Just remember, if you run your own DNS, and you do so for a mission critical platform, the platform is exposed to a udp DDoS that will be hard to detect let alone prevent.
Unless of course you will invest 5-6 figures worth of US dollars worth of equipment, which by then you can look back and ask yourself, was I better off with Google Cloud DNS, AWS Route 53 and the likes.
Not that I disagree with the fact that these risks exist, but how is that different than running any other service for a mission critical platform?
The main thing I can think of is DNS amplification attacks, but that's more your DNS server being used as part of a DDoS attack rather than being targeted for one. Also (afaik) resolvers are more common targets for DNS amplification than authoritative.
Large scale dns vendors have a multi million dollars worth of network layer traffic filtering equipment pipelined in front of their DNS servers (or in house solutions such as Google).
May or may not.
You open the UDP ports, you get flooded, they block all incoming traffic, and this way or another your assets are not resolvable.
One must distinguish between application layer attacks HTTP/S and UDP, cloud vendors won’t protect you implicitly for network layer attacks unless you purchased such service from them.
There are 2 short segments in the video showing the actual performance and thus far it is a complete [1] failure [2].
The guy has a talent, and he put together a nice prototype based on OpenRocket [3], but with all due respect, this is not a rocket, and you are not going to win any war with this toy, even if all your enemy has are rocks thrown at you from pretty much similar distance.
The remix of computer games / Ukraine / Martin Luther King / Vietnam / David Koresh just adding more to the amateur spirit and confusion.
I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. The entire YouTube video has only two short clips of the actual rocket being fired, and in both cases the clips are very short and only show the rocket being fired and then following an erratic flight path, and then get cut before showing the rocket hitting anything.
For all the technical info given in the video, there is a curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system. What percentage of rockets tested managed to hit anything and at what range?
Yes, I don't think this project is a serious threat as a weapon, it's more interesting if viewed as a politically provocative stunt, to get people thinking about the relationship between technology and war.
Part of it is the sophistication. Take the Tomahawk: assumed range of ~1000 miles , estimated accuracy of 30 feet. Can launch from above or below water. Etc.
The other part is the limited production runs. Until last month, the DoD was generally purchasing ~100 of these annually. There's no scale economy in making these, so those 100 missiles need to support the entire production & R&D of the product.
It's worth reading up on the history of the Sidewinder development for the other side of this coin. Radically cheaper than the conventionally-developed alternatives at the time. It's grown legs in more recent marks but the first few variants were really not sophisticated at all.
Missiles definitely do not always work. I have seen film of a Sea Slug missile (with war head) falling over the side of a Royal Navy ship, without the motor firing properly. Apparently there was a void in the solid propellant.
Check out Joe Barnard's youtube channel BPS.Space where he's documenting his development of "high power" (hobby) rockets. Those are relatively small rockets still but nonetheless he's getting into performance regimes where the engineering starts to be tricky and the details really matter. The more extreme your rocket gets, the difficulty really ramps up quick.
It’s not a complete explanation, but I was awed by the precision of the shower screens used in modern rocket engines. In the 60s it might have sufficed to just spray fuel into the combustion chamber using some nozzles, but now we have highly precise matrices of micro-perforations that maximize combustion.
Also if you want to harden the rocket against EMP attacks you need an inertial guidance system, and those things also demand extreme precision.
It really depends on what kind of rocket you’re talking about. An unguided rocket propelled grenade mass produced with 1960s technology is a few hundred bucks. Stepping up to a simple TOW guided missile using 1970s technology quickly ramps that price up to $5-10k per round with a max range of 3-5km.
Once you add in modern electronics and guidance and reliability that cost quickly skyrockets, going up an order of magnitude at each step of complexity (advanced guided like the Javelin, cruise, ballistic, etc).
Fireworks rocket do not cost as much. But if you want high precision and high speed, that simply is expensive. Also the area is of course restricted making it more expensive as most states do not want DIY rockets everywhere.
They arent. Missiles cost millions. Rockets are cheap. Rockets are unguided. Missiles are guided. From a military perspective, spacelaunch rockets are techically "unguided" as they are not tracking a target but trying to stick to a fixed/programed trajectory. It is the seeker head that costs the millions, all the jamming/counter-jamming tech that drives up development costs.
This is a rather basic (passive) seeker head by modern standards.
