I Picked this 20 years ago!

Twenty years ago I said there’d be a market for cheap anti-drone drones. I WAS RIGHT! I WAS RIGHT! I WAS RIGHT!

I was thinking about a cheap self-directing drone that just approaches the nearest drone-shaped flying thing and flies into any of the whirly things. My thought originally was just invasion of privacy by unauthorised drone operators, and it was prodded into my conscious by the appearance of slaughterbots – I found several other references to them and it started me thinking. (Oh – I should say there’s another side to the concept, with this article detailing why you shouldn’t rate them a credible threat – I present that as a bit of a ray of hope, you decide what you think…)

And I know, I just presented the “don’t worry be happy slaughterbots are very crappy” side of the debate, I must be getting less conspiratorial in my old age – but then we’ve just seen (as at October 2024) Israel has made specific batches of pagers and walkie-talkies explode and kill Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon on a signal, so I think despite the IEEE being a respected Institute of Engineers, Mr Scharre may have been perhaps pulling some wool over our eyes, or maybe just their own eyes.

Also – my time spent as a system and network administrator and protecting my employer’s network against the first of the Internet viruses and users seemingly intent on letting lowlifes into the network and plain self-destructive servers hasn’t left me hyper-vigilant – it’s left me mentally exploiting every loophole in every device and program and – pretty much everything – and then I could work out how to protect from it.

And bots and self-driving (one day, one day . . .) cars and industrial robots and – everything – gave me plenty of things to think about. When the Stuxnet virus showed how a virus could be released into the wild Internet and get onto all sorts of computers and microcontrollers and bide its time until it was on particular Siemens centrifuge controllers – but only those in Iranian nuclear facilities – we witnessed that people are devious and stop at nothing to hurt specific people they perceived as enemies.

You could say IT roles equipped me less for doing IT and more for seeing the misuses of anything… And it seemed natural to me that if someone would harrass me with a drone, I should demolish their drone with a cheap throwaway drone designed for the purpose. And now I see that Ukraine soldiers using a drone with a jousting pole to harass another drone. And it’s only a matter of time before they improve the control software to where it smooths out the wild swings and zeroes in one that tempting pusher prop…

Heck, they turned a simple recreational seacraft into a lethal remote-piloted and autonomous-capable explosive torpedo drone that caused Russia to have to withdraw their fleet into safe harbours rather than deploy them in the open. Have a look at some ingenious killer technology:

I noticed that the face recognition AI for a slaughterbot can be included on a microcontroller chip along with the camera software and the guidance program for a drone. Once you charge a drone’s battery for twenty minutes’ flight, it will stay charged for months so you have plenty of time to package a few tens to thousands of them programmed with their targets and sent to the operations area.

The video made a big deal of the fact that they could be programmed to hit particular sets of features such as Chinese or Eurasian or Melanesian – but they can do so much more. Transformers for the power grid, Army barracks, military airfields or hangars or particular aircraft. Tesla Cybertrucks. (Oh come on! Get rid of the stainless steel exploding dumpsters they’re disgusting wastes of space, metal, and technology!)

Anyway – it’s –

Doodle Time!

The image is a doodle on one of those LCD drawing pads, scanned into Paint.NET, and then comprehensively bastardised and the version turned into a triptych. Progression is (LH panel) the original scan, a neon colourised version in the middle, and a combination in the RH panel.

Since I make most of my graphics for this site I sometimes get sidetracked into little side projects like this. I sometimes start with an image created by AI, erase and overlay and add other details, sometimes by yours truly and sometimes from a photo by YT or others, never anything large, and then draw in details myself.

Because I’ve never had complete motor coordination these things are all shaky and poorly drawn lines – but they are mine.

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