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Pirate Electrician Supplied Power To 1,500 Homes
fridaynightsmoke writes "A former electrical engineer for utility EDF has been prosecuted for illegally supplying power to some 1,500 homes in north London. Derek Brown, 45, was arrested in 2008 after being seen tampering with the electric grid in a manhole. He specialized in connecting separate supplies to houses that were split into apartments. One landlord involved, Haresh Parmar, was jailed for 9 months for stealing £30,000 worth of electricity for 22 of his apartments. Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service."
What a shocking development
Electricity wants to be free!
Je ne parle pas francais.
Can someone explain how the mains circuit is supplied.
TFA was so light on details its very difficult to understand what he did. I'm not sure how you can actually illegally tap into the power grid without someone noticing. Here an inspector literally reads the meter or in some cases a digital meter supplies information automatically. In fact, my gas is apparently wireless and merely requires someone to drive by to meter the usage. It would seem like something that would be very difficult to subvert in a suburban environment.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
So I guess the charges he was brought up on were negative, am I right?
The UK is just as screwed up as the US. (The citizens are not the problem - we love you UK, but your government ******g bites.)
It's easy to do and totally undetectabe - I've been on pirate power for yea
Nothing suspicious going on in that picture.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
If people were willing to use this scheme to get cheaper electricity, I guess the electricity is too expensive.
Here in Denmark over 90% of the amount we pay for electricity is various taxes. No wonder people turn to alternative solutions because once you've done yours and switched bulbs, appliances and everything to the most environmentally friendly versions available, you still get a hefty bill and there's nothing (more) you can do about it - except perhaps to steal the electricity that is... ;)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Cool story bro
Tuttle, or was it Buttle? Anyhow, clearly a rogue handyman on the loose. Better arrest somebody.
Sounds like he already did the community service.
The guy who stole GBP30k of energy for 22 apartments gets nine months in jail. The guy who helped him and many, many other people steal power for 1,500 homes gets...basically nothing, if the article is to be believed. An eight month suspended sentence (so all he has to do is not commit crimes for eight months), plus a little under 19 days of community service.
To put this in perspective, assuming that the remaining 1,478 properties that he provided stolen power to used only 1/4 as much as the 22 apartments did (unlikely they used this little), that's still a little over half a million pounds, on top of the 30k that put another man away for nine months. More likely, it was closer to two million quid's worth of electricity whose theft he facilitated -- 67 times more crime, and he serves no time at all if he's a good boy for a few months.
Pretty pathetic.
Quite shocking, I'd say.
...errr, I mean Archibald "Harry" Tuttle.
Don't know why, but I don't find surprising at all the guy is from the same country as the The Pythons.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I've got the power...
Of course one way or another you pay for everything but power should be lumped into the library, schools, and roads category. If without it people freeze to death then any worthwhile government should see that nobody gets a monthly bill for it. I don't feel sorry for these so called public utility companies.
Since I think the distinction between thieves and pirates can be a useful one in the debate on software piracy, I'd say we're dealing with a thief here - not a pirate.
Get it?
He didn't steal the power, he just borrowed it. For every electron that went into his wires, he sent one right back to the electric company. So he just copied them. Or something.
The article doesn't give any useful information about what was actually going on and doesn't mention dodgy landlord Haresh Parmar cited in the summary.
I would _really_ like to hook up with him...
Wait, so let me get this straight: You design an electric vehicle with special arms whose sole purpose is to reach up its arms at night to recharge, then sit there during the day as the battery drains out, then reach up again a night or so later and recharge again.
And you do this for years...
Brilliant!
coding is life
Those usually go hand in hand!
Hope he doesn't get any arrrrrcing!
And yet I believed my parents when they told me I should get a nice office-job because I would earn better than an electrician.
I got the details about the landlord being prosecuted from here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4m7ouHfb-GwJ:findarticles.com/p/news-articles/people-the-london-uk/mi_8046/is_20100919/revolting-behaviour/ai_n55280555/+derek+brown+Haresh+Parmar&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
I figured that a Google cache link wasn't quite worthy of being linked in the submission so I just included some details from that article.
There is nothing online with much detail about how exactly the connections were made or how the end users/landlords were charged for them (eg one-off payment for connection to free juice, or some kind of billing) other than a police spokesman saying "OMG dangerous" which they can be relied upon to say about anything.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
In the Netherlands I pay:
Euro 1.99 per month tax, plus
Euro 0.08496 per kWh for electricity, plus
Euro 0.11140 per kWh energy tax, plus
Euro 0.03731 per kWh sales tax/VAT.