You don't need to win any wars with it if you can use them to sow confusion, obscure the firing of more serious rockets, and/or trigger a sufficiently more expensive response.
It clearly needs more work, but if an amateur can get this far at this low cost, odds are you'll see attempts at overwhelming attackers or defense systems by sheer volume with cheap decoys like this long before they become an actual threat in and of themselves.
Get the rocket a bit more stable, and force an attack to try to take out dozens of these because one of them might be a real threat, and you'll have created a problem.
People can do very scary things with a knife, a car, or petrol+matches.
We don't try to regulate those things out of existence like we do with new technology (drones and now 3D printers)
Kind of ridiculous that a country with more guns than people and 45k firearms deaths per year wants to regulate 3D printed plastic. Yet collecting and shooting actual guns is still an acceptable hobby in many states.
The same states that want to regulate 3d printers and force you to register them and install only software that will prevent you from printing anything that even looks like a gun part are also the same states that have been trying (or succeeding) in enforcing those same sorts of broad and dubious regulations on firearms too. When you think of states whose legislatures think collecting and shooting guns is an acceptable hobby, California and New York don’t exactly top the list.
Oh, I totally agree. I always see this as evidence that the terrorism threat is overblown, if it were really as large as we are led to believe the number of successful attacks would be far higher than it is.
3D printers have absolutely no clue about what it is that they are printing. They just receive X, Y and Z coordinates, temperature settings and extruder feed rates.
Just like an injection molding machine doesn't care about what the shape of the mold is. Just like a lathe doesn't have any restrictions on what you can make as long as it fits the chuck and the tooling.
Exactly. Consider the current conflict in Iran. They have thousands of drones that cost $50k each. The US’s only real defense against one of these drones is to fire a million dollar missile at it. That assymmetry can win or lose a war.
I've been subscribed to this guy for some time. His work is much more impressive, and IIRC, he either works for a defense contractor or is studying for that.
I think there's lots of people talking past each other on this post. These kinds of designs won't be as reliable as the existing designs, and they may have a systemic flaw, for example, susceptibility to disabling with microwaves. And they aren't going to work after sitting in an ammo depot for 15 years in the desert or after being dropped from a plane.
But these designs will cost just a few dollars more than the equivalent dumb munition (and can possibly be retrofitted), and can be two orders of magnitude more effective in the short term. The threat here isn't "guy in garage makes MANPADS", it's "IRGC converts 100's of thousands of existing unguided cold-war rockets into guided S2A and S2S missiles for $20 each". Even if it doesn't hit any target, each aircraft has a limited number of countermeasures and has to return to base if they run out or risk being hit.
Guided munition at a dumb munition price is enough to invalidate many strategies.
This design is pretty clearly optimized for weaponry. Eg the foldable fins - necessary if you want to keep a magazine of these things stored compactly before firing. Totally unnecessary for funsies.
What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?
Launching model rockets with a controlled landing (less likelihood of property damage or fires). Learning about the components. Folding fins make it easier to transport without snapping one (hopefully). Trigger vs button launch isn't that big of deal, although might have better safety options compared to standard model rocket launch buttons.
> A launcher for a climbing rope or grappling hook. Have you ever tried getting a rope up over a branch on a very tall tree?
You might look into arborist's throw line launchers and line guns. They come in slingshot and pneumatic varieties. With a little (mostly fun) practice, they can be pretty accurate and reach limbs over 100' up.
Even if the correct sensor could be chosen (whatever it is), unlikely is attainable by consumers and the technology would definitely be export controlled in the US.
I saw this pop up alongside its video thumbnail and nearly shit myself watching it and going "damn, that looks exactly like what's on those RU/UA drones going at each other"... https://www.ebay.com/itm/197224214645
"HS AI Vision Cube For Ultra-long-range Target Recognition tracking & Thermal" for as low as $175. I am feeling the potential ITAR violations straight through my screen.
The funny thing is, at least as I understand it, ITAR only applies to things produced in the United States. As example, you can't buy very good FLIR IR cameras in the United States without a lot of paperwork, but you can trivially buy much better (higher resolution, faster frame rate) and cheaper IR cameras that are produced in China.
I think MEMS gyroscopes and accelerometers used in consumer drones should be just about good enough to measure orientation and acceleration, and those are cheap and easy to get.
You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
I think thanks to drones and RC hobbyists, there's a generally nice body of knowledge on how to get good enough data from consumer hardware to keep things flying.
