A Gazillion-Dollar Standoff over Two High-Frequency Trading Towers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloombergquint.com/bq-blue-exclusive/the-gazillion-dollar-standoff-over-two-high-frequency-trading-towers <comment><USER2> I was working in HFT myself, though in Europe, and I asked around about this. Specifically WTF do they do with this line from Chicago to New York that's so insanely important?

The US market has this interesting phenomenon that the futures trade in Chicago, but the single stocks trade in New York. For those who are not familiar, this means you can make a bet on the S&P 500 index as a whole in Chicago by buying or selling futures. But if you wanted to replicate the basket, you would go to New York.

Naturally there's a relationship between the two. If the futures are going down, the prices of all the stocks needs to be adjusted. And if you look at stock prices, it turns out quite a lot of any stock price is simply exposure to the market at large. So you really want to know as soon as possible if the market is moving.

Now you might have thought that the index is the index of shares, which is in NYC, so why does it matter what Chicago thinks? Well actually the tail wags the dog in this case. The futures are how people express a view on which way the index is going, and you want to know that view immediately.

How does it actually work? Variants on "if the market goes down, pull all your bid orders". Basically if things are fine you are happy to look at queue position and imbalance as an indicator of whether you want to leave orders to capture spread with. But the moment there's an indication from Chicago that the market is dipping, you forget that and pull your orders. Or if you're really fast dump a sell order on the guy behind you in the queue.

There's a huge amount of stock trading in NY each day, so it's worth your while to have this line that you use to send the warnings down.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this explanation. I previously thought the distance fight was over being closest to the NASDAQ co-location building in New York, not connecting Chicago and New York.

I am still not clear why microwave is faster than fiber though. Is it simply that the fiber lines are multi-tenant, so there is not a direct hop?

<comment><USER4> Microwave signals travel from the transmitter to the receiver in a straight line. Whereas light bounces off the walls of the fibre optics cable, which increases the distance. Furthermore, the material that fibre optics are made out of attenuates the signal much stronger than air, so you have to place more repeaters and electronics in between your endpoints.

<comment><USER5> > light bounces off the walls of the fibre optics cable

This is true of multimode fibre, but not single mode. Long haul communications cables are single mode.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single- mode_optical_fiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-mode_optical_fiber)

<comment><USER6> Even for multimode fiber it's a huge simplification of the actual physics. The actual cause of the speed difference, for both single and multimode fibers, is the index of refraction of glass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain to me the purpose of HFT? Not the economic incentive, I get that, but what does it accomplish? Is it a net benefit to the system? If we arbitrarily limited transactions to human speed would there be some kind of systemwide downside? Are there any good, human readable papers on the benefits of HFT?

<comment><USER8> In theory the liquidity created by HFT lowers the cost of capital and increases economic growth. Whether it creates a net benefit relative to the profits it sucks out of the system is unknown. It would be quite difficult to obtain the data necessary to make that calculation, and all of the second- order effects would be complex to model.

<comment><USER9> I think that a good way to estimate the benefit would be to compare how much less money HFT sucks out of the system than its predecessors.

<comment><USER8> Lots of other things have also changed since then. It's impossible to isolate the independent variables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know when we'll have practical long-distance neutrino transmitters [1], but I'll bet someday the implementation will be bankrolled by HFT firms.

Why go around the Earth when you can go straight through it?

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2012-03-wireless-message- neutrinos.htm...](https://phys.org/news/2012-03-wireless-message- neutrinos.html)

<comment><USER11> I think when we get into cool near sci fi stuff we'll have faster than light communication pretty soon with quantum entanglement effects, which should be way easier to wrangle than neutrinos.

<comment><USER12> Quantum entanglement cannot transmit information faster than light unless contemporary physics is very very wrong.

Neutrinos may be hard to use but they at least known to be physically possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I work in HFT as a quant dev

I am proud of my work and find HFT to be an interesting intersection of computer science, math, game theory, economics, and psychology

As far as the societal benefit of HFT, I think that it is neutral. It doesn't hurt anybody. It might even help a little bit (liquidity and tight spreads save people a little money and maybe spur some economic growth).

However, this particular aspect (the physical latency war) makes me literally sick to my stomach. I hate reading about it and I hate thinking about it. It's like -- what are we even doing here guys?

