jaseg
Joined 14 years ago
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380
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18
Member since
Aug 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
In addition to sensor-based collision avoidance you would probably want some means of communication between the drones so they can choose non-colliding flight paths in advance.
In the altitude these drones will be flying most of the regular traffic probably is composed of helicopters. For those Amazon could easily provide some means of requesting a temporary drone no-flight zone.
Comment · 13 years ago
I think tree branches will be a rather large problem for these drones since you need a pretty high resolution 3D sensor to accurately detect them.
GPS is most certainly not enough for navigation next to a building since you can hardly get an accuracy below 5m. I would bet on navigation by computer vision and 3D sensors.
Another interesting aspect of this is the choice of location where to drop the package. You certainly would not appreciate finding your emergency math textbook in the middle of your flower bed. This could for example be solved by setting up delivery spots in advance, or perhaps by using human judgement through something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Comment · 13 years ago
Instead of a battery-powered beacon you would likely use fiducials [0].
The issue I see with delivery to windows is all the clutter that is commonly found in front of windows such as power lines, tree branches etc. since that cannot yet be easily detected with computer vision and inexpensive 3D sensors.
Comment · 13 years ago
I don't think so. The PRNG will at least be less biased.
Comment · 13 years ago
I would seriously advise anybody from using this device. Designing a hardware true random number generator takes a lot of effort that this design is evidently lacking. For example, there is no whitening whatsoever. Even worse, the firmware includes a line of code that ensures that the "RNG" never outputs the same "random" number twice in a row.
Also, usually HW RNGs include a firmware module that is constantly monitoring the entropy output and shutting off the generator in case of it sinking below a certain threshold to detect hardware failure and prevent it from causing predictable output.
Some more information on this subject can be found at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat... I do not want to discourage anybody from working on such things. I think this is a nice project idea and a very good opportunity to learn a lot about random numbers. Please, though, always put a big warning on any crypto things you designed youself and do not present them as a finished product.
[edit]s/such a/this/1[/edit]
Comment · 13 years ago
They claim to be a "non-profit" organization organizing community events.
I think it was not very intelligent on their part to (according to their post) try to finance themselves by effectively trademark-trolling community events.
Comment · 14 years ago
When you allow less common tools to be used, one could use the bash or zsh read-builtin to read the master password without echoing (e.g. dash's read can not do that) and use xclip or similar to directly put the password into the X clipboard. With xclip's -l option you could even automagically "forget" the clipboard after it was pasted once.
Comment · 14 years ago
Though that would be hard to do in a one-line shell script, which was the idea behind the gist.
Comment · 14 years ago
I have added a link to your comment to the gist in the warning.
Comment · 14 years ago
The python scripts to generate the repository from the xmls freely available from the german government is also on github:
https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze-tools
So, go ahead, hack! ;)
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