> You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
‘Easy to ignore’ is not a term I would use here, especially given the motion environment of a rocket. It seems like it might be beginning to be borderline possible.
This sensor has a 16G limit, which is well above what an amateur rocket cold and the compounding velocity error at 10G would be something like 0.0002 (m/s)/s. Which is way more than good enough, at least for short flights measured in minutes max.
Regardless, he made a prototype rocket enclosure and he seems to have the software down… I think the propulsion system will be the easy part. Hardest part will be tuning the PID so that the rocket goes where he wants it to. Then incorporating his tracking system will be another challenge of itself but that’s because of the form factor. As long as his calculus and linear algebra is good I see than being successful. Either way I’d hire simply to be a prototype engineer. Either Anduril or CIA would hire him in a heartbeat for prototyping.
> I think the propulsion system will be the easy part.
Really? I think rocket science is still not easy. Just look at how much nation states are spending on maintaining their liquid and/or solid fuel rocket programs. If they even have one, let alone both.
Quote: "All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention
asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be
It has recently been shown that an argon fluoride, probably ArF2, does exist, but it
is unstable except at cryogenic temperatures.
[...] kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal
fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat
of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere.
If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to
reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a
metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
Granted this is about a fuel that is AFAIK not used for MANPADs, but the joke about the running shoes could be made about most aspects of rocket propulsion.
With all do respect I think your over complicating the problem. It’s not rocket science (no pun intended). It’s essentially a hobby rocket that can be weaponized and it’s all DIY. That’s the point simple and off the shelf. Not meant to travel towards the stratosphere or even long range. Quick and dirty way to cause havoc in a localized area.
And that’s ok if it’s failing to do the job as intended, learning is acquired, and it looks fun to build, I am in the field and I find it great homemade concept.
Realistically, I doubt there’s ANY system out there will be able to counter small weaponized drones that are flown manually let alone with AI, you might have some workarounds, but never a real counter.
> Realistically, I doubt there’s ANY system out there will be able to counter small weaponized drones that are flown manually let alone with AI, you might have some workarounds, but never a real counter.
Weaponized drones (say D_A) can be countered by other weaponized drones (say D_B), equally cheap or cheaper than D_A because the D_A is usually targeting something larger (so more payload) and typically has a longer range. D_B only needs to wreck D_A at a shorter defensive range. That's what Ukraine is doing.
You can also use drone swarms with coordinated action so that each drone in the swarm is only targeting one other drone, and automatic re-targeting if one node misses. [1]
hardest issue as I mentioned in another comment is detection. Now on using other drones to counter a drone, there are other issues, as I built and tested some before, assuming you got the detection part done. The first one is guidance and correction mid-air, flying manually won’t really be practical due to the need for an extraordinary flying skills, which can’t be relied on in the field, the second part is the speed, you need to ALWAYS make sure the interceptor is faster to catch it up, third is the weight, I disagree about the payload part you mentioned, I have seen videos of light weight drones failing to wreck bigger ones, if you are relying on collision alone. Additionally, the telemetry/video/C&C for the interceptor, if jamming is already in place, your counter won’t work either.
The swarm will require a low latency comms link, centralized or decentralized, if the area is jammed, it won’t work. i have built a self-healing decentralized system using cellular in each drone, but that’s useless if the network is down to start with.
So they might work in a very specific use case, but not an ultimate solution to counter them.
While it [1] doesn't talk about swarms, it has some details - $1k - $2.5k price, 170mph speed, backpackable, thermal imaging, radar, ai, manual control (fiber-optic I think, based on other sources and battlefield pictures).
This [2] talks about swarmer software used by Ukraine.
$1k-$2.5k gives a lot of room for tech to avoid jamming - ir or visible light, ultrasound, for in-swarm comms.
And I wonder if the battery itself could be weaponized. We have seen that a very thin layer of the right material can turn phones/pagers very destructive.
> I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.
It's a good point, though I should point out that GPS denial is assumed in those sort of contexts as a first countermeasure so D_A likely has alternative targeting, and that smaller drones can move faster with less energy storage, which itself requires less weight, compounding the benefits of being smaller.
D_A only needs to get to coordinates (X, Y) with a minimal requirements for Z as "some meters above ground." It doesn't matter if it gets there in 15 minutes or in 20 minutes, or in 2 hours.
