I used to be someone who did programming outside of work, but I don't have time with a kid, and further I don't really want to spend time fixing anything electronic any longer. I just use a console for gaming, my computer sits unused and I only use my work pc for work, so I barely even go on the internet.
Parenthood takes a lot of time, and I fear I'll never be able to find a new job because i don't have time to jump through interview hoops.
I'll certainly never work at Google or wherever, because they interview for so long and have so many requirements that it's impossible for me to even think about applying. The tech interview process is openly hostile to parents.
Would you want to fire several hundred kilos of tungsten in a random direction while you're next to the USA coast, where civilians and shipping pass by all the time?
Edit: as a reply, since I can't post faster:
CIWS, in certain modes, do indeed track a target and fire at it, which could be considered a "random direction" when considering the maneuverability of the target.
I would think CIWS systems don't fire in random directions. Anyway if these were just small drones that would probably be overkill, I would think a shotgun would be sufficient.
No submarine can come this close to the coast without being detected. Especially not in this area, there's huge numbers of Navy ships there 24-7 due to training, and all of them are using passive sonar all the time due to that training.
Folks, there are very strict conditions under which a Navy ship can use weapons, and some unknown aircraft isn't gonna be a situation that they're going to open fire. You could be shooting some moron in an ultralight or some kids science project or whatever.
The US Navy is a professional organization, not some scared cops who shoot first and ask questions later.
Edit: I'm done here, but please stop all the military fantasy where everything is a threat and needs to be shot. This was like 50 miles from the coast of the USA, not Iran or NK.
I'm a former SWO qualified Naval officer, as stated elsewhere I believe. I vouched your comment just to reply, because it's important to be correct. I'm not going into details about anything else, I've gone into detail elsewhere about this topic already.
You come here to comment rudely, well outside your supposed SWO naval officer context, but without demonstrating evidence of any qualification in a relevant and visible context, and others are the idiots for doubting such absurdly terse replies on a technology site where explanation and questions are par for the course among many types of technical experts? Is being a socially clueless asshole part of your qualification requisites as well?
Yes, and every officer since then has been drilled not to do such mistakes. The military fucks up like this sometimes, but that's one event out of millions of miles steamed.
Not defending this event, those sailors should have been court martialed, but your snarky comment didn't add anything.
No one is going be the CO the opens fire on a non combatant drone on the USA coast, as you'd lose your command pretty fast.
Edit: I can't post faster, so here's a response to a reply:
I didn't peruse the logs myself, so I don't know the situation, but the rules of engagement are pretty strict, and also they may not have even had ordnance onboard for the weapons needed to take out one of these things. Not every ship carries live rounds all the time, and near the USA coast we pretty much never wanted to have loaded guns.
Like I said elsewhere, the US Navy isn't a bunch of untrained psychos looking to shoot stuff. Officers and enlisted are trained to put our lives on the line, not get scared and shoot everything that looks weird or threatening.
What's surprising to people is the fact that rules of engagement are inconsistent across government entities. E.g., when you think of local police, people characterize firearm usage in a way that is not measured or protocol-driven. So people are substituting the experiences they're familiar with, and applying them (incorrectly) in a naval context.
This is probably it, even between branches there are major differences, the Navy and Air Force both tend to be more educated than the ground forces which tend to attract soldiers and Marines who want to play Battlefield games in real life.
This is how untrained people think. This particular group (the people who frequent this site) would probably want to know, quite strongly, what the craft are trying to do, and who was piloting them.
It was probably russia fucking with us from a submarine nearby.
Nobody knows for sure, however the most plausible explanation put forward is neurological side effects of a banned pesticide being sprayed heavily in the embassy compound to combat Zika. They found the same pesticide was in use in Guangzhou, where diplomatic personnel complained of the same issues.
If anyone (with sufficient resources) can send a drone swarm to go harass, or worse, anyone, including the US Navy, and there's nothing that can be done about it then eventually I think something quite bad is going to happen.
It reminds me of 9/11. Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.
