Microsoft and DJI announce new Windows 10 SDK

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Sweet.
I wonder how long it will be before I can conduct flights from my laptop, ideally with a wireless controller :)
 
Don't get me wrong here... I speak as someone with three decades of IT experience and whose living revolves mostly around Windows and I'm the last person to start an OS war against the platform. It's generally not deserved. The platform is no more or less buggy and no more or less susceptible to hacking than its competition.

But if I had a financial interest in DJI I'd be nervous about this. The Windows platform is so much more of a malware magnet compared to IOS, Linux or Android and The Great Unwashed are sometimes a special kind of, well, naive, who hardly need to be "hacked" and who would eagerly click through the most dire warnings to willingly and eagerly install something that promises to show them a free video. I'd hate to see a spike in fly-away events and the like due to someone using a control device that's been pwned for the last two years and has been elemental in three botnets and fourteen million spam emails.

Oh, and here's a very slightly relevant article that popped into my Farcebook feed today from a peer of mine... (mostly because it mentioned drones)

Microsoft’s obsession with Windows is ending, and I couldn’t be happier

Fly safe, kids! ;)
 
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The platform is no more or less buggy and no more or less susceptible to hacking than its competition.

This statement just about contradicts the rest of your argument.
If both are equally as susceptible to hacking and the target is drones, then why would they choose one OS over the other?
Given the variables you presented, there is no reason.

That's like having a choice of two identical doors by which you can reach an intended destination in the same amount of time, except one is blue and the other white. Why choose one over the other if your goal is to reach the target?
 
This statement just about contradicts the rest of your argument.
If both are equally as susceptible to hacking and the target is drones, then why would they choose one OS over the other?
Given the variables you presented, there is no reason.

That's like having a choice of two identical doors by which you can reach an intended destination in the same amount of time, except one is blue and the other white. Why choose one over the other if your goal is to reach the target?
It's the people who are susceptible, more than the platform.

Look, I have customers who require visits three time a year. I hate to call them idiots, as many of them are successful business owners, managers, etc. While at any given time I have a half dozen or more PC -based systems of my own in use by myself and my wife and we've never gotten infected by anything, and we do a LOT of web surfing. I won't even tell you about some of the web surfing I do! My mom has been using PCs for three decades and has never picked up anything harmful. Same with my brother.

To be fair, I did get hit by a drive-by (from a malvertising attack against a zero-day Java and/or Acrobat vector I think it was, no direct fault of the owner of Storage Review) many years ago but it failed because I was using NT 4.0 and the hack was designed for Windows 2000. LOL.

You're also assuming that the target is drones. I never said it was. But if you're flying while a hacker is trying to use your laptop or tablet as part of a DDOS network, spam generator or relay or click revenue generator, and all your network traffic is being hijacked and your DNS calls are being redirected, do you really believe that's going to be harmless?

It's not even a matter of PC users being any more ditzy than Mac, 'Droid, etc. users. There are far more PC users, so there are more attacks designed to exploit PC users. It's that simple. Mostly, anyway. I've noticed that when Mac users see notices to install patches and updates, they usually do so promptly, while PC users have a far greater tendency to ignore them. As a result they wind up getting hit by exploits against outdated OS components or against Java, Acrobat, etc. much more often.

I personally would not have any hesitation to use a Windows box.

I would definitely hesitate to have some of my customers use Windows. But sometimes they have no choice. The software they're required to use is only available in Windows. Here we do have choices.

I hope this makes everything sufficiently clear.
 
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I hope this makes everything sufficiently clear.

Dude, don't assume you know the credentials of the people you're replying to, just because this a drone-focused forum.
I've been supporting Windows-based networks since NT 3.51 and Netware 3.x. (former MCSE and CNE) The subject is matter is more than perfectly clear; your presentation, however, was muddy.
 
I made no assumptions. Sorry you feel my presentation was lacking.