<comment><USER14> It's only neutral (at best) if you don't consider opportunity cost. Is the best way for the country/society/humanity to deploy a bunch of smart people with a decade and a half of education truly an attempt to try to cheat the speed of light? If trades took 2x as long to execute as they currently do, what exactly would be the harm?

<comment><USER15> Even supposing that HFT adds no value to society (which is an incorrect assumption as many commenters have already pointed out), this particular argument is pretty inane in my opinion.

There are perhaps 4-8 significant players in the HFT space, all employing anywhere between a few hundred to a thousand people. Probably less than 5000 people total, and if you only include programmers and quants, maybe less than 2000. Google alone has 30000 programmers. How many of them are optimizing ads for eyeballs vs "benefiting the country/society/humanity"? What about the thousands of programmers making video games mechanics more addictive for children? I think it's silly to focus on one tiny industry, and demand that those people should be working on things for the good of humanity, when the fact is the vast majority of humans just work for their own livelihood. I mean, what do you think 95% of the people in SV are doing? Not every company is trying to cure cancer or explore space...

HFT is such a small, niche, industry, and also extremely productive per employee relative to most other industries. (the primary reason for comp being so higher). It replaced the thousands of manual traders that used to be responsible for arbitrage and market making with automated robots, dramatically increasing market efficiencies while reducing the amount of human capital required to provide those services. I find all the virterol towards hft from SV very puzzling, as it seems to exemplify all the things that SV espouses!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Location is everything. If trading firms are willing to spend money to position their towers slightly closer to the trading endpoint, the town where the endpoint is located should approve construction in geographic order, allowing new towers to be constructed closer to the endpoint in a way that maximizes tax revenue to the city.

Ideally this would keep a lot of tower-construction people continually employed and paying taxes, building new towers ten meters in front of the old ones every month or two.

</comment><comment><USER17> Fun fact: New Line Networks mentioned in the article is named after the New Line Tavern in Chicago [0]. Which is actually quite good. And might just attract network engineers that work for HFT firms. Purely coincidentally.

[0] [https://www.newlinetavern.com](https://www.newlinetavern.com)

<comment><USER18> New Line Tavern is the only bar I've seen that has drink/food specials on Friday and Saturday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This film seems relevant - [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6866224](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6866224) \- The Hummingbird Project (2018).

'A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.' (It also seems to feature the microwave based approach from the trailer).

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if a lot of money is going into research on "spooky action at a distance".

</comment><comment><USER21> I get that arbitrage helps set the price, but what does HFT do, beyond deciding which of the competing nano-second enabled traders get to edge a profit in an artifact of how information _flows_?

I don't see this HFT as being information-worthy arbitrage. I have an intent to set a real-world price, I declare it, and in the increment of time it takes my packets to flow, somebody edges in the queue and inserts trades to make me have to deal with them for some increment of price. I wind up paying more, and the original source winds up getting less, or some other event.

its like re-intermediation, in a world heading to dis-intermediation.

What is the real-world, wider economic "good" here? If my pension fund is routinely profiting from this, I am not sure that is a wider good btw: We could probably make more money selling Heroin, if we're going down this 'whatever it takes' track...

<comment><USER22> > it takes my packets to flow, somebody edges in the queue and inserts trades > to make me have to deal with them for some increment of price

This is the biggest mistake people make when talking about HFT. At no point in time does someone see your order before it hits the exchange (unless you've specifically agreed to trade that way & even then they are obligated by lots of regulation to execute in particular ways to protect from that agency problem).

No HFT is taking pennies from your order. If you send a limit order through the book you will get filled at the best price available up to your limit.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for explaining. If they're just squeezing margin by being quicker, and not intruding into my trade (I don't trade. this is clear I think, given how ignorant I am) then I have less to worry about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oof, solid article but Bloomberg breaks the back button if you scroll past the end of the article. It will load several new articles and push them onto the nav stack, meanwhile it doesn't seem like I can click enough times to get back to HN from there.

<comment><USER24> Are you on mobile?

