is somehow going to sink major media companies or do a great amount of harm is vastly hyperbolic. Which is what scummy politicians and said media companies have been trying to claim as an excuse to ruin people's lives for years, now.
It is feasible, if not now, then probably in a few years, for these things to be running full-time. It would probably just be extremely expensive to put one up in the air due to production costs. De-centralizing the locations that control them would also help quite a bit in protecting them. Some companies already do this. They put part of their network in one country, and part in another, that way no one can easily screw with their electronic assets legally speaking.
If they get these things to where they can actually host a network of their own wirelessly (Not even sure how the mechanics of that would work.), then yeah, this isn't hyperbolic, but pretty much "completely fuck over anyone who wants a monopoly over the internet". Since at that point they have the capacity to create large-scale darknets that can geographically relocate themselves and are visually and technically very difficult to find and stop.
Darknets hosting illegal content are already a royal bitch for law enforcement agencies to stop, since most of the actually secure ones are "invite only". The only thing going for law enforcement agencies is that they're usually centralized and static in location. Removing that advantage pretty much means you could open them up and operate with impunity.
Just a guess, but I'm thinking The Pirate Bay is basically forcing the government to escalate the situation. If it gets to the point where we have to keep spending $TEXAS to placate hollywood it will force some uncomfortable public discourse that will probably not go well for the movie or music industry. Part of why they have been able to be so successful, up until now, was general public apathy and lack of knowledge regarding Intellectual Property/Technology issues. SOPA/PIPA and now ACTA are showing that this is not going to be the case for much longer.
By escalating the situation it will force a discussion the *AAs are almost certain to lose. It just needs to happen fast enough so that Pharma, big Tech companies AND Hollywood don't all get in bed over some TCPA/Palladium style scheme to destroy the general purpose computer.
This.
If the US was willing to shoot missiles over IP infringing, we'd have already launched them all over SE Asia.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Because the roads flooded.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-03-internet-provider-virgin-media-blocks-torrent-site-the-pirate-bay
End result; a whole lot more traffic to TPB.
But hey, keep wanking about invincible sky pirates.
I'm kind of amazed everyone is going straight for shooting it with missiles, while it's so much easier to just point an antenna at it and jam the fuck out of it. It won't be possible to make a machine this small, cheap, long-lasting and light-weight and make it immune enough to radiated disturbances at the same time with current technology.
Rigid airframes are actually pretty darn stable, additionally if you have overhead power lines in the area you can leach power without effecting the grid pretty easy and rarely ever dock if needed.
Also teaching a rigid airframe to go from point to point where it can be anchored, or just going down and latching onto the grid, is actually pretty easy as well. Also long as you are within range (2-3 miles) for a good solid data link just a few of these guys would be enough for redundancy. Especially if the ground based servers are doing the heavy lifting.
All the thing would have to do it follow the high power lines around from one dock station to the next. Would not have to be very big. And outside of a highly dense area it would be pretty invisible to most people.
This is besides the clearly illegal stuff they do and would have to do to keep something like this up in the air its not out of the realm of possibility.
The real answer is hidden servers on the ground or a distributed botnet of some type.
What follows is probably the most fun I've had applying the Pythagorean Theorem, ever.
If a drone traveling in a straight line delivers this much data to a point that will be 20 miles away at its closest (so the receivers don't have to be on the beach and the drone doesn't have to skirt the border too closely), and the drone flies at 140mph (incidentally a Cessna's cruising speed), then with a 100-mile broadcast that coastal point will be in range long enough to receive it as slowly as 20KB/s. A 50-mile broadcast could do it at 42K. Slower drones would need proportionately slower data rates or less powerful broadcasts. At 70mph a 30-mile broadcast would only need to average 44K to deliver 100MB before flying past the same 20-mile-distant point. Uploading links is much less of a technical challenge, since it's a ground-based broadcast of a tiny amount of information.
This seems possible, but what doesn't is landing without getting arrested, whether you're the pilot of a Cessna or a big drone. It'd be another matter if the SolarEagle A) existed and
Yeah I imagine this would be smoke and mirrors to distract from other efforts. Have a couple of these flying around being visible...
It's actually much, much less than that because you really just need the delta between the last flight and the next flight... and one of the links included can be "last flight's database" or "deltas from last flight" and you can chase the links back to get the whole thing.
Also, you may have confused mph with knots, but there's only a small difference there
You are going to lose half your potential supporters when one of these things goes off course and gets sucked into a jet engine.
You are going to lose the other half when a bald eagle or something gets entangled with another one.
Not to mention they're conveniently forgetting about birds.
No, I'm serious. You could build a drone with a GPS nav system, with simple echo location based avoidance systems (Yeah these exist for drones already, and I mean the kind you can buy at Brookstone and pilot with an iphone.)
So you stick the brain with the flight path in a sealed shell. EMP, Radiation and interference based attempts to disarm it are thus rendered moot. The drones themselves only have to land for roughly 2 minutes to slap in new batteries, and it isn't like the government has the time to follow them around constantly to see when they do land. Have it plop down on someones balconey at random, slap in new batteries, it takes off again, and no one ever knows.
This really isn't as super future as everyone is making it out to be. I mean hell, people are making things that self pilot based on images captured with cameras. Making a stable drone that transmits a small packet of data and avoids objects while navigating from GPS position A to B? That's like, radio shack and new egg levels of garage technology.
I doubt it is something worth worrying about. Most nations aren't going to risk killing plane loads civilians just so they can prevent people from pirating movies, which is an unavoidable risk of any real attempt to jam a drone.