There’s a reason consumer drones have evolved from an expensive toy into a tool of war: They can perform high-altitude surveillance, carry out reconnaissance, or even deploy weapons, with their operator safely hidden as far as miles away. But hackers are revealing that for quadcopters sold by the world’s biggest drone manufacturer, operators aren’t nearly as hidden as they might think. In fact, these small flying machines are continually broadcasting their pilots’ exact locations from the sky, and anyone with some cheap radio hardware and a newly released software tool can eavesdrop on those broadcasts and decode them to extract their coordinates.
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