
Real-world aimbot: The $17,000 rifle with a Linux-powered scope - Libertatea
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/145332-real-world-aimbot-the-17000-rifle-with-a-linux-powered-scope?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=real-world-aimbot-the-17000-rifle-with-a-linux-powered-scope
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rthomas6
I'd just like to point out something that nobody has addressed so far, which
is that this setup _triples_ the accurate range of the rifle compared to a
human operator. That is absolutely astonishing. If the accurate range increase
would apply to larger caliber rifles, this means that with a .50 sniper rifle,
it could be used to snipe targets almost a mile away. It wouldn't even take a
human sniper being in position.

...In fact, the $17,000 price tag is probably cheaper than training a human
sniper. I'm sure we'll see this in military use in the next 20 years.

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shpxnvz
This system in no way triples the effective range of these rifles. The "error
budget" analysis in the Army Research Laboratory report is purely estimated;
it's not based on real world observations. Unless I'm reading it wrong, the
error budget analysis is pure fiction.

Take the hit percentages from Table 5 for the .300WM - they claim a baseline
hit percentage of _only 34% at 600 yards_ which is ridiculously low. I've
directly observed marksmen shooting the (far inferior) .223 cartridge at 600
yards _with open sights_ at one of the more difficult ranges in the U.S. With
no spotting, hit percentages are consistently close to 100%.

We see snipers in operational environments getting kills _at over a mile_ with
a .338 Lapua - one of the longest was 2600 yards. According to this report,
that sniper would have had only a 4% chance of making the shot _if is was 1000
yards closer_.

I don't see any way to rectify what we see in the real world with the
conclusions from this report.

> I'm sure we'll see this in military use in the next 20 years.

The individual technologies in this new integrated scope have been available
in dedicated spotting scopes for years. The advancement here seems to be
packaging it up into a single weapon-mountable scope. I don't think there's a
whole lot of value add for this setup for the military over the separate
spotting systems currently in use.

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hga
Yow, if you're reading that correctly, then no one should be bothering to buy
.338 Lapua rifles, since their whole point is to get reliable results beyond
the 800-1200 yards you can in theory get from .30 envelope rounds like
.308/7.62 NATO and .300 WM, but without the gross overkill of .50 BMG, which
was intended for a material destruction role, not anti-personal.

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shpxnvz
Right, yet in real life we see effective use of those rounds out to double
that 1200 yard range.

And, of course, accuracy is only one part of effectiveness. Stopping power is
also important, especially in the military role, and varies greatly between
cartridges; for instance .338LM is something like 5000 ft.lbs. at the muzzle
vs. .308 which is somewhere around 2900.

Regarding .50 BMG - I'm not sure there is such thing as overkill if you're one
of those guys on a two-way range. ;)

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hga
Heh, but with 63% more muzzle energy than .338 LM ... well, I don't have to
tell you this, but for the larger audience we're talking about a heavier
weapon and more recoil, a lot more muzzle blast (more likely to be observed by
the enemy), the rounds are heavier and bigger (pxlpshr has a point about the
impracticability), etc. etc. Snipers have used it mostly because it was
available, not because it was well suited for the purpose. And of course
sometimes they're called upon to ... discretely destroy material.

They haven't caught on yet, but Barrett and others have been working on
cartridges with 400 instead of 600 grain bullets and noticeably less energy:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.416_Barrett#Muzzle_velocity>

~~~
monochromatic
I thought the .416 Barrett was basically designed to get around laws that
explicitly prohibit .50 BMG, rather than to be a superior alternative. (It's
possible I'm thinking of .408 Cheytac here though.)

~~~
hga
Partly, but since Barrett has a firm policy of not selling to jurisdictions
like California that ban civilian use of .50 BMG only so much. It's also
intended to be a superior alternative for the non-material sniping role,

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roel_v
Next step: quadcopter based delivery of a gun like this (presumably one with a
shorter or retractable barrel). Imagine: from the comfort of your office
1000's of kilometers away, you can have a gun fly out of a container, fly to
the mark's backyard, wait until he gets home, shoot him in the head, and fly
off before the cops or anyone else has a chance to even realize what happened!
I've thought about the idea several times over the last few years, way cool
that at least part of it is working. Or way scary, depending on how you look
at it.

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ricardobeat
why… have you been thinking so long about 'remote murders'?

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roel_v
Well not so much thinking about (committing) murders, more hypothesizing on
what the next logical evolution of drones would be, and how (once they have
been developed and mass-produced by the military) they will be used by
organized crime.

