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Satellite Views Of The Blackout
An anonymous reader writes "These Before and After satellite views of the blackout, from the NOAA, show the geographic extent and intensity of the outage. Toronto, Ottawa, and Detroit seem the worst hit. Currently, a cnn article mentions that a reverse of power flow around Lake Erie may have caused an overload that triggered the programmed shutdown of the power grid. Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."
If a private citizen were to show the interconnections of the power grid on their website, what would happen? How long would it be before the government ordered him/her to remove that information in the interest of "National Security"? Why is it that CNN can show it freely? A similar map was being broadcast on TV all morning.
;) ) as soon as there were variants on the Blaster worm, a large section of the power went out? Hhhmmm...
And as for how the software works, it would be interesting to know just what OS the power company computers were running. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist (well, ok, that's exactly what I'm trying to sound like
libertarianswag.com
I'm in Grand Rapids (MI) - I think it stopped short of here too. Lansing and Detroit were both out from what I hear. Of course, I was at cedar point that day, trapped on the Iron Dragon for an hour and a half until they got out the cherry picker to rescue us.
Morphing Software
i dont know how they referred to it precisely; it was something like reflection index. basically, it was all the stuff floating in the air. i'm not saying this is in any way cool, but it is interesting --
http://digitalsushi.com/wtcreflection.gif
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
And your telling me that publicising a blackout's cause as being one grid station, and then showing how its braught half of the northeast practically to a halt for a day or two isnt information in the wrong hands?
;-p
I'm just waiting for some half baked terrorist to whack off a couple of power grids now... Then our excuse of an administration will want to inspect everything about power right down the the electrons because of "national security"...
On a larger note, I'm surprised that nobody has really taken it seriously that there are other things in America then commercial airplanes that can bring this nation to its knees (like power, water, lack of a starbucks...)
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Maybe these links may enlighten the situation:w =0
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333505
and
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&ro
Somehow, even during the blackout, it doesn't look as bad as North Korea on a normal night.
I live in Cleveland, and while we were dark, the outlying suburbs had power, and Columbus certainly had power. Why is it dark in the after picture? Clouds?
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
This kind of idea applies to a system where intrusions and failures are acceptable in order to learn the weak points (and then fix them). On development systems in a controlled environment, this may be appropriate. On fully functional systems, it may not be.
... to me, obscurity can be one part of a total security package.
I see people comment daily on the faults of security through obscurity
How many of you have email addresses partly designed to avoid random spam? How do you feel about having one nuclear disaster to learn how to prevent a similar disaster from happening in the future?
-- jetlag --
using obscurity as the soles means of security is a bad thing. However, using obscurity as another layer of an already hardended system isn't a bad thing, and would in fact be encouraged.
For a quick example, I'm sure the NSA has all sorts of crazy security measures (both physical and virtual) around some of their sensitive systems. Do they publish the specs to the security methods? No, they hide them as much as the secrets they protect. But if the specs were to be revealed, the security itself probably isn't compromised. The obscurity is just another layer on top of any already tight system.
Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."
... This sounds a lot like the explanations of why Open Source software is so much more secure and reliable than proprietary software. ;-)
Well, maybe, but if it can be kept secret by the authorities, they'll just "explain" it with reassuring PR, while not bothering to do any real fixes to the problems.
A lot of us have had far too much experience with big organizations to believe that secrecy will lead to solving the problems. The right way to prevent such things is to make the entire system public information. Then independent engineers can study it, point out the weakness, and suggest solutions, without worrying about losing their jobs if they go public with the bug reports.
(Hmmm
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The wrong hands are the hands that believe in the theory of wrong hands. If distributed applications and development have taught anything, it's that progress is more sound when coming through open channels. I see nothing wrong with a more open approach to major (currently archaic) infrastructure. It may demand more participation from both the end and middle users, but is far more progressive. The question of whether the power grid is so ingrained as to be unchangable still remains. /me votes for distributed clean self sufficient energy networks (solar, wind, etc). Gets us out of this mega uber global corp dependancy we're currently in too, perhaps fostering collaboration at the same time.
The blackout began at ~4:15pm. The second satellite image is 7 hours after the blackout. So, it's ~11:15pm (approx). Maybe there was only less light at ~11:15pm because much more people are sleeping and people close the lights when they are sleeping?
Montreal - Best city to live in!
If I interpret the photos correctly, they were taken at 0114Z and 0129Z... only 15 minutes more than exactly 24 hours apart. So I think the relative brightness should be the same.
I would go with extra cloud cover in the second photo as an explanation.
I was funny hearing people talking about lightning strikes near Niagara asa possible cause... There was not a cloud in the area at that time.
-Dubya
I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.
To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.
And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."
It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.
But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.
And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies.