For a typical monthly bill (300 kWh), this works out to:
Energy usage = 300 * 0.08496 = 25.49
Tax = 1.99 + 300 * (0.11140 + 0.03731) = 46.60
For a total of 25.49 + 46.60 = 72.09 Euro.
As you can see, tax is 65% of my montly bill.
Don't start about my water bill, that's even worse.
This is not piracy, its actual theft.
If you pirate a song, a computer program or a movie, you are merely making an unauthorized copy. You can't do that with electricity. It still has to be generated by burning fossil fuels and adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere.
I know of a degreed Electrical Engineer from Japan with a house in southern California that put an induction loop along his backyard wall at over 100 yards from where the Power Lines run by Tower above Railroad Tracks. 2-years later, a TEAM of Power Company Service men arrived at his front-door with COPS on a conclusion that the extra load in their circuit was coming from something on his property and they decided this because he was Off-Grid and his Credentials and Housing arraingments suggested he wasn't Solar and Wind.
Electrical Service Providers are providing after the Power company causes regulative estoppel to Natural Resources. Nobody is being robbed, because the Power company is a middleman that produces no power only channels it from a convertible source; they are entitled to lost labor to bring power, and not allowed to put any cost on the actual Powers because they don't make shit unless they hire men to turn wheels theirselves rather than hinder moving rain and sunlight and wind and combustion.
Note the use of the New Labour asset seizure law, which allows the police to seize the whole of a person's assets on the assumption that they all derive from illegal acts. The victim then has to prove that they came by the assets legally in order to get them back... The concept of being prosecuted for stealing electricity is laughable when you recall how private companies got control of electricity generation and distribution in the UK in the first place.
Funny, I didn't know hemp was a plant that came originally from the Arctic regions. That's the only way I know to get 18 -24 hours of light in nature.
But what I want to know is how he get the pirate ship down the manhole?
Sigs are for losers
.. They wouldn't have stolen it that fast when it had DRM!
(I can't believe I've said pro-DRM crap; my low-uid must be tarnished for life now!)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Power to the people, man!
It just seemed like the 'right' word to use at the time, it is not in any way intended to make any kind of statement whatsoever about the ever-popular Slashdot intellectual property debate.
I do not however make any claim to be 'unbiased' or in any way 'sane'. :P
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Are they sure this wasn't in Brazil?
I Don't Work Here
I hope he installed an Aaaaaaaarr! CD.
Years ago when I was a kid our neighbour was a sparky working on a site building new residentials. He had a huge fight with his foreman over something that wasn;t his fault, he got so pissed that he cross-wired the meters for each pair of houses on the site he was working on that day so house A would be paying for house B's electrons and vice-versa.(easy to do in our brick built "semi-detatched" houses in the UK where each pair of houses is one physical building)
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
I wish I could give mod points to whoever tagged this story "tuttle". That was the first thought that popped into my head. If you're on /. you should already know, but for the youngun's out there:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
----
Not to be confused with Col.
Yeah I hate how high taxes and over regulation created those third world countries... oh wait they are almost universally libertarian fantasies in which even local policing is "outsourced" to "entrepreneurs".
This sort of Libertarian fantasy wank gets modded insightful?
P.S. The freedom crushing is being done at the behest of under-regulated corporate behemoths that can buy laws. Which is the end result of Libertarian fantasy wank.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Pirate ships have electricity now?
The first was marked as a funny but only because there's a kernel of truth to it. A lot of people do believe that digital goods should be free. Should we expect their attitude to be any different towards electricity? The main story is also a good example of what people will attempt if they believe they will not be caught.
The problem isn't that the 'corportate behemoths' are under-regulated. The problem is that any competition from smaller businesses are over-regulated. The government gets to pass laws and gets seen as 'doing something', while the big guys eat the cost of that regulation and make it up with all the additional business they squeeze out from the competition. Even worse, companies like GE and BP get to look at heroes for pushing legislation for things that sound good like 'Green Energy' while doing so simply to benefit themselves and harm the competition.
If government was smaller, and not as easily bought (as as wise man said, "When bying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators"), you wouldn't have this incestuous relationship. It's a form of rent seeking, and you wouldn't have it as bad if the upper eschelon of both govt. and business weren't tag-teaming to screw the little guys.
They showed the coils of bailing wire didn't work with specific PG&E transmission lines to 'power a house'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
buttle or was it tuttle, damn that typewriter....
1) People want more then there necessities. It's a false premise that people only want to survive.
2) Most things most people buy are not necessities. NO one is saying tax paid iPods. It's also a false premise in that you discount the fact that poeple will still be paid to do the work. Paid from taxes.
No, it's not what was proposed in the Soviet Union. You used false premises to make it seem like that.