I wouldn't be surpised if there are over 50k individuals in the US with the electronics/computer knowledge to pull this off. All it takes is one person to develop an obsession with it and spend the time needed to pull it off. If you look at a 10-20 year time frame I'd say there's a high certaintity that someone commits a terror attack via a large number of drone.
The saving grace here is that people who want to terrorise often aren't the same with these skills IMO. If you have the skill/knowledge to make a drone swarm you probably have other valuable skills, have a good job and live comfortably. Lower chances of radicalisation.
You're looking at it backwards. Some of those who are already radicalized have the background and mental capacity that they could learn the knowledge needed to pull this off. Al Qaeda didn't radicalize pilots; they sent radicals to flight school.
You're right. We're probably going to see an attack on a stadium full of people that involves a drone swarm crop dusting the crowd with a combination of pesticides and nail bombs.
It's gonna suck to see the end of outdoor music shows in our life time. :-/
I dont think its clear that nothing can be done, its just that nothing was done. Going weapons hot with military anti aircraft guns within a few miles of civilian ships and aircraft is probably not something that any sane officer is going to order, unless there is a safety of life issue.
> Everyone knew that crashing commercial aircraft could cause a great deal of destruction but somehow we could never prepare for such a scenario until it actually happened.
Interestingly and off topic, the same lock that is intended to prevent take over of a plane, was used by a pilot to crash the plane and kill all 150 people [1]:
> The crash was caused deliberately by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared "unfit to work" by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, he locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft impacted a mountainside.
Are we not? Current protocols eliminate almost all chances of taking over a plane with box cutters. People now know what is up and will risk a laceration to take out some homeboys when they know it means certain death if they don't
So serious question from an operational perspective: One of these drones were over the helipad, which I would have assumed would be considered 'controlled airspace'... If they knock down drones that go over airports, why not over a military vessel's airspace?
Or is it not considered restricted airspace if not in use? etc
Conditions off the Californian coast are different to a Straight of Hormuz transit. Every deployment will have command guidance, RoE, threat briefings, maintain a picture of possible threats etc. A ship doing routine training is probably under default 'self defence' rules. And no CO wants to be the one to mistakenly blast some civilians into pink mist.
Experience shows that mistakenly blasting some civilians into pink mist doesn't mean anything if those civilians aren't white US citizens on US soil...
You can certainly choose to believe this, but it is wrong.
What you are referring to is choosing to blow something up based on a systematic approach that follows the laws of armed conflict, with frequent legal oversight, separate after action review, in a system that strongly punishes failure to follow process. This system is fully endorsed by the US Congress, representing the citizenry.
So if some civilians get blown up, 9/10 it was a deliberate decision.
Rogers certainly got off lightly, as did the system that promoted him, and the US has to own that, along with all the other atrocities. The US pays in a thousand ways they choose not to account for -- the guilty have externalised the costs.
Shooting down unaccounted for drones isn't bloodlust, it's common sense. They should have taken down at least a couple of them to try and ascertain what's going on, how can you defend against something that you don't understand.
I don't understand that mentality. At the very least I would think they would be considered a security risk since they could be spying on sensitive systems. It's not like we're talking about manned aircraft here.
Same mentality that would fire a CIO whose breach mitigation strategy was to unplug a couple computers in the "server room" - its a nonsensical reaction that only demonstrates your lack of knowledge and your inability to recognize your lack of knowledge, you're not going to get much out of hand ordnance in a situation like this
I don't see any real similarity between those two situations.
There aren't any details in the article on the size of the drones or their distance but I think a destroyer would have a wide range of weapons available from which to choose the appropriate level of response.
Doing nothing and hoping it goes away doesn't seem like the wisest response to this type of incident.