The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull created the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned power "trading" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates.
Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Damn right we did.
Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.
But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a lega
Read this today:
It is ridiculous to accept that a lightning strike could knock out the grid, or the transmission system is over stressed. There are many redundant fault, limit and Voltage-Surge Protection safeguards and related instrumentation and switchgear installed at the distribution centers and sub stations along the Power Grid
that would have tripped to prevent or otherwise divert such a major outage.
I believe that the outage was caused by the MSblaster, or its mutation, which was besieged upon the respective vulnerability in certain control and monitoring systems (SCADA and otherwise) running MS 2000 or XP, located
different points along the Grid. Some of these systems are accessible via the Internet, while others are accessible by POTS dialup, or private Frame relay and dedicated connectivity.
Being an old PLC automation and control hack let me say that there is a very good plausibility that the recent East Coast power outage was due to an attack by an MBlaster variant on the SCADA system at the power plant master terminal, or more likely at several of the remote terminal units "RTU". SCADA runs under Win2000 / XP and
the telemetry to the RTU is accessible via the Internet.
- From what I recall SCADA based monitoring and control systems were installed at many water / sewer processing, gas and oil processing, and hydro-electric plants.
I also believe that yesterdays flooding of a generator sub- facility in Philadelphia was also due to an MBlaster variant attack on the SCADA or similarly Win 2000 / XP based system.
To make things worst, the Web Interface is MS ActiveX. Now lets see, how can one craft an ActiveX vuln vector into the blaster?
Oh, and for the wardrivers, SCADA can be access via wireless connections on the road... puts a new perspective on sniffing around sewer plants.
It is also reasonable to assume that we could have a similar security threat regarding those system (SCADA and otherwise based on MS 2000 or XP) involved in the control, data acquisition, and maintenance of other critical infrastructure, such as inter/intra state GAS Distribution, Nuclear Plant Monitoring, Water and Sewer
Processing, and city Traffic Control. IMO
I think we will see a lot of finger pointing by government agencies, Utilities, and politicians for the Grid outage, until someone confess to the security dilemma and vulnerabilities in the systems which are involved in running this critical infrastructure.
Regardless of whether the Grid outage can be attributed to the blaster or its variant, this is not entirely a Microsoft problem, as it reeks of poor System Security Engineering practiced by the Utility Companies, and associated equipment and technology suppliers.
Nonetheless, the incident will cause lots of money to be earmarked by the US and Canadian Governments, to be spent in an attempt to solve the problem, or more specfically calm the public.
This incident should be fully investigated, and regulations passed to ensure that the Utility companies and their suppliers develop and implement proper safeguards that will help prevent or at least significantly mitigate the
effects of such a catastrophe.
Conversely, I do not want to see our Government directly involved in yet another "business", which has such a controlling impact over our individual lives.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Now, if we can just shut off the rest of the outside lights... I'll bet some children saw stars for the first time in their entire lives.
Blackouts of this magnitude hit New England every 15 years or so. Load balancing in the power system is rather complicated over the distances in the USA. Better understanding of how the power system works would do wonders for people understanding how the Enrons are screwing the public. Deregulation of the power industry will make major failures like this happen more often. Companies like Enron are more of a threat to the powersystem than any herd of Al Qedas: the enrons are removing the ability of the system to recover from and defend against kamakaze squirrels, which are still more of a threat than hostile humans.
I find it interesting that in those pictures, most of the US cities affected are dim, but the Canadian cities are completely gone.
Canada may be a big producer of electricity, but Ontario (which has about 1/3 the population and the largest industrial base) is still a net importer. The lack of supply and worries about the infrastructure have been a massive political issue for the last couple of years, delaying the provincial election (governments get to choose the timing of elections under the Canadian system - they simply has to be at least once every five years) because of the public's worries about the summer power demand spike.
After an unusually cool summer (relative to recent years) Thursday was the first "hot" day in much of Ontario and thus the first real test of the provinical government's claims that their critics were just fear-mongering. It may turn out to be a coincidence, but no matter where the initial spark was, the fact that the whole grid collapsed is not likely to be forgiven.
(by the way, it was a really nice night - beautiful sunset)
Now that it's a "crisis", Dubya's going to announce another boondoggle program to "fix" things up. Things being the bank accounts of his energy industry cronies.
On the "after" pic is a bright line from Detroit to Montreal. Satelite? ISS?
Cheers
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
this blackout. I live here in Pittsburgh, abd the main reason that we were 'saved' from being knocked out is that our grid section was designed to support large iron and steel mills (which of course are no longer in existance). This gives us one hell of a buffer against surges such as the one that caused the cascading balckouts on Thursday. Hopefully America (and Canada) will learn from their mistakes this time and this will hopefully never occue again. On a simialr note, I just hate to even think of all the high uptime counts lost on effected *nix boxes in the blacked out areas. :)
-Cnik
Since I live in Niagara Falls, NY, I can vouch for that.