D_B needs to absolutely nail X, Y, Z -- but also t!
To be at the time t0 at the point (X0, Y0, Z0), the defence drone needs to be at some other point (X1, Y1, Z1) at the time t1 -- given the speed and the direction of the attack drone. But what the defence drone has is just an estimation of these. The amount of back-propagation calculations for the defence drone is simply immense.
And also the attacker can send 100 drones without any real targeting at all and 10 proper expensive drones and you need to send up 110 defenders which need to be able to track flying drones. Being the attacker will always be easier.
He wasn't wrong in that claim: for the most part the bombers did get through, especially at night. The problem was that their effectiveness once "through" was far lower than the bombing proponents had claimed, due in particular to the lack of precision, but also the resilience of both targets and the enemy population.
David Suaez in Kill Decision had swarms of small single shot drones with the targeting intelligence of ‘00 camera. Identify a face, fly towards it, fire when close. It was an implementation of quantity has a quality all its own.
"Realistically, I doubt there’s ANY system out there will be able to counter small weaponized drones that are flown manually "
Why would lasers not work?
Those cheap drones are made from plastic, if you have a laser powerful enough and a target guidance system (like a camera and a PI) - then you would just need enough of them.
At long distances the small cross section of the drone requires tight focusing (expensive optics) or a high power, preferably pulsed laser (expensive laser) or both.
Not impossible but many times more expensive than the drone
At some point it itself becomes a target. It has to be able to get almost 100% kills, otherwise the enemy can swarm it with cheap drones, destroy the expensive installation, then continue as before.
Many times more is about what it comes out to. There are some companies selling laser defense systems but they are many times more than cheap FPV drones with grenades attached.
Lasers won’t effectively work, it’s a two part equation, detection and targeting. To neutralize a target using a ground-based laser, you need an enormous power, and still it won’t penetrate a high distance/altitude in the sky, environment factors also to be considered. The detection part is even harder, these small 8in drones are almost impossible to detect unless you can hear it, aka it’s over, because they can fly at 250km/h, too small to be visually detected, acoustic sensors will fail to detect them, and radar will miss it as a false negative since it’s the size of a bird. I have seen some systems trying to combine all that to detect them plus AI for flying pattern detection, but they are far from being reliable in practical applications.
Unless you mean it just can't detect objects that small, my guess is we'll see things calibrate toward a lot more birds being cooked in active war zones vs drones with explosives being let through.
8 inches drone cannot carry much of explosive at all. In order to dump 10 kg load of explosives, you need an “agricultural drone” one that can carry 45kg, since the additional mechanisms and their batteries (and the drone’s backup batteries) are heavy.
Last week I was flying the argas! But I think you are misunderstanding, these are suicide drones not dropping the payload kind, and 8in can very well carry a deadly explosive, mostly against personnel, vehicles ones you get it bigger but not by much, from 12-18in max.
They can fly at 350kph, check this redbull drone that was used in Olympics, acceleration of 100-300kph in just two seconds faster than any F1 car. Now add a bit of payload and you get the 200-250 speed range, still crazy fast.
At very short distances and with a lot of power, perhaps. Despite what we see in movies laser beams diverge. And then with distance it’s harder to track moving objects precisely to hit the same spot long enough to melt it.
At that point might as well spend the money to use a kinetic weapon with basic tracking and ballistic calculations.
Powerful enough laser and accurate enough targeting system is easy to say, but not easypeasy to do. Dumping thousands of Joules on a tiny moving target is much easier to do with explosives.
- are cheap to shoot
- do not fall on someones head if they miss (unlike firing bullets and rockets at a drone that will come down again)
- do hit the target immediately if aimed right
Problems with lasers are, cooling, power consumption limiting mobile use - and indeed targeting and fog and clouds.
You need about 2 MJ (or 2000 Watt seconds) to boil away 1L of water. The Dragonfire ship class laser puts out 50 KW, so it would take 40 seconds to do that, assuming it can fire without pause, all of the enrgy makes it into the target, and none of it gets reflected.
This is a container sized system that needs to be mounted on a ship.
Meanwhile in Ukraine you have auto turrets made from anything ranging from heavy machineguns to old AA guns, with some added optics and/or radar, which are super cheap and you can carry them around in vans.
"let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!
