Remember that New Zealand bloke a few years ago was trying to build his own cruise missile?
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“Read the manual next time, Xeni.” FTF her
Of course, if it crashes, the preprogrammed route might be available to whoever retrieves it. Not sure I’d want that.
If you want to get someone to do something illegal, or unethical, find an engineer. We don’t seem to be able to resist a good problem. I’m going to spend the afternoon working out the best way of delivering a few kilos of white powder several miles through the air, and there is nothing I can do to stop my brain, now you’ve programmed it. Thanks for that 
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Well, obviously you don’t preprogram it to show up at your house. You pre-program it to show up at a random point in the desert. And if it doesn’t show up at the expected time, you high tail it out of there (hopefully they don’t intercept it and extract the GPS info with enough time to catch you there).
I meant that the preprogrammed route would include the “from A” as well as the “to B”. I guess you’d want the software to erase traces of the route as it went along. Or install a third-party deGretelizer.
Well, you’d want to launch it from a remote location too 
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You can also design the control unit to have the route in RAM only (e.g. load from a memory card, then remove the card before takeoff, or load by a cable from a laptop), and to forget all the data if the unit detects a crash (e.g. stops moving for couple seconds, rpm from one or more motors goes to zero, or other conditions or sets of them) or the power to the unit is cut.
Without encryption of the RAM there is a chance to get it out with liquid nitrogen, but that assumes the adversary can capture the machine immediately enough after crash and has the resources on hand; DRAM decays fast, SRAM somewhat slower but anyway. And you can always scrub the RAM after using the data (or in case of detected crash).
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Don’t even need that. If it has a GPS, you can program it to go to a spot from wherever it is now. It does not have to log its course as it goes.
Yes. What I proposed is a technique so it forgets the route plan in case of crash (and possibly keeps forgetting where it was, the path already flown, as an added precaution).
I think there are old people who do that already - I’m probably one of them :-0
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