The article reads fine w/o JavaScript, desktop Firefox. And the back button keeps working. I assume that's thanks to the absence of JavaScript, rather than something special that Firefox is doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Another example for people to appreciate what a small latency advantage means. Consider SPX options which is a huge market. These "trade on CBOE" which is a Chicago exchange - but they physically reside in NJ. Now consider SPX futures - ES - on CME, physically in Aurora. Now imagine a 20-tick / 5-handle "sweep" in the ES — "sweep" is instantaneous price move (either up or down). Not "very fast" but exactly that - instantaneous. These happen as a result of large incoming aggressor order taking out many book levels at once. Sweeps can be of different magnitude (from just few ticks all the way to max allowed per CME's "velocity logic") - but they happen all the time. If you know enough about e.g. ES futures but have never seen sweeps, chances are you didn't have access to the right tools/platforms. Even some supposedly-professional-grade platforms like TT or CQG do not show trade data with enough detailization to see these.

Anyway... why is this important? Because immediately following the sweep in e.g. ES, option prices in e.g. SPX options are temporarily way off. Dutch market makers have not yet moved their options quotes, because they do not yet know about the sweep - at least not in NJ. If you can somehow get orders to NJ faster than market makers can cancel their option quotes, you can take out _hundreds_ of mispriced options. Multiple expires, dozens of strike, puts and calls. Very juicy bunch of stale quotes.

PnL... well that gets tricky. On one hand, just this one example is in theory worth hundreds of million per year _if market did not respond_. But the market will respond. That's inevitable. No one enjoys being ripped off for too long, so if they cannot defend they will either leave the market or set quotes wide enough that they are never mispriced. The same goes for any other "latency arbitrage" game. I always love how people throw numbers like "this is worth X", almost always assuming status quo. HFTs are very responsive to market conditions. If I run a strategy that's been making money every single day for 10 years and all of a sudden it starts losing - I press the pause button and go do some serious analysis. So maybe I will let you have it for few hours - but after that if I can't compete I'm out. So it's not that simple.

</comment><comment><USER26> The dice is fully loaded in favour of HFT pioneers and incumbents, facilitated by the ever-growing and nouveau riche (e.g. Zayo) Tier-1 ISP's, who control most of the backhaul and dark fibre estate.

However, over the next few years, the advent of maturing ML frameworks, coupled with the intensifying war and ratification of standards over 5G/IoT based infrastructure, might prove to be serendipitous for nimble-footed enterprises.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayo_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayo_Group)

<comment><USER27> Highly unlikely that 5g / iOS will play a role in the context of hft. Also your view of the ecosystem (eg zayo and co being the big winners) is massively outdated by five years at minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The use of wireless communication in high frequency trading begs the question: how much could a malicious actor profit from momentarily jamming that CyrusOne (or similar) tower?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm largely ignorant of HFT but I often wonder what the benefit of it is. It sounds like a huge zero-sum game to me.

In my (probably simplistic) view, exchanges could publish and process orders at long intervals (seconds, minutes, hours?) then add a jitter of several intervals to incoming orders, with cumulating jitter for cancels. That would require traders to look beyond one interval when trading.

<comment><USER22> Traders already look beyond one interval. An order I put in yesterday that took 5 minutes to execute still beats an order I put in today in 10 nanoseconds.

Being fast is important for cancels & risk management. Which answers the question on what it provides. It lowers the risk for the traders allowing them to price tighter.

<comment><USER29> But lowering the risk can only happen at the expense of other traders. So overall there is no lowering of risk. HFT is just increasing the cost of market participation for other traders. Because they pay the profits of the HFT traders.

<comment><USER22> No. We can objectively show that is untrue. The risk for HFT (especially market makers who are most sensitive to latency) is priced via the bid/ask spread. That is smaller than it's ever been and would be smaller still on many symbols if minimum price of ticks was lowered.

<comment><USER29> I don't understand why I should care about the risk to HFT traders because I don't see why they should exist in the first place. So I don't understand your argument.

For HFT traders to make a profit, somebody else must lose. In my understanding, the ones to lose are the other traders. If I want to buy shares, part of the price of buying them will go to HFT traders. And my revenue of selling them will be lower due to HFT traders on the exchange.

<comment><USER22> One of the biggest classes of "HFT" is automated market making. These participants have long existed in trading environments and are there to bridge the gap in time (you want to buy now, but no one wants to sell) and space (you buy on exchange a, but the participant that wants to sell is on exchange b).

