The neighborhood drone wars have begun
Posted by: Jon on 06/13/2013 12:51 PM
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All the news about the Government spying on us is enough to to have some people cut the power and sit in the middle of the living room with a cute little tin foil anti-thought reading hat on, but did we forgot about our peeping neighbor in the interim? You know the geeky RC enthusiast who seems just a little creepy ala peeping tom?
We shouldn't forget about them, as the occurrence of using drones to spy on you by your creepy, geeky, RC loving, peeping tom of a neighbor are up.
Seattle pi notes that just last month a story of a drone hovering just outside a third-story window of a Capitol Hill home with cameras sending images back to the drone’s operator sent collective shivers down spines last month.
“This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing “research”. We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.”
The big question – besides how’s that guy get the nerve? – is “Can people using drones be legally or otherwise stopped from spying on into their homes?”
Well there seems to be an answer, at least for part of that question in the works by a company called DroneShield. The defense system would essentially be able to identify an airborne surveillance vehicle by the sound signature that it produces, and provide an alert.
The system includes a microphone that listens for sounds of drones. Each DroneShield contains a database of common drone acoustic signatures so false alarms are reduced (IE ignores lawn mowers and leaf blowers) and in many cases the type of drone is also included in the alert.
The goal of this initial campaign is to create a low-cost device that will help protect privacy against RC helicopters and quadrotors with video cameras; we already have a working prototype running on a laptop. The Indiegogo campaign will port that code to a small low-cost hardware platform that you can plug in and forget about. If you like you can periodically update the signatures of the drones we scan for, or even contribute your own signatures to the database.
This is all fine and dandy, so you know that the drone is there watching you, but then what to do? I am thinking that maybe some way of deactivating or perhaps jamming the RC signal, causing the the aerial peeper to crash, you could then hold the drone ransom, perhaps mount it on the wall as a trophy, just a thought.
We shouldn't forget about them, as the occurrence of using drones to spy on you by your creepy, geeky, RC loving, peeping tom of a neighbor are up. Seattle pi notes that just last month a story of a drone hovering just outside a third-story window of a Capitol Hill home with cameras sending images back to the drone’s operator sent collective shivers down spines last month.
“This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing “research”. We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.”
The big question – besides how’s that guy get the nerve? – is “Can people using drones be legally or otherwise stopped from spying on into their homes?”
Well there seems to be an answer, at least for part of that question in the works by a company called DroneShield. The defense system would essentially be able to identify an airborne surveillance vehicle by the sound signature that it produces, and provide an alert.
The system includes a microphone that listens for sounds of drones. Each DroneShield contains a database of common drone acoustic signatures so false alarms are reduced (IE ignores lawn mowers and leaf blowers) and in many cases the type of drone is also included in the alert.
The goal of this initial campaign is to create a low-cost device that will help protect privacy against RC helicopters and quadrotors with video cameras; we already have a working prototype running on a laptop. The Indiegogo campaign will port that code to a small low-cost hardware platform that you can plug in and forget about. If you like you can periodically update the signatures of the drones we scan for, or even contribute your own signatures to the database.
This is all fine and dandy, so you know that the drone is there watching you, but then what to do? I am thinking that maybe some way of deactivating or perhaps jamming the RC signal, causing the the aerial peeper to crash, you could then hold the drone ransom, perhaps mount it on the wall as a trophy, just a thought.
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