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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?
It's easy to do and totally undetectabe - I've been on pirate power for yea
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) --
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.
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
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.
The sad part is, since moving to Honduras, that just looks like a power pole to me, I had to go back up to look at it to see what you meant.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
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.
And yet it enabled him to supply more power than the average renewable power government project. I say we need more nuts and rocks !
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.
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..
I'd like to point out that this sort of thing is very common in third world countries. When it happens, it drives up prices for actual paying customers by making it exponentially more difficult for utilities to provide service and maintain infrastructure due to the uncompensated stress put on their systems. As the increased taxes and regulations of the modern socialist nanny state crushes entrepreneurship and throws ever larger numbers of people out of work and onto welfare, expect to see more of this as a harbinger of things to come.
Remember, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
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.
I think it's partially BS. An induction loop that provides useful power (enough to run a house) at a distance of 100 yards to the AC transmission line must be coupling to a big-scale high voltage line -- I'd presume something above 100kV. AFAIK, in those lines, change in losses due to changes in something as trivial as air humidity beats whatever consumption a house would have, by orders of magnitude. I doubt they would be able to measure whatever this man did. Now it's true that he did increase the load on their line, but the instantaneous power transmitted by such lines is such that one house's worth of load is below the capability of typical industrial measurement systems. So it's true that he was stealing power, but I doubt they came to him due to "extra load in their circuit". Besides, such lines are costly to maintain, so I presume it's rare that you would run such a line without normal loads attached to it. I'd think that leakage measurements with disconnected loads are rare: idling a big transmission line wastes lots of money.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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 increased taxes and regulations of the modern socialist nanny state crushes entrepreneurship and throws ever larger numbers of people out of work"
And yet the Scandinavian do just that and maintain the highest level of happiness in the world. The god of Capitalism thinks nothing of you, stop worshiping it.
Do you happen to work for Trafigura, by any chance?
They could have paid a disposal fee of € 500 000 in Amsterdam, instead they opted to make 30 000 West-Africans sick and still ended up having to pay US$ 198 000 000 cleanup fee.
Sounds like exactly the same attitude towards reality, environment regulations and profits that you display here.
TANSTAAFL indeed.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
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
Defending one position by taking the other to an extreme proves nothing.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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
'Remember, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' there is not no such thing as a free lunch? ain't = is not
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.
While its true, the words do not make logical sense as written, you know the meaning. In fact, this is a very very common idiomatic expression. Feel free to read up on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom
If it were not for such things, we wouldn't have such gems as "fuck you", which, I might need to point out, is not a suggestion that we have sex.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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
Actually, they can measure some pretty nifty things about electrical current from down at the powerhouse.
Go to your local one and ask when/if they schedule tours.
I and my family got in to our local town's power plant and the got a huge earful.
Basically, from what the electrician said, if you're drawing enough power to do 0.25 horsepower of work, they can detect it.
Good fellow; he was a lineman on the huge lines that go between towns before he settled down in my town with his wife.
Also, as far as humidity causing loss of power in the lines..
Dude.
There's a HUGE difference between electricity being impeded by an induction coil (causing resistance on the line in order to move the charge) and the air being wet and mucking with the line.
Wet air doesn't cause electrical resistance - wet air in theory can cause a short.
On the big lines like you're talking, they've been designed to handle big rains and wee tornadoes - a bit heavier duty for line shorting than your 'air humidity'
Get it?
Induction coil (resister-like device used to transfer power and scale it) is a 'resistance' thing.
Wet air is an 'electrical short' thing.
Apples, Oranges.
What? Me worry?
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
Wet air causes corona discharges. Their effect, in bulk, is same as if you'd attach a resistor between each phase pair, and one between each phase and ground. Wet air is not 'an electrical short thing' anymore than a transformer with a resistive load would be.
Let's see if you're right about 0.25hp it in terms of resolution of measuring instruments. Assume you're doing power measurements using a 6.5 decimal digit instrument, with p-p noise of one least significant digit. That lets you measure 0.3ppm, or 0.3W in a MW. Assuming you have a transmission line with a 500MW load, then yes -- you could detect adding ~160W of load.
Now there are several problems that I see:
0. Do they actually have that sort of resolution available for power measurements on HV transmission lines. We're talking 1ppm. You can't exactly attach an electrician's power meter to a 100kV line -- those instruments probably cost ~ 10k USD, and are few and between. You need an isolated current transformer with isolation rated for, say, line voltage * 1.5, and a voltage divider stack, similarly rated, with accuracy, say, an order of magnitude or two away from your resolution -- so that the results will have any real-life meaning.
From what I know, making a 100+kV divider that maintains accuracy down to say 10ppm over industrial temp range is no small feat; those aren't exactly instruments that you can throw ate every which large substation.
1. How much does it fluctuate due to changes in load -- the value is not steady, so you can't exactly see anyone in particular doing anything. I don't know what is, say the typical p-p power change in one second on a large line (>10MW load). This would be important.
2. How much does the load fluctuate on a large (say ~500kV) line with no loads attached -- merely due to corona discharges and such. And, moreover, what is this baseline load.
3. How often do they run the line with all loads disconnected (no transformers, no nothing, all switches open).
4. If they run tests with large substation transformers in the circuit, but with load sides of those transformers open, what's the magnitude of load presented by unloaded transformers (they have radiators for a reason), and how much does it change due to weather conditions (temperature, humidity) -- say you measure on Monday, then Joe Schmoe starts stealing on Tuesday, can you see the difference on Wednesday?
5. Transmission systems are dynamical things, sometimes to a point of becoming runaway-unstable, there are plenty of Ph.D.s on the topic. From what I recall from reading about powerplant commissioning, sometimes just maintaining the power flow going in the correct direction so that your generators don't absorb all of it can be something that get to brag about in the evening over beer. I don't think you can measure any effects of a couple, or even dozes, of hp of loading in a large transmission system that's operating normally. And that's what we're talking about here: someone "stealing" from a multi-100kV line, not from a small local substation where arguably it'd be comparatively trivial to detect.
And so on. All I see are real metrological problems, and the overall accuracy and sensitivity of the measurements you call for is more to be found in a lab than in the field.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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!
Regulation is as important for safety (and prevention of this kind of theft) as competition is important for encouraging better pricing and services. Only a complete wanker would believe you can completely deregulate reticulated infrastructures. It's not the socialists who are unrealistic loonie anachists, it's clearly the capaitalists.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1