And I kind of miss Netware. ;)

Then again I also miss VMS and RSTS.

EDIT: Spare me the "dude" stuff. We're both too old for that!
 
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Don't get me wrong here... I speak as someone with three decades of IT experience and whose living revolves mostly around Windows and I'm the last person to start an OS war against the platform. It's generally not deserved. The platform is no more or less buggy and no more or less susceptible to hacking than its competition.

But if I had a financial interest in DJI I'd be nervous about this. The Windows platform is so much more of a malware magnet compared to IOS, Linux or Android and The Great Unwashed are sometimes a special kind of, well, naive, who hardly need to be "hacked" and who would eagerly click through the most dire warnings to willingly and eagerly install something that promises to show them a free video. I'd hate to see a spike in fly-away events and the like due to someone using a control device that's been pwned for the last two years and has been elemental in three botnets and fourteen million spam emails.

Oh, and here's a very slightly relevant article that popped into my Farcebook feed today from a peer of mine... (mostly because it mentioned drones)

Microsoft’s obsession with Windows is ending, and I couldn’t be happier

Fly safe, kids! ;)
The custom code that would be running on the drone would not be running Windows. The Azure IoT code would run on the Linux OS that DJI uses for their drones. The drone demo the \\Build keynote was pretty cool. They flew a DJI drone over some pipes and code running on the drone identified fault areas with the pipes.

As for the malware angle, on the client side, the SDK is for Windows 10 apps. To distribute Windows 10 apps, you need to place them in the public app store or an enterprise app store. To sideload them, you'll need to sign them and the destination computer would need to accept that certificate before allowing the install of the app. For applications like this, you could just run Windows 10 S, which only allows apps from the public/private stores. It's a lot harder to get malware on the device when everything is running out of a secure sandbox.
 
The custom code that would be running on the drone would not be running Windows. The Azure IoT code would run on the Linux OS that DJI uses for their drones. The drone demo the \\Build keynote was pretty cool. They flew a DJI drone over some pipes and code running on the drone identified fault areas with the pipes.

As for the malware angle, on the client side, the SDK is for Windows 10 apps. To distribute Windows 10 apps, you need to place them in the public app store or an enterprise app store. To sideload them, you'll need to sign them and the destination computer would need to accept that certificate before allowing the install of the app. For applications like this, you could just run Windows 10 S, which only allows apps from the public/private stores. It's a lot harder to get malware on the device when everything is running out of a secure sandbox.
My concern is strictly client-side.

I have deservedly little trust in users.

I just had a friend of mine with Windows 10 show up with her laptop, twice in three weeks. A Chrome vulnerability and something odd going on with Yahoops! Mail. Smart gal. Doctor. Amazing endocrinologist. Go figure...

What's even more worrisome is there are folks who are pwned and don't even know it. "My PC is slow - must be Windows - darn that Bill Gates" {sigh}

At work we still get occasional issues with a worm that's ten years old, hitting machines on an isolated network. And I'm pretty sure it's my boss who is responsible but he won't hand over his USB sticks.

We have anti-virus PCs here we call "scrubbers". We're supposed to put our USB sticks in them first before putting them into any mission-critical stuff. In an epic example of irony, last November one scrubber had to be rebuilt because it caught a virus (or viruses) so bad that it/they couldn't be removed.

It will be interesting to see the market penetration and usage trends of 10S, which is hardly without its caveats.

Thanks for the summary,
-"Andy"
 
My concern is strictly client-side.

I have deservedly little trust in users.....
-"Andy"
You hit the problem right on the head, it's a people problem. The market for this sort of thing is for commercial use and you would hope that the usual anti-malware precautions are in place.
 
You hit the problem right on the head, it's a people problem. The market for this sort of thing is for commercial use and you would hope that the usual anti-malware precautions are in place.
Commercial? I work for a Fortune 100.