Market makers take on the risk bridging those 2 areas. They hold positions for short periods, with the hope of making money when a new participant enters the market. They lose money when they are holding positions that the market goes against. To account for that, they price their risk into what they are offering you. The less risk they take on, the better price they can offer you.

If you want to buy shares _right now_ you are going to pay someone for the privilege. Modern HFT are offering that service cheaper than any other implementation before.

<comment><USER29> Ok thanks for the explanation. I still don't see what benefit I could get from buying shares right now as opposed to a few seconds later. Why should I pay for that?

<comment><USER22> If you don't cross the book (ie offer more than the lowest bid or vice versa) the you _become_ a market maker (though not much of one). You don't pay anyone to do this. But because of the HFT/Market Makers you get the benefit of dramatically lower trading fees.

So you _don 't_ pay for it in that case, but you still get a benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I did the math to use the neutrino transmitter it'd be 0.13% faster to transmit information from Chicago to NYC. Using equations:

s = r(theta)

l = (2r)sin(thea/2)

s: arc length (air travel distance 714 miles)

r: radius of earth (3,958.8 miles)

theta: arc angle

l: length of cord (straight line under arc)

(s-l)/l * 100 gives the % increased difference in length

<comment><USER24> You need to add a little extra time to the microwave route because microwaves are line of sight. The signal needs to be detected and re-amplified multiple times along the way. How much extra time? I don't know, I'm not an RF guy, maybe someone can chime in and tell us how much latency each amplifier adds.

The neutrino route only needs a single detector at the very end, nothing along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you want to know how HFT works I recommend the book Flash Boys by Michael Lews or the first 15 minutes of this talk by Brad Katsuyama (the book protagonist) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hoqFpDjVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hoqFpDjVs).

In short, when you send an order from your computer to buy say 10000 stocks, this order gets split to all the multiple exchanges. When the order hits the first (closest) exchange, HF Traders will pick that up and race you to the rest of the exchanges and try to front run you by buying the stock in lower price if available and make an offer to your bid price that they know is coming.

<comment><USER32> Flash Boys is terrible (it's not even good as a book --- and I'm an avid fan of Michael Lewis's). It's embarrassingly bad on the technical details.

I like "Flash Boys: Not So Fast" as a corrective.

A much better book, from another HFT skeptic, is "Dark Pools".

The example you provide (of basic, naive latency arbitrage) matters for trading desks at giant investment banks. They make their money in part by selling execution services to giant holders of stock. Major trades by these people (big "blocks" being "shopped") are tradable market news. The giant holders of stock would prefer it if the news didn't get out until after their orders were filled. That's a service people like Katsuyama used to be able to offer his wealthy clients with very little effort on his part. That service has since been automated away, and it bothers him. I guess I'd be bothered too, but I'm not sure why it's moral dilemma.

Front running isn't a technical problem and it has little to do with how fast traders are. It's an agency problem: a broker "front-runs" their client when they receive an order from that client and make proprietary trades against and ahead of it. Random people in the markets don't have an agency relationship with other traders and are under no obligation to avoid competing with them.

<comment> integrate-this I was an engineer for a high frequency trading desk at a firm not mentioned in this article.

Flash Boys is a great book and we required our new hires to read it as it got a lot of things right.

Front running is illegal now, but arbitrage opportunities still exist between exchanges. Being fast is still an easy way to make money.

You're right about dark pools though. Those are the future (honestly they are already up and functioning) and they hide trading activity very well.

<comment><USER32> This is kind of a series of non-sequiturs.

Front running has always been illegal.

Arbitrage is not illegal. Latency arb certainly isn't easy.

"Dark Pools" is a book. It's also a thing, but that's obviously not what I was talking about.

There's nothing especially shady about dark pools. We'd call them "private exchanges" if the exchanges weren't themselves already private companies, I think.

<comment> integrate-this Front running has not always been illegal, front-running if you have a fiduciary duty to clients has always been illegal, and many forms of front running are still legal today.

Nowhere did I imply that arbitrage is illegal and latency arbitrage is a big driver of revenue for several hedge funds, especially those which track baskets against their components.

