African firm is selling pepper-spray bullet firing drones

I am surprised that anyone would be caught off guard by this sort of thing. After all it is going to be much more effective to fly over a crowd and shoot at them than to try to hit them from behind a riot shield.<p>The Union outrage is interesting too, mostly because I agree that as your government (or companies) acquire tools for crowd control it certainly has a chilling effect on peaceful assembly. That said I don&#x27;t see why these folks don&#x27;t have drones of their own. They were used to good effect to document some of the protests in Turkey. As the drone is probably efiltrating its video during operation it is much harder for a repressive regime to shut it down and suppress the video.

The problem with the tools we are currently seeing created is this:<p>Nigeria (for example) doesn&#x27;t derive its power from the people; but from its oil, currently being pumped by Western oil companies. The populace are simply an expense. The source of their money comes from Exxon and Shell; their military might from foreign weapons manufacturers. I know a number of people who work for said manufacturers.

Surely these won&#x27;t be too effective. They&#x27;d be easily brought down by getting anything at all (fishing wire, string, etc) fired from a makeshift catapult caught up in the rotors.<p>High tech crowd control that can be defeated with stuff you&#x27;ve got lying around in the kitchen doesn&#x27;t seen too useful.

Side note: I&#x27;m always a little bothered when people attribute something from &quot;Africa&quot;. Africa has 54 countries, c&#x27;mon people

WTF. Blinding lasers aren&#x27;t even allowed in combat during war, they&#x27;re considered inhumane and banned under international law.

Unfortunately, I can imagine militarized police departments all over the U.S. getting excited about these kinds of anti-crowd weapons.

For a mining (or any) company to buy this to control workers is reprehensible, and it&#x27;s rather shocking that they would publicize this as their first order. They could have just as easily said that an undisclosed buyer has purchased the first 25 of them. It&#x27;s as if they are trying to market this as a slave-control copter.<p>However, this makes me wonder why we don&#x27;t have small military drones with guns on them. It seems like they only have the large missile carriers and tiny surveillance drones. Something in the middle that is armed would eliminate most soldier-to-soldier battlefield confrontations. They could just send several small armed drones out and fire at their opposition with near perfect accuracy for every bullet since a computer would control the aiming and firing.

<i>&quot;Desert Wolf&#x27;s website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second.&quot;</i><p>If they sell this in the US our company paintball outings might get a little more interesting.

If I were a manager at the mining company that purchased the drones, I would be worried about retaliation in kind by workers who obtained a similar drone.

Technical solutions to people problems.

While I&#x27;m absolutely against using this kind of technology on peaceful civilians, I think it would be interesting to see autonomous non-lethal or less-than-lethal weapons deployed against actual terrorists. Not only would it virtually eliminate the risk of collateral damage, it would also allow us to capture and interrogate them.

Fuck that and fuck you assholes who are excited about this torture weapon, it&#x27;s gonna be used against people! The first order was probably for a mining company in Amazon, to torture the locals who defend their land against fucking mining companies. And soon, it&#x27;s gonna be used everywhere in the world against people protesting for rights.<p>Lots of people lost their lives, lots of people lost their eyes by pepper gas bullets this year, including this 15 years old kid: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Berkin_Elvan" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Death_of_Berkin_Elvan</a><p>See this documentary: <a href="http://www.worldpressphoto.org/multimedia-gallery/2014/witnessing-gezi" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldpressphoto.org&#x2F;multimedia-gallery&#x2F;2014&#x2F;witne...</a>

They should send the drone to defcon this year to compete in defconbots (defconbots.org).

I can&#x27;t wait until someone builds a working ManHack. Only a matter of time at this rate.