You are either ignorant, or a bastard who lies in order to hide problems with his ideological belief.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The word you want is voila.
A viola is a stringed instrument slightly larger than a violin.
He supplied free energy to 1,500 members of the community. How much more service do you want? Maybe they should give him credit for "time served" - I bet it took 150 hours to hook up all those power lines.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Trickle-down: When an already wealthy entity receives money, it becomes more and more conservative with it. It invests it outside the core business (diversification) or it squirrels it away (hoarding), sometimes in the form of non-cash (art, land, etc.) What it doesn't do is turn around and shower that money on the workers, or the consumers, of the products it is currently selling. This trickle down idea is a myth, a myth started and maintained by those whose only goal is to collect as much of everyone else's money as possible.
Credit: The function of credit is to expand the gap between the wealthy and the poor, by transferring money from the poor to the wealthy. Here's how it works. At some interest rate, $100 is made available to the poor by the wealthy. The poor pays back $110. That $100 then is actually worth $90 to the poor, but $110 to the wealthy. At the end of the transaction, the wealthy have more money. The poor, however, have less, although they have $100 worth of goods, with a probable resale value of far less, should they try and exchange them for cash. It is worth noting that in general, they goods they purchase they also buy from the wealthy. The result of the credit process is a continuous transfer of money from the poor to the rich - never the other way, unless the debt repayment is defaulted, and even then, statistically speaking, this doesn't slow the process down much.
This is why the libertarian idea of corporate freedom is bunk. Corporations are not people; if we compare them honestly to persons, they're a lot more like psychopaths. No society that lets them run free can remain healthy; the US is one recent example; when unregulated, jobs are sent overseas, healthcare is not provided, products are not made to last, warranty and service are only given under profound duress, copy protection, software differentiation, IP hoarding and other anti-consumer practices become not just common, but the standard for behavior.
The libertarian outlook has major value in that area where it recognizes the liberties and freedoms of people, and says that government should have no authority there. When those freedoms are extended to corporations, the libertarian ideal turns immediately into a nightmare, one not all that unlike the one we're currently experiencing. Corporations are not people. They completely lack empathy, sympathy, compassion, courtesy, loyalty, and honor. They are, quite literally, psychopaths. Given the strengths of a legal person, they will act along the same lines of the worst criminals society has ever known. All the while smiling to your face.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If that's how you figure it, you're not even close.
For instance, if you pay $100 for plumbing, but the plumber has to give $30 of that to the feds for his taxes, do you think the plumber is going to do $100 worth of work for you? No. He's only getting $70, and so that is the very MOST he going to do for you -- he'll do less, in fact, because otherwise he will not make a profit.
So, if you pay 30% taxes, then you had to earn $142.85 to pay the plumber $100, for which you got less than $70 worth of services. In the end, $142 of your dollars bought something less than $70 worth of services.
People are generally unaware of this, because we don't see the plumber's taxes; that info is hidden. Each purchase we make of goods and service has a significant, but variable, hidden siphon of funds going on to the government, directly affecting how much actual work your money does for us.
Sometimes they even manage to tax our purchases more than once; for instance, a death tax taxes funds and goods we already bought when we try to pass them on, making them that much more expensive, or, to look at it another way, devaluing your money even further.
So... perhaps you do know what taxes are doing to you. But most people really don't. It's because it isn't all that obvious. What some tax reformers want is that it be made obvious, generally by consolidating the process (taxation) into one event - for instance, a national sales tax that would replace the other taxes, or other, similarly transparent ideas. The trick to it all is making it fair, and determining what "fair" means in the context of people who are barely making it as compared to those at the other end to whom taxes are irrelevant to them making it, and all those in between, for whom taxes variously affect their lives.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The first thing that came to my mind is Robert De Niro in Brazil.
This was North London, not Yorkshire!
HARRY TUTTLE!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Snarky straw man quips aren't the same thing as eloquence, even on Slashdot. Besides, it doesn't actually rebut what I was saying, since I wasn't talking about anarcho-capitalism just by pointing out that there's nothing libertarian about buying laws.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Okay, now I get it.
But I gotta tell you that in my neighborhood there aren't that many places where I could park under a powerline like this.
Do you think it would be possible for me to run a couple of wires across my driveway between my house and my garage, and then have the car reach its arms up there?
That should be a slick way to solve the problem, and I can almost always get into my driveway, except when the guy next door parks his big rig on the street and the end of it blocks the entry to my driveway.
coding is life
He got 150 hours community service as part of his sentence? Kinda sounds like he was already providing a service to the community. Too much service.
What a shocking development
Makes you want to keep up with CURRENT events!
Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service."
I consider giving the community free electricity "community service." I'll sign off on those hours if he hooks my house up!