There isn't anything shady about dark pools, except that there is little public information about the trades which take place within them, they are sparsely regulated, and you have even less insight into your counter parties than you do on open exchanges. And my response referencing dark pools was a response to your comment about execution services.

<comment><USER32> Front-running has been illegal (under that name) since 1987, long before the full automation of trading. Again: front-running involves an agency relationship; by law, you're not "front running" simply by beating a part of someone's block trade to an exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Follow @sniperinmahwah if he is still active... everything else is stuff that's been known for quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER33> Could they not just make one tower a few feet higher than the other?

</comment><comment><USER34> Why don't the rich people just move to New York?

</comment><comment><USER35> Capitalism is just so absurd.</comment>


Roughtime: a protocol for secure, auditable time synchronisation - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/09/19/roughtime.html <comment><USER2> This is awfully similar to Ben Laurie's good ideas about how to run a distributed time stamping service for a cryptocurrency. [http://www.links.org/files/distributed- currency.pdf](http://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf)

Great to see these ideas used for general security applications.

<comment><USER3> (Ben was involved in the design of Roughtime.)

<comment><USER2> Just intended to point out this is a great example of the general applicability of crytocurrency inspired research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious why the clients chain requests but the servers don't chain replies. It would be straightforward for servers to emit a CT-style log as they go, thus forcing servers to prove that all their timestamps are in order. With a bit of refinement, it would also allow servers to prove that they didn't generate, say, Thursday's timestamp prior to learning a nonce that was sent to them on Wednesday. If nothing else, this would substantially strengthen its use as a timestamping service.

Also:

> It is the case that the signature, even assuming one request per batch, will > add some number of microseconds of latency to the reply. Roughtime is not > going to displace PTP for people who care about microseconds.

I'm not convinced that this should prevent extremely precise timestamping a la PTP. The server just needs to indicate, outside the signature, how long its processing took. Sure, this prevents authentication of the fine-grained time, but a client could easily bound the amount that a server can cheat.

<comment><USER5> _I 'm curious why the clients chain requests but the servers don't chain replies._

One challenge would be around server scale -- for the servers to maintain a strict chain, they would need to coordinate amongst themselves, which can be costly. The proposed approach doesn't introduce that requirement.

But they could get close by maintaining a branching history, like what you might see in a git history, or a vector clock. Neither of those approaches provides the same causality assurances as your proposal, but either would provide something close without incurring any blocking server-side state management.

<comment><USER4> I just meant for servers to maintain a local chain. Cross-server checking would be free, sort of, as clients that talk to multiple servers would inject the chain state from the first server into the second via their nonces.

<comment><USER5> At scale, a time server's DNS address will likely either be a reverse proxy or a multi-valued A record. The coordination amongst those separate physical servers that are serving requests for the same DNS name would become a scale challenge if they needed to share state.

<comment><USER4> But they wouldn't need to share state. They could run independently, and any client that wanted to tie their clocks together could request the signed time from one and then send it to the other, causing it to get logged in the other server's chain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SpiderOak might be interested in running a Roughtime service / participating in a Roughtime community to support Semaphor.

As it is, Semaphor clients include a local timestamp among the signed content of most actions, and the server rejects actions that aren't within some tolerance (strict ordering however is accomplished via hash chain.) Roughtime would allow improving this situation from several angles.

One of the logistical challenges is client network traffic footprint. Enterprises that deploy a collaboration solution often want to have a strict definition of which upstream servers it can be expected to talk to. Would it be possible for a single Roughtime service to incorporate verifiable information from a larger Roughtime community, such that end user clients don't have to communicate with additional addresses?

<comment><USER7> At the bottom of the page, they mention to get in touch, either via the mailing list ([https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/proto...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/proto- roughtime)), or directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > There have been efforts to augment NTP with authentication, but they still > assume a world where each client trusts one or more time servers absolutely.

OpenNTPD has "constraints" where it makes HTTP requests (using TLS) to webservers and checks that the time provided by the NTP server is within a certain threshold of the time returned in the HTTP Date header.

Much simpler and doesn't require dedicated servers.

<comment><USER9> tlsdate is a much cleaner implementation of this idea, taking the time from the handshake. TLS 1.3 as it stands makes sending the server time optional.