Not trolling you, genuinely trying to bridge a communication gap I see both sides of: they, and I, reacted literally to I think what you meant to be hyperbole, i.e. by saying "Surely one of the people on the deck with a shotgun could have a go at it without revealing too much secret information", you meant to say "why didn't they take any aggressive action?":
The other comments speak to various factors why it was more complicated, and just affirming that decision wouldn't have enabled action, TL;DR: you don't start throwing $500K missiles at lights 1,000 feet above deck when you're right off the coast of the US, and also we don't have nearly all the info here, just a subset of a subset of docs that got through via FOIA two years ago, you can safely assume that would have been considered at the time
To be fair, they equip the SNOOPIE team w/ COTS, hand held video cameras rather than installing some sophisticated, centrally managed surveillance camera system. OTOH, it's much less dangerous for a bunch sailors to run around on deck with cameras than with shotguns.
The problem is when you make a mistake and now an Iranian plane is in the water. Part of the job of the armed forces is that they stand and handle the risk far more intelligently than we would, i.e. they don't react in terror constantly.
Three responses up though someone is just suggesting that a sailor with a shotgun could take down one of the drones that was hovering close over the helipad.
That negates the possibility of misidentifying a plane as a drone, or hitting anything unintended, or of any risk of taking down a plane at all.
There's a wide gulf of responses between that and firing off an anti-aircraft missile in a "using a bazooka as a flyswatter" kind of application.
There's no marines onboard a destroyer, and no one is shooting anything that hasn't shot first when you're in that area, it's full of Navy training platforms and civilians.
Based on the flight times and 100 mile flights ~100 miles off the coast and the investigated boats in the area...they couldn't be small. At least not with current consumer battery technology. Maybe if they were launched by a sub?
There's a youtuber that has a multi-hour autonomous drone, but it's solar powered and this was at night.
I hope they give you a nice bonus for trying to fall on the sword so honorably, but even if no one else read your post before you posted it then that's still a leadership failure, frankly.
> It sounds like you got your arse kicked for being a jerk. Oops.
People say things like this about people who get killed by cops for minor offenses and such. I think people shouldn't be jerks, and should learn from mistakes, but this sounds more like revenge than a true reckoning. If the guy did something illegal, that's one thing, call the cops. He shitposted right wing crap, that's just idiocy maybe, but not illegal.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, I never got that phrase until recently.
Why not just fake stuff? If you give software no file permissions, show it an empty dir. Tell the software you saved it's file but don't, just keep it in an memory overlay just for that program's run. If it wanted the network, give it a dummy net.
Easy, show a pop-up informing the user that the application tried to access so and so file, and if this was intentional, please click allow and try again.
When the sandbox works as it should, the application has no idea that so and so file even exists.
The flatpak portals are trusted system components, that work outside the sandbox and can present some choosers, where the user picks what will eventually become accessible inside sandbox, if the user agrees (whether files via file choosers, microphones, cameras, desktop sharing, whatever). The sandboxed processes talks to the these portal via IPC (dbus, normally).
The thing is, that outside of standard gtk3 and qt5 apps, nothing else uses portals yet (and gtk3 with qt5 do that at framework level, so it's transparent for the apps). You cannot sandbox random electron app, for example, and expect that it will work just like it worked when it was installed via deb or rpm. And with files, it is just not single files (document apps are relatively easy), but imagine opening project file inside IDE or playlist inside media player: the project or playlist was picked by the user and can be opened by the app, but it contains references to other files, potentially hundreds of them. Can you imagine asking the user to confirm opening each and every one of the hundreds of files?
And then there were people complaining that their locally installed SDKs cannot be used from sandboxed IDEs. Sigh, that's kind of the point...
As an counterargument, see all the comments to this article.
Most people here comment on something they have exactly zero idea about how the security model works, how the transition (i.e. holes in the sandbox and the reasoning behind them) works and what is the intended end-result (portals).
Very similar. Either complaining about non problems, or complaining about some default they can change, or suggesting solutions that are over-complicated and simultaneously inadequate anyway.
Same underlying reason, except it is worse, because it is in the quadrant "they think they know, and they really don't".
Parenthood takes a lot of time, and I fear I'll never be able to find a new job because i don't have time to jump through interview hoops.
I'll certainly never work at Google or wherever, because they interview for so long and have so many requirements that it's impossible for me to even think about applying. The tech interview process is openly hostile to parents.