It was a bright, sunny day. I was in Wilson Farms (convenience store) picking up some supplies, and had just paid for it, when the power just died.
Oddly, the power at home was fine.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
is the one in the Rotten Library entry for North Korea.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
As for info on the power grid getting into "the wrong hands", this isn't some sort of national secret. It's not classified information. Some of the security methods used to protect individual plants or other parts of the power grid are not made public, but anyone who watches The Discovery Channel on a fairly regular basis probably has as good an idea of how the power grid works as would be needed to bring part of it down. The method of the failure this time (3 high power transmission lines failing simultaneously, causing an overload) seems remarkably similar to what happened in 1965. Which in itself is pretty ridiculous - this wasn't supposed to happen again. Any terrorist could plant a few bombs at the base of some of these high tension wire towers and bring the system down if this is all it takes - this is not something that would require declassifying information to figure out.
And I don't agree with those who say this is not a dangerous thing. I was one of the millions of New Yorkers who had to walk home over one of our river crossings on Thursday. Imagine a coordinated attack involving first taking out the power to the northeast, followed by any one of the following:
Those are just a few examples - I'm sure there are many more that terrorists have already thought of. It is very dangerous for power to be completely out in any major city, let alone the northeast - nobody is able to get any news or announcements (land and cel phones were down on Thursday, and even the news outlets not knocked off the air were relying on those who could get through on phones for information), emergency calls cannot be made, emergency vehicles cannot get through streets choked by pedestrians, police and fire departments cannot communicate with their bases, hospitals have to rely on minimal power from backup generators, etc.
Until we heard definitively that this was not a terrorist act on Thursday, everyone in this city was very nervous - I was surely not the only one who thought it could be a setup for something larger. After all, we've been through this before - both large-scale power outages and large-scale terror attacks. Once we were told that it definitely was not terrorism, that's when the partying started - but until that point, there was what I consider to be a perfectly justified fear in the voice of pretty much everyone I talked to.
Yep, a friend of my dad's setup his big reflecting telescope in the front yard and all the neighbors came over and looked at things. It was incredible before the nearly full moon came out. It was also great timing because we were in one of the minor meteor showers which would not normally be all that impressive but with such little light polution you could see almost all of the shooting stars that were falling at a rate of one per 3 minutes or so.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is a lie, Those price ceilings were put in place AFTER The the energy giants running the White House started to raise prices to the point that the average 3 bedroom house couldn't afford, and large buisiness consumers (heavy manufacturing etc)couldn't keep up with. My Fathers house electric bill went from $180 or so a month to almost $800 in the space of only a couple of months. This was not due to anything BUT deregulation, and the fact that the big Energy traders that now run the White House were deliberatly withholding supply to force the price up, and then charging for NON-EXISTANT, PHONEY energy transactions at almost 4000% of average market price, costs that the State had to absorb.
This is a lie, the gas turbine power generation plants existed. They sat deliberatly idled, while G Davis went virtually on his knees BEGGING to the White House to force those plants to be started. Enron and Dynegy who owned the plants flat REFUSED to turn them on. The Bush administration backed them up and told Davis and the State of California to go fuck themselves. Those plants you describe being built in past years were built when the State owned and controlled the supply structure.
When the Energy system is deregulated (sold off) to private concerns, the only people that concern them are the stockholders, who could give a damn about any aspect of the buisiness except profit. When the system exists and is owned by the public, through the state, these problems never existed, and the State was solely responsible for maintenence and upkeep of that system. And prices stay low, this has been proven througout history. California and Nevada boomed in the 1960's and early 70's, partly because the States had PUBLIC energy systems that were reliable and inexpensive for the general public to use. they were maintained and built with public money, with highly skilled workers that had to be trained and certified by the state to work in the power industry. Now, with deregulation, you literally have kids right out of high school doing those jobs for one-third the pay that the workers did while under State control. The State conomy boomed while this system was in place. Deregulation has cost the State hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenues and tens of thousands of jobs. Jobs that are now, moving to Texas after being offered nearly free electricity from a publicly supported system that is operated under contracts to Dynegy and Halliburton. The more you Republicans keep lying about this, the more people are going to say "wait a minuite" because the one thing the GOP forgot, is people are not stupid, and the more you GOP sociopaths keep insulting peoples intelligence the more those folks are going to want something else that what you are offering, or forcing down peoples throats.
Stupid Humans.....
I live in Columbus, Ohio. The before picture shows Columbus, Ohio lit, and the after picture shows it dark. Columbus did not have a black out. Doctored photo? Not sure, but still wonder why it shows Columbus blacked out.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."