The 'Date' header is tricky because it is a timestamp of when the document was generated, not when it was served. Caching proxies have no obligation to (and in most cases shouldn't) update the value.

<comment><USER8> Some TLS implementations return a randomised date for the handshake anyway, which is why constraints works the way it does. TLS 1.3 killing it is just gravy.

If you're worried about a caching proxy you can set the constraint to a URL that returns something dynamic. Although it would be interesting to see what % of the top TLS-enabled webservers don't return something recent for HEAD / HTTP/1.1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great, I work in distributed systems and am always dealing with wall clocks. Most people ignore/forget about clock sync or reject using wall clocks entirely because of it. But you can get very practically reasonable results by thinking these things through and doing sync. I'm glad to see other people doing more work on improving and validating NTP servers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like this might be useful with proving that something happened at a certain time, no? Like use the hash of something as a nonce to a roughtime service?

</comment><comment><USER12> Reads a bit like PGP's trust model applied to time synchronization.</comment>


Speedy Beet - <AUTHOR> https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/269783-speedy-beet <comment><AUTHOR> A podcast episode on whether Beethoven's Fifth is played at the correct tempo. It's a treat to hear it played at a much faster, breathless tempo, feels like an entirely different piece of music.

Additional discussions on whether Beethoven's metronome was broken:

(2009) [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/mar/14/beethoven](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/mar/14/beethoven)

(2011) [https://thebeethovenproject.com/how-fast-shall-we- play/](https://thebeethovenproject.com/how-fast-shall-we-play/)

AMS paper on whether the weight arm was off:

[https://thebeethovenproject.com/notices/201309/rnoti-p1146.p...](https://thebeethovenproject.com/notices/201309/rnoti-p1146.pdf)</comment>


Drones Help Rid Galapagos Island of Invasive Rats - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/drones-help-rid-galapagos-island-of-invasive-rats <comment><USER3> For those interested, they did something very similar in the 1990s with the goat population and killed something like 250,000 goats: [https://allthatsinteresting.com/project- isabela](https://allthatsinteresting.com/project-isabela)

 _" A Judas goat was a female who would be captured from the wild, tagged with a GPS tracking device, and then released to find other goats, especially lovelorn males.

The sharpshooters would take to the air again, track the Judas goat, find her hidden companions and gun them down, always leaving the Judas goat alive so that the whole process would begin again. Track, slaughter, repeat. The team eventually used 900 Judas goats over the course of a couple of years."_

<comment><USER4> And this is why I don't believe in uprisings and revolutions in modern societies anymore. As an individual, even if you can buy guns, you are not that far away from the goat compared to what tech and training current militaries have.

<comment><USER5> A human can carry a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapon and destroy the helicopter, while hiding amongst the rubble of a chaotic urban environment.

Asymmetric warfare is very difficult. The US military struggled for many years and spent huge amounts of money fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those are small countries compared to the US. Trying to fight an insurgency on home soil, without the support of a tax-paying public? Forget about it!

<comment><USER4> > The US military struggled for many years and spent huge amounts of money > fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan

They kill 100 fighters for one death on their side, and have control over the natural resources they want. I don't see the bright side for the opposite party.

> Trying to fight an insurgency on home soil, without the support of a tax- > paying public? Forget about it!

That's a better argument. But that would assume the revolution would last. The local population would not have money or food either, but wouldn't have the supply chain or the reserve the military have.

<comment><USER6> The us lost these engagements though. Truly defeating insurgencies like these is currently beyond the reach of the most technologically advanced and well funded armies in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how effective this will be. About a decade ago the Tasmanian government successfully eradicated rabbits & rats on Macquarie Island - <USER2> important nesting place for penguins and albatross halfway to Antarctica.

They had to literally carpet the entire island in poison dropped from hoppers carried by helicopters. For seven years after that, the island was combed daily by hunters with teams of trained dogs before they could finally declare it pest-free. This was the largest successful island pest eradication program in the world at the time.

[https://www.parks.tas.gov.au/file.aspx?id=31160](https://www.parks.tas.gov.au/file.aspx?id=31160)

</comment><comment><USER8> I may have missed this in the article, but does anyone know what organization or group is doing this work with drones on this project? I seem to see small companies pop up that offer 'drone support' on things like property photos, search and rescue, etc.