Even the fastest "real-time" LLM frameworks currently report sub-second latencies around 120ms. This is fine for high-level mission planning (e.g., "fly to the red house") but too slow to prevent a drone from hitting a tree at 50mph (80 KM/h)[1]
Whilst the Shahed-136 kamikaze drone typically flies at a maximum speed of around 185 km/h (roughly 115 mph or 100 knots).
> "let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!
LLMs (Large Language Models) are far from the only type of AI around. It's a pretty broad field, and there are real-time AI systems, for example, self-driving cars, which have the response times you're thinking of. [1]
From what I can tell, Ukrainians are having some success with converting guns into automatic turrets that can track and shoot down drones via sensors, and the rifle-equivalent of birdshot.
"Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones."
That feels like a bold and unsupported assertion. Ask a pilot how they'd feel about takeoffs or landings through airspace filled with adversarial drones.
Get connected with DARPA ASAP, just to let the overlords know you are on "the right side of the fence" - - before Homeland pays you a "very uncomfortable" visit
Setting aside the DIY and hacking spirit of the project, let's remember that, with the commonly accepted figure of 2,500 kcal/day for an adult male, a whole iceberg lettuce (~600g) provides about ~87 kcal which is roughly 3.5% of what one's need.
Getting all the calories you need from (plain white) rice just about meet minimum protein needs for a sedentary lifestyle (around 50g protein). For every 100 calories of rice there are about 2.1g of protein, so for a 2000 calorie diet of just rice that would be 42g protein. But eating 10 cups of rice is a lot.
Protein-wise, an all cabbage diet would give you more if you’re meeting calorie needs - 5.1g protein per 100 calories, or 102g protein for 2000 calories worth of cabbage.. but that is a heck of a lot of cabbage (17ish lbs)!
Let’s be real though, people should be eating a varied diet and not just a single food. And perhaps not a junk food only diet.
Any issues about amino acid deficiencies from that? (as opposed to protein more generally?)
When I was growing up, there was a vogue among my fellow vegetarians for the book Diet for a Small Planet which suggested that we needed to eat a diversity of amino acids in each meal, hence "complementary" proteins at the same time. This concept then seemed to fade away completely because it appears that the body can actually successfully make use of amino acids even when consumed at different times. But they have to be consumed eventually!
This was the selling point for a Mexican cuisine staple: that rice & beans had all the complementary proteins. But, good to hear that the body does not need to have the complements in the exact same meal.
I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region
The last part when Excel is entering the story, brings memories of Joel Spolosky, AKA founder of Stack Overflow and other companies, who was one of the early team members of Excel development ---
The only thing that made it look reasonable was
that it looked great compared to Lotus macros,
which were nothing more than a sequence of
keystrokes entered as a long string into a
worksheet cell.
“I've just released a new version of typeagent, a Python library I've been working on since mid last year --more and more using Claude-- that implements memory for agents.
Not originally my idea, I mostly ported the TypeScript version by Steve Lucco and Umesh Madan. This release was improved a lot by Bernhard Merkle.
The updates shipped by apple introducing more bugs every cycle. It is across the board, macos, ios and ipad os. The fact there is a group inside apple, that is capable of standing against common sense and users best interest for so long, tells how wrong things are internally.
It is the steve balmer - satya nadella moment of apple.
1. Plugging my laptop to the same desktop screens requires rearranging displays almost every time.
2. Airdrop stops working for no apparent reason.
3. Copy paste across devices no longer a stable mechanism.
4. The stupid new preview app crashing if you scroll pdf pages too fast.
And on and on. Those are all newly introduced critical bugs i have been facing since that flameboyant liquid glass virus took over.
Apple is a sillicon valley pioneer from the generation of hewlett packard (before it was called HP) bell labs and others. Watching a decay at its beginning is mind boggling and tragic.
Also MacOS completely crashes if you have ethernet cable connected and decide to also turn on the WiFi. No "hey, choose whatever you wish" or "hey, disconnect from ethernet first" errors, just complete crash to reboot, lol.
I abandoned MacOS back in 2018 since I found it too quirky and poweruser-unfriendly (the main thing that comes to mind is neatly indicated by todays other MacOS related frontpage article on resizing). Now we can add overt instability to the list.
Unless of course you will invest 5-6 figures worth of US dollars worth of equipment, which by then you can look back and ask yourself, was I better off with Google Cloud DNS, AWS Route 53 and the likes.
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