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hnb32
It makes me sad that software like Linux written in a benevolent co-operative
spirit ends up being used for such a purpose.

Makes you wonder if there needs to be a software license with a stipulation
along the lines of "must not be used for evil", though I guess that would need
defining.

~~~
phpnode
JSON cannot be used for evil, unless you have permission from Crockford:
<http://www.json.org/license.html>

~~~
robin_reala
Incidentally, IBM have permission from Crockford to be evil or to have evil
sublicensees: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764024>

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spindritf
More of an autofire than an aimbot. Those were used to make it more difficult
to spot a cheater in-game while watching from his point of view because the
aiming process still looked natural — the crosshair didn't magically jumped to
the target. The cheat just chose the best moment to fire.

~~~
pestaa
Wow, if online cheaters were not difficult enough to catch already! Without
client-side verification (such as PunkBuster) it sounds "even more" impossible
to distinguish between really good players and cheaters. I wonder if such
libraries are still being developed.

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prawks
Such libraries are _constantly_ being developed. There's a very large market
for cheats for online video games, especially highly competitive ones
(Counter-strike, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft).

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wtracy
Actually, for civilian (or police) purposes I'd like to see a system that lets
you mark targets that you _don't_ want to hit, then automatically prevents you
from shooting at or near them when you're aiming at your real target.

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SeanDav
What is the point, there is no skill in this....oh wait...you get to press a
button to select the target, yeah 1337 skills required for this. On the
upside, hopefully the animals will suffer less due to better accuracy on kill
zone.

Personally hunting is not my thing but I have no problem with others hunting,
this rifle, however, just seems a step too far.

~~~
wtracy
I had a similar reaction to the hunting shown in the video, but if you're
shooting for animal control purposes rather than recreation it makes more
sense.

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rthomas6
In some places in the US, deer are pests, and state conservation agents
actually shoot them to thin their numbers. Otherwise, lacking a sufficient
number of natural predators in the area, the population would explode to a
number greater than the land could handle. This would cause a significant
portion of the deer population to die of famine and disease, and cause local
flora and crops to be eaten bare.

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duck
Actually, wildlife bounties are more common than you think and are often
offered to the general public. This isn't a complete listing (as I know some
Maine counties offer bounties on coyotes and yet it isn't listed), but gives
you a general idea: <http://www.bornfreeusa.org/b4a2_bounty.php>

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binarymax
Consumer tech like this scares the crap out of me.

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monochromatic
Why?

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binarymax
An interesting question that has a very long answer, but I'll try to be brief.

As a starting point, I was raised to think guns are bad. And psychologically I
am fearful of even low tech firearms. Whether the two are related is unknown,
however the phobia is real.

This goes beyond a phobia of encountering them personally - I am fearful for
the results weapons bring upon humanity. And think that the time and energy
spent on creating instruments of destruction would be better spent elsewhere.

I understand this is marketed as a hunting rifle. I eat meat. I understand
some people like to hunt. Yet I am fearful of the repercussions of technology
like this being used outside of the realm of hunting things like deer - for
example, being used to hunt things like humans.

I am also fearful of this because it showed up at CES. It costs $17k. Its
hooked up to an iPad. I know this specific model is not rigged to fire without
manual operation. But someone with enough knowledge to hack something like
this, but not build one from scratch, can do nasty things. So in 10 or 15
years, when the price point is down, and remote servos and triggers are off
the shelf toys for the iPad8, this thing becomes a toy sentry.

I have a vivid imagination too, and some of it is dystopian future stuff. So
that probably explains a lot.

Now I have a question for you: Does this scare you? And if not, then why?

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monochromatic
Thanks for taking the time to respond. No, it doesn't scare me.

Guns in general don't scare me, because I see them as tools that generally
have a lot more positive effect than negative effect. There will always be bad
people who would do others harm, whether with guns or with something else.

If guns didn't exist in America, the next crazy person who wants to go out in
a blaze of ignominy will just drive his car into a crowd, or make homemade
explosives, or something else. Guns give the good guys a fighting chance,
leveling the playing field. And by "good guy" here I mean both the unassuming
guy who carries a concealed handgun every day (me, for example) as well as the
90-pound girl who protects herself from a home invasion. (To say nothing of
the whole defense-against-tyranny thing.)