Are these often just some guy/gal who buys some nice drones then starts offering those types of services with them? Are there regulations, licenses or anything these people should or need to have to be considered legit and operate these types of services legally?

Just overall curious how these 'drone specialist' operations come to be..

<comment><USER9> FAA regulates commercial drone us in America. I'd imagine places like the Galapagos may not yet have regulations around drone usage.

<comment><USER10> There are strict drone regulations in Ecuador and specifically in the Galapagos. They are banned except for scientific use.

[https://www.galapagos.org/travel/travel/planning-a- trip/trav...](https://www.galapagos.org/travel/travel/planning-a-trip/travel- faqs/#drones)

[https://drone-traveller.com/drone-laws-ecuador/](https://drone- traveller.com/drone-laws-ecuador/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The drones are used to carry and drop rat poison over the island, which is something a few steps behind of drones those equipped with laser gun to hunt and terminate rats just like the movie Oblivion (2013).

<comment><USER12> I had such a wonderful visual in my head, of drones with tiny machine guns doing night strafing runs on rats...

Sigh.

(Also was looking forward to the next article, about the rats scavenging from the drones and firing back...)

<comment><USER13> Check out the Cacophony Project [0]. I believe they were looking at using machine vision combined with poison paintball guns. Open source too!

[0] [https://cacophony.org.nz](https://cacophony.org.nz)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do they make sure the other animals don't eat the rat poison? Is it just that no native species would find the bait tasty?

<comment><USER15> It's not clear from the article, but my guess is (as others noted) they'd have some level of confidence from testing against the other inhabitants of the island.

They could engineer the baits to look, smell, and taste especially unpalatable to the birds and iguanas there, or ship the baits in wrappings that rats could & would be able to penetrate, say a thick cellulose or cardboard wrap containing a single serve.

Typically the problem with baiting in this way is what happens when those animals die, and other animals eat the carcass. This isn't discussed either, but it sounds like a) local wildlife aren't big on scavenging dead animals, and b) the wildlife losses from this would be significantly smaller than from the rat infestation.

<comment><USER14> Oh, I can think of a dozen or so ways it MIGHT work, but I'm curious about how they actually did it.

One way would be to make sure the amount of rat poison is precisely calibrated so that the rats will get to it first and not leave a lot behind for other animals to consume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I imagine that cost savings would be pretty significant switching from helicopters to drones.

Related articles:

[https://www.islandconservation.org/ecological-restoration- no...](https://www.islandconservation.org/ecological-restoration-north- seymour-island-drone-rat-removal/)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00176-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00176-z)

<comment><USER17> saw a presentation from HBO folks noting exactly this for film, you're talking well over $100k for a day for a chopper, IIRC. you can pretty much drop a couple of the highest-end cameras in the ocean for that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Rat eradication using aerial baiting Current agreed best practice used in New Zealand (Version 3.1)

[https://www.doc.govt.nz/Documents/conservation/threats- and-i...](https://www.doc.govt.nz/Documents/conservation/threats-and- impacts/pest-control/other-technical-documents/rat-eradication-using-aerial- baiting.pdf)

DoC is the NZ department of conservation - we try to be a fairly green country!

</comment><comment><USER19> An article in Nature [0] has a few more details, including the fact that problems with the drones meant that only half of one island was baited by drone, and the rest of the island had to be done by hand. Looking on the bright side, Island Conservation, the Californian group that is conducting the operation, see this as having set up a controlled experiment (i.e. drone delivered baiting vs. hand delivered). Only one of the smaller islands was involved, not the whole group.

[0] [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00176-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00176-z)

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, but now the drones will start breeding out of control, and you'll have the same problem all over again.

<comment><USER21> That's the best part. When winter comes the drones will simply freeze to death.

<comment><USER22> Don't be ridiculous. The Galapagos are on the equator.

<comment><USER23> Its from the " invasive lizard clean up plan" on the simpsons.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743879)

[https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=That%E2%80%99s+the+be...](https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=That%E2%80%99s+the+best+part.+When+winter+comes+the+gorillas+will+freeze&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> All species on an island were invasive at one time or another.</comment>