British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs

judgecorp writes "Britain's Channel 4 screened Blackout, a drama about a cyber-attack which crashes the national power grid. The show was silly enough, with a strong message about the dangers of lighting candles in such a situation, but the Twitter responses were even better. The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid."

Comments

hey stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

don't put power grids on the open internet. DUH.

Re:hey stupid

[fridaynightsmoke]

How do you suggest the control room communicate with all the various power stations and electricity consumers across the country then?

Perhaps, I don't know, they could piggyback a communication network onto the physical power network they own, airgapped from the internet? Maybe they could call each other on the phone like they did for the first ~80 years of the grid's existence?

Re:hey stupid

[Jawnn]

Do we really need to explain that a network need not be connected to the Internet to be, you know, a network?

Re:hey stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears that you are not taking the time to think through the problem that a power plants control center has.

> For the fine details of current usage the plant should just respond to voltage changes on the lines.

Yes the plant could tell how much power it is providing by monitoring the out put lines.

You think you know an algorithm that would provide the plant with the information on how to reliably and economically contribute to the power grid based only on the voltages of lines connect to the plant itself?

I suggest you consider a few unknowns from your air gaped power plant control center:

Grid topology is constantly changing with construction and maintenance outages.
Transmission line capacity, based on many things some of the larger factors including ambient temperature.
Costs for other plants to produce power, assuming you would be so kind as to only produce power when your plant is the cheapest.

And for the record there are monthly and weekly forecasts but the grid is run by much finer grained timescales.

Re:hey stupid

[ciderbrew]

Porn mags

Re:hey stupid

[Mousit]

Speaking as someone currently working in the electrical utility industry, I can tell you how my company does it. We use a combination of things, depending on what's most cost-effective, but the vast majority of our communications are done via microwave relay. We actually set up our own towers, get FCC licenses, and transmit private microwave signals to our substations and to our satellite control centers, as well as our generation plants. Some of it is proprietary serial protocol (DNP, very common in the utility industry) and some of it is standard TCP/IP based.

We run multiple networks over these microwave links (which ARE isolated from each other both in microwave frequencies and in physical equipment), as our satellite offices also get corporate network connectivity and Internet connectivity via microwave as well, communicating to our HQ and using its Internet hardline.

For locations where we couldn't set up microwave, we sometimes use private leased lines (direct, always-on, no-dial telephone connections, but these we only use if we have to because they're the most expensive). On a few occasions we use spread-spectrum radio, or as an absolute last resort we use GPRS radio over mobile networks. This last solution is NOT the same network as what a cell phone or other consumer access point goes through. We are basically leasing access to their mobile tower for a "private line" more or less.

In ALL cases, whether it's microwave, radio, leased line, or anything else, over-the-air communications are end-to-end encrypted, because yes we're totally aware that OTA stuff can be intercepted and eavesdropped, even point-to-point microwave links. It is also a closed, air-gapped network. As I said, the Internet and corporate network stuff to our remote offices goes over its own separate microwave channel with separate air-gapped communications equipment that's independent of the equipment talking to substations and the like.

So that's how we suggest you do it.

Fond memories of Threads

[laejoh]

In the eighties the BBC had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads. It's on youtube, you won't enjoy it.

Re:Fond memories of Threads

[rwise2112]

so I can scare myself to death whenever I want.

Surely that only works once!

Re:Fond memories of Threads

[MrNemesis]

Just to chime in with a "me, too!" but The Day After is very much a Hollywood version of nuclear war. Threads (and to a lesser extent 1965's The War Game which inspired the structure of the film but was banned from being broadcast) is essentially some of the most harrowing TV you can put yourself through. If you like your post-apocalyptic stuff then despite its pitifully small budget Threads is hard to beat; just don't expect to feel too chipper afterwards.

It's might not be well known outside of the UK, but part of what made Threads so chilling was the fact that the documentary-style delivery was done partly with excerpts from Protect and Survive, a real PI film, just to show how ineffective and futile the advice being given out by the government would really be. I think the nearest US equivalent is Duck and Cover.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Threads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_survive

Kind of reminds me of a story...

[Anonymous Coward]

The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid.
 
