comment: >
  
  
  Video has emerged on social media depicting captured Wanger’s novel laser detection device, called the Spider. It is a laser early warning detection system to provide advance warning of attacks.
  The Spyder is a lightweight warning system used as a passive military defense. It detects, analyzes, and locates directions of laser emissions from laser guidance systems and laser rangefinders.
  
  Seeing as Wanger group just suffered immense casualties, it doesn’t seem as if this advanced warning system worked very well.
context: They have an office in Finland. >
  
  I wonder how similar that is to a radar detector you buy for a car, they also detect lasers. >
  
  Not sure how effective this is in the field.
  It is essentially an infra-red light detector. The IR beam coming from the laser targeting/aiming devices needs to hit the sensor arrays/windows. These are small and typically moving. >
  
  That's why laser detectors are useless on cars, and why cops use laser speed guns nowadays. All it does, at best, is tell you when you've already been dinged.
  Maybe they're a little more useful in a war zone, because being targeted doesn't mean you've been fired on yet. >
  
  You can jam the lasers, IR tools exist. Check out wired magazines new cannon ball run article from this week. >
  
  But not legal in every state >
  
  The notable thing is that while Part 15 of the FCC rules ban radar jamming(sales, manufacture, possession, or use), there's no such federal regulation for lasers. Laser regulation is mostly limited to "pointer" devices and is the regulatory domain of the FDA.
  So there's no legal market for radio jammers but there's a broad one for laser jammers even if there's local regulations.
  This will probably change with automated vehicles relying heavily on LIDAR... I'm not sure they can survive an adversarial environment. They need cooperation. >
  
  LIDAR systems (e.g. autonomous driving) are designed to operate in traffic environment with multiple LiDAR equipped vehicles. 
  LiDAR systems are typically based on the time-of-flight measurement of the emitted (laser) and back-reflected photons from the object. One will get spurious disturbances but these can be filtered out with data processing.
  Jamming a LiDAR is challenging because the jamming laser beam (photon flow) needs to continue hitting a relatively small sensor area with filtering optics optimized to detect the photons emitted from the LiDAR system itself.
  It is possible to jam / blind image sensor based systems. >
  
  Is this reply GPTed or something? It lacks human nuance/point.
  
  Jamming a LiDAR is challenging because the jamming laser beam (photon flow) needs to continue hitting a relatively small sensor area with filtering optics optimized to detect the photons emitted from the LiDAR system itself.
  
  You only need an emitter of the same wavelength, which can be acquired from mouser or hacked out of an actual LIDAR sourced from robotshop/hokuyo. The sensor's lack of dynamic range combined with time-of-flight logic makes it difficult to operate in an adversarial environment. You can white out the sensor itself, or pollute the environment with that wavelength so it can't see it's own pulses. Either works. >
  
  Which is easily countered by rolling frequencies, no? >
  
  LIDARs inherently have narrow optical frequency ranges due to their use of solid state laser diodes, and an optical notch filter in front of the sensor.