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox about all that. This gun _in particular_
doesn't scare me because there are already far more practical and cheaper ways
to do bad things. If you want to throw servos and a camera on a rifle, you can
do that today. It doesnt need to be something that compensates for wind speed,
and you won't use a bolt-action rifle if your goal is to kill a bunch of
people remotely. Or you just build a bomb or something, like I said above.

~~~
hnb32
... and logic like this is why I'm glad I live in Europe. Please examine
recent events in your country to see how ridiculous your opinions are.

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hga
Repeating a post from a recent gun control thread, you're actually doing
noticeably worse than the US:

From Wikipedia, school shootings in Europe in this century, last two numbers
are killed and wounded:

    
    
      R., Georg, 18, Sep. 17 2009, Germany, 0, 10-15
      Kretschmer, Tim, 17, March 11, 2009, Germany, 15, 9-13
      De Gelder, Kim, 20, Jan. 16/23,, 2009, Belgium, 4, 12
      Saari, Matti Juhani, 22, Sep. 23, 2008, Finland, 10, 1-3
      Auvinen, Pekka-Eric, 18, Nov. 7, 2007, Jokela, Finland, 8, 1
      Bosse, Bastian, 18, Nov. 20, 2006, Germany, 0, 22
      Steinhäuser, Robert, 19, April 26, 2002, Germany, 16, 1
    

Other spree shootings in Europe in this century:

    
    
      Merah, Mohammed, 23,  March 11–22, 2012, Toulouse & Montauban, France, 7, 8
      Amrani, Nordine, 33,  Dec. 13, 2011, Liège, Belgium, 6, 123 (he also used grenades)
      Breivik, Anders Behring, 32, July 22, 2011, Norway, 75, 242 (a bomb killed 8)
      van der Vlis, Tristan, 24, April 9, 2011, Netherlands, 6, 17
      Radmacher, Sabine, 41, Sep. 19, 2010, Germany, 3, 18 (arson was also used)
      Bird, Derrick, 52, June 2, 2010, United Kingdom, 12, 11
      Sacco, Angelo Secondo, 54, June 28, 2005, Italy, 3, 9
      Antonello, Mauro, 40,  Oct. 15, 2002, Italy, 7
      Durn, Richard, 33,  March 27, 2002, France, 8, 19
      Selamet, Ozan, 42,  Jan. 18, 2002, Belgium, 6 (2 strangled)
      Roux-Durrafourt, Jean-Pierre, 44,  Oct. 29, 2001, France, 4, 7
      Leibacher, Friedrich, 57, Sep. 27, 2001, Switzerland, 14, 18
      Kaya, Hakan, 24,  Dec. 22, 2000, Germany, 6

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hiddenfeatures
Interesting piece of technology.

Sounds a lot like the XM-25 grenade launcher
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE>) but without the air burst grenades.

I wonder why this has not been developed by the military / government.

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zeffr
"I wonder why this has not been developed by the military / government."

They actually outlined this in the article. The reason pretty much boils down
to the fact that gear specifically for the military has to adhere to whatever
crazy shit the higher ups demand. This makes developing a proof of concept/
fully functioning, marketable device rather difficult as the costs begin to
skyrocket.

These guys took the opposite route: develop the tech, bring it to market, then
let the military get in on it if they like it.

~~~
hga
A very large fraction of the small arms optics technology that the US military
has been using in this century has followed exactly that part. Aimpoint,
EOTech, maybe others, and of course conventional scopes.

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Pezmc
Warning, don't miss this line from the story:

"If it doesn’t upset you to see animals being hunted, the video at the end of
the story gives you a good idea of how a PGF works in practice."

The video shows animals being shot!

~~~
theorique
If you're not a vegetarian, it's important to know where your food comes from
:)

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hnb32
If you're an omnivore your meat probably comes from intensively farmed animals
kept inside their entire life, before being beheaded on a conveyer belt or
shot with a bolt gun. Not by a hunter sporting the latest rifle on the open
plains.

~~~
maxerickson
The conditions in feeding operations are often fairly grim, but cattle
operations are often open (i.e., the animals are confined outdoors) and they
buy in lots of animals from breeders that feed from pasture for a year or so.

Basically, it would be more expensive to keep them inside for their entire
life, so that doesn't happen.

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anon31415933
Maybe the government should consider banning Linux. I know you guys hate this
idea but if it can be used to make weapons ...

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joelthelion
Does the military have similar technology?

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rthomas6
How could the answer possibly be no?

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joelthelion
I was just surprised to first hear about this on a civilian application.

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theorique
Cool toy. I'd love to take it out on the range for a few hundred rounds!