A friend of mine was getting ready to get in his car one day and noticed the neighbor woman was having an issue with her car. He stopped over and asked what was wrong and she said it wasn't doing anything when she turned the key. He tried and noticed she didn't have any dash lights or anything and explained that it may have been a dead battery. She said to him "I thought cars ran on gasoline?"

Re:Kind of reminds me of a story...

[SJHillman]

I've encountered, on more than one occasion, people with the opposite misunderstanding. They don't think their cars will start because the power is out on their block. There's also a lot of people that don't realize corded phones will still work with no power (in most situations) - probably the biggest obstacle to VoIP adoption in my area.

Re: Kind of reminds me of a story...

[Megane]

But what about fresh fruit? What do I do if someone comes at me with a banana and I don't have a tiger to release at them?

Re:None of those tweets are funny

[SJHillman]

Of course they're humorless. They would much rather have humour.

I liked it.

[SuricouRaven]

You need to adjust the time scale a bit - the drama showed the near-collapse of civilisation taking a matter of days.

And here come spoilers:

- One of the things I liked was the show of futility at the end. One of the characters, desperate for food and water for his child, resorts to looting a shop. He films and inventories everything, intending to repay once the crisis is over. Instead he finds another survivor huddling inside, one even more desperate and terrified than he is, who immediately goes into a confused panic and beats him to death - not because this unexpected lurker is trying to steal food himself, but because he is startled, paranoid and on a hair-trigger after the few days of hell he has just endured. The final shot of the scene is of the attacker's face as he realizes what he just did.

- The survival enthusiast, a prepper who treats the whole event with glee that his precautions were proven worthwhile, starts out by stockpiling water and checking food reserves - confident that he is ready. The drama here comes not from the survival efforts he takes, but how his family handle them. He's been irritating them for years with his 'freakish' behavior of keeping stockpiles, asking to move to the country and insisting on teaching them how to purify dirty water, and now he has a chance to shine. But far from becoming the hero he envisioned, his wife craves normalcy so much she can't stand his infuriating cheerfulness and efforts to help. She rejects all of his advice out of hand, tearing the family apart as all rationality is lost - even accusing him of poisoning their daughter with his home-sterilized water, and just shouting over him he explains he hasn't even opened that bottle yet. That's a family fight done well: There are two sides to the argument, and each one is incapable of even understanding why the other is upset.

This isn't a drama about the power cut. That's just a device. This is a drama about urban populations in crisis conditions, and it would be valid no matter what the crisis is - power cut, flooding, riots, collapse of government, even prolonged heavy snow. It's a story of human nature as sociary crumbles: Desperate, often irrational, the facade of morality gradually giving way to the simple instinctive need to protect one's self and one's family no matter the cost to others.

Re:Remember what George Carlin said

[Russ1642]

Half the population isn't dumber than the average. That's not what average means. (pun intended)

Re:LOL

[glavenoid]

Al right, joke's on us. I just read the /. submission title again:

"British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs"

STOP THE PRESSES! SOME SHOW TRIGGERS LOLS!! I can see timothy scrambling like a madman to get this thread out of the submission queue and onto the front page. This in the running for the most ridiculous title I've ever seen here, even worse then the gloriously daft "OMG PONIES LOL!!!"

Re:Who cares about battery life?

[gsslay]

If the grid goes down the whole network goes down with it. Towers, exchanges, switches, relays, the lot.

Your phone would become a tiny tablet without any connection to anything. Not entirely useless, but not much use. Then the battery would go.

Re:Luddites.

[HornWumpus]

Even though it's much less satisfying, try feeding them into the chipper shredder head first.

Re:People

[Minwee]

Knock knock.

Who's there?

To.

To who?

No, "To whom".

actual advice

[slashmydots]

Anyone read Hyundai's tweet? That's not far off, Hyundai. Last time the power was out for 3 days here due to a tornado, we hooked an 800W inverter up to our Chevy S10 and idled it like a generator for at least 20 hours to power our retail computers. Really, it can be any brand car though, lol. Generator = $a lot High wattage inverter = $100-ish USD + car you already have Also, 16 gallon gas tank in the car. What's up now, generator sellers? Lol.

Re:Why is this even on Slashdot?

[Thud457]

-1 we already have a way to deal with this sort of thing

if some of us lazy asses would mod the submission queue, maybe crap like this could be avoided.