Slashdot Mirror
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."
Um, he can do all kinds of things.
Just tap into power and run it to a new building. Meter reader isn't expecting to go to the building to read the meter, so nothing is missed.
Or run electricity into building, through a box that looks like a meter, only gives out a faulty reading.
As for wireless and/or internet-connected meters, it wouldn't surprise me if the company isn't particularly on the clue train and may not, say, have a very good system in place for authenticating the data from the device [so you could replicate the signal and put out whatever reading you want]. However, the company probably does require a semi-regular physical meter reading, to check that the physical meter has the same reading as the broadcast one, and the system doesn't appear to be tampered with].
Electricity may be more complicated to wire up correctly to bypass the meter [so x% goes through the meter and y% goes around the meter], but gas and water are really straightforward to do the plumbing and to get a reasonable percentage through the meter, and people have been really imaginative in disguising/hiding the modifications.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
You can even see this in judgements we would now disagree with.
The famous "end of slavery" judgement in England is very narrowly written, it holds that slavery is a repugnant institution, and so could only exist in England if it was the law, then it says the law doesn't provide for slavery in England, and so the plaintiff, who is in England, is not a slave and may go free.
But it carefully says nothing about slavery outside England. There were in practice essentially no slaves in England, which is why this chap (brought there from a colony and unwilling to return) was chosen as a test case. Everything was paid for by anti-slavery advocates. So the intention was to secure a judgement that slavery as a whole was illegal, and the judge did not do that. He didn't want to cause chaos by spontaneously freeing huge numbers of slaves.
Campaigners still called this an end to slavery, but England continued to operate slave ships, and to control colonies whose commercial viability depended on slavery. The only thing that had changed was a man who found himself in England could be sure he wasn't a slave - though as a servant he might be little better off. It would take many more years before English rulers instructed their colonies to cease buying new slaves and grant their existing slaves freedom.