Yeah, the people, indeed. We send out phishing emails to the employees regularly to see who bites, and the fish we catch are an eye-opener. That of course is the tip of an iceberg full of careless surfing, folks bringing in flash memory with unauthorized software, folks plugging their phones into any USB port they can find, anyplace, etc. etc. etc.

And the malware landscape just gets more and more sophisticated, aggressive and difficult to keep up with.

The tools are in place, but they are by no means any guarantee.
 
Commercial? I work for a Fortune 100.

Yeah, the people, indeed. We send out phishing emails to the employees regularly to see who bites, and the fish we catch are an eye-opener. That of course is the tip of an iceberg full of careless surfing, folks bringing in flash memory with unauthorized software, folks plugging their phones into any USB port they can find, anyplace, etc. etc. etc.

And the malware landscape just gets more and more sophisticated, aggressive and difficult to keep up with.

The tools are in place, but they are by no means any guarantee.
Interesting points, but a bit OT from the start of this thread. If the concern that malware is going to take control over a drone based on code from the Windows SDK, then I think you can make that extremely difficult from your own code. If you are writing code based on that SDK that runs on Windows 10 and controls a drone running your IoT code, then that malware is going to need to know how both parts of your app work in order to intercept and take control.
 
Interesting points, but a bit OT from the start of this thread. If the concern that malware is going to take control over a drone based on code from the Windows SDK, then I think you can make that extremely difficult from your own code. If you are writing code based on that SDK that runs on Windows 10 and controls a drone running your IoT code, then that malware is going to need to know how both parts of your app work in order to intercept and take control.
Yeah, topic drift. Internet. Quelle suprise!

As I attempted to clarify before, I worry not about malware targeting drones (though that opinion could change as the industrial use landscape evolves - coughStuxnet), but about malware disturbing the normal operation of a control device (as it often does) and randomly causing drone damage as a result.
 
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Don't get me wrong here... I speak as someone with three decades of IT experience and whose living revolves mostly around Windows and I'm the last person to start an OS war against the platform. It's generally not deserved. The platform is no more or less buggy and no more or less susceptible to hacking than its competition.

But if I had a financial interest in DJI I'd be nervous about this. The Windows platform is so much more of a malware magnet compared to IOS, Linux or Android and The Great Unwashed are sometimes a special kind of, well, naive, who hardly need to be "hacked" and who would eagerly click through the most dire warnings to willingly and eagerly install something that promises to show them a free video. I'd hate to see a spike in fly-away events and the like due to someone using a control device that's been pwned for the last two years and has been elemental in three botnets and fourteen million spam emails.

Oh, and here's a very slightly relevant article that popped into my Farcebook feed today from a peer of mine... (mostly because it mentioned drones)

Microsoft’s obsession with Windows is ending, and I couldn’t be happier

Fly safe, kids! ;)
From your IT experience can you point me to an android emulator so I can use DJI Go on a windows tablet without jeopardizing flying my Phantom 3 SE. I currently use an android tablet but it does not fit well on the P3 SE controller and my windows tablet would sit more securely.
 
From your IT experience can you point me to an android emulator so I can use DJI Go on a windows tablet without jeopardizing flying my Phantom 3 SE. I currently use an android tablet but it does not fit well on the P3 SE controller and my windows tablet would sit more securely.
My IT experience tells me to use Google...

LMGTFY

Or the search engine of your personal preference, of course.

No matter what you choose, you will want to make sure the emulation layer doesn't impact performance enough to interfere with flight control.
 
From your IT experience can you point me to an android emulator so I can use DJI Go on a windows tablet without jeopardizing flying my Phantom 3 SE. I currently use an android tablet but it does not fit well on the P3 SE controller and my windows tablet would sit more securely.
Google's own Android Emulator runs pretty well on the current version of Windows 10. You'll need to install either HAXM or Hyper-V to get any sort of performance from the emulator. While it should work, you'll want a fast Windows tablet/
 
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