But these blockers and such also rely on trust. I trust older reliable stuff and am not going to jump on some new piece of unproven software just because someone on slashdot says to. Adblock works, I don't see ads, why should I change?
And which of them are you referring to and what are the bad reasons? Because one day someone noticed the proliferation of spaghetti code and wrote a paper to encourage use of structured programming does not mean he intended to have a fundamental prohibition against one construct.
But then, programming seems to be all about superstition. It had superstition in the 60s and it still has superstition today. Someone learns a rough rule of thumb as a student and keeps sticking to that for their entire career without thinking about why that rule of thumb was created. Someone had a bad day with threads and declares jihad against them for all time. The adherents of CamelCase struggle for dominance against snake_case believers. One exit from a function shall rule them all. Eat eggs from the little end and not the big end. It all boils down to letting others do the thinking for you.
I use goto. Sometimes. When you're in C then it's can be effective way to do a function clean up before exiting. Sure this can be over done but trying to avoid a goto like a religious taboo can also result in some pretty nasty code to replace it.
If you're using a professional code base, then you're better off NOT using all the latest features just because they're new! Sure, learn about the new language features, but that doesn't mean you should embrace them. Let other people be the guinea pigs.
And reference counting has been known to be a terrible garbage collection technique for four decades. Yes, it's problematic to add good garbage collection to a language compiled to bare machine code, especially with smaller CPUs or less memory, and so it the reference counting technique keeps getting used even in modern times.
It is actually easy to manage the memory yourself (though less efficient than incremental generational scavaging techniques) but there has been a generation of programmers trained to believe that manual memory management is evil. There also seems to be this sort of mystic vision that if only we could solve the memory management problem that programming will finally become pain free and we will no longer need to learn to be disciplined. The whole goal, probably driven by management, is to allow poorly trained engineers to write software.
C++ is great. Where else can you reinvent bad garbage collection techniques every day? Modern languages like Java come with bad garbage collection built in!
Check out the comments for some online forums from the anti-smart meter people. Ie, they say they're waking up every night at 2:00am with a headache and thus they conclude that this must be the time when smart meters are transmitting. Or they person who complained about potential health effects which also interfered with the baby monitor. Or from the other angle, that the smart meters are just a government scam to raise electricity rates, or a plot to spy on home owners.
No, if you've got a digital meter then that's a "smart meter", lower case S. If it's networked then that's part of a smart grid. I'm in the US and most of the utilities here have been moving away from the older analog meters.
Actually causes some controversy just switching to digital meters. Ie, the analog ones would slowly wear out over a few decades, meaning the gears. This meant they would report less electricity consumption than was actually used. So swap in a new accurate meter and the monthly bill goes up too. If the utility adds a fee to install the new meter, this also increases community objection to getting rid of the old meters. Some of these utilities are just plain awful at public relations and don't know how to read an angry crowd (like mine, PG&E).
It goes to the utility. The utility may or may not contract with someone else to collect, store, and process the data on their behalf. This isn't "cloud" storage, it won't be Amazon, it's probably the company that built the solution. Over time the utility may take over this task once they're more comfortable with it. Ie, in this case it's possible that Telefonica does this.
You will still get a "smart meter", in the sense that no one is makes the old analog systems with gears anymore. It will be an electronic system with solid state digital parts. It may not be terribly fancy, maybe just an MSP430 doing the thinking. It will store the data in eeprom so that someone can come by later and suck out the data once a month. But because you opted out of the Smart Meter networking portion and someone has to come out once a month, you'll most likely be charged an extra fee (that's what they do with PG&E).
But you may as well opt out of using a mobile phone as well. Or even the old land line. Those are already known to share data with the NSA. Worry about the hospitals and do all your health care at home, because the hospitals have been lax with security breaches.
Many of them may have some open source components (probably not GPLd though), but that does not mean the home user gets to paw through the code because the home user does not own these meters.
As far as trust goes, some utilities have paid for security penetration testing on their third party meter and network solutions, and those guys do get to see every line of code (if you think you get some nit picky code reviews, wait until you deal with one of these).
The old systems used MORE power and had a high potential for failure. They were just plain awful. No one is going to be making the old 50's style analog meters with the rotating disk and gears that wore down over time. And the old meters could be read remotely with a telescope just like the new meters, giving high resolution data on what you've been doing (tedious and impractical though).
But once a month is too long a time. That's the problem with most utilities these days, the literally do not know where their electricity is being sent or how much is being used at any one time. The big transmission companies do know this, the stuff that cross state lines, those guys pay attention to it like a hawk. But the smaller distribution guys are less concerned, and the local utilities are mostly blind. The old model was to take power from one place and stick it on their wires and try to forget the details except once a month. For instance, most utilities do not send someone out to check on a power outage until at least three people phone in complaining because they have no way to tell that there's a neighborhood outage without the customers calling in (and with everyone on cellular, that means phoning in will be harder to do). Another problem is even knowing what voltage is being supplied. The monthly read does not tell you that the neighborhood has been under voltage for a long time. A device on the transformers or cap banks in the neighborhood lets the utilities know when they're not working right (it's not uncommon for some people to use transformers for target practice).
How can they run and manage their grid effectively if they don't even know what's happening on the grid? That's why those old systems were the stupid grid. Not the average-intelligence grid, or even the occasionally-needs-tutoring-grid.
But if you don't like it, in some areas you are allowed to opt out. It costs more, as they have to pay someone to go read regularly, but it's an option for you.
There are conspiracy theories about this. When the meter was read only once a month (sometimes less) then the user didn't have to worry that the utility could discover them cheating. But if it can read usage once an hour, which is typical, now the cheats are caught more quickly. Though more seriously, the concern is that someone can figure out when you're not home by breaking into the utility and reading the data.
But, people can already figure out if you're not home by breaking into the phone company and reading their records and notice that all your calls are coming from a vacation site. Why aren't the conspiracy theorists worried about that? Or break into the credit card company and learn that you've bought g gas on the other side of the country an hour ago, good evidence that you're not at home.
One reason some of these networks have proprietary protocols is because the need for those particular protocols did not exist before smart meters. Wifi and cellular are impractical for them in many ways (though some companies use those in some cases). But there are standardization committees with active arguing participants (mostly trying to figure out how to lock out a competitor).
Hacking the meter will almost always be in an attempt to either disrupt the network (conspiracy theorists pretending to be the saviors of humanity) or to reduce charges on their own meters (by preventing transmission, not by rewriting the data). Plenty of people have screwed with meters and power systems before smart meters, so the utilities already have a vested interest in tamper detection and security.
I work in this industry. Proprietary networks can still use freely available frequencies; most of them actually do. Other spectrum is extremely expensive and often impractical for this sort of stuff (unless they plan to blast out at high dB to collect data from further away). The article mentions wifi and cellular, and wifi is freely available spectrum, and cellular may be used in some cases where connectivity is a problem and the telephone companies have paid the big bucks to buy that spectrum (expensive to use cellular so it's a last ditch resort).
For open source, that's not practical. First off, the customer here is not the home owner. The customer is the utility. The utility does NOT want the home owner to be hacking on the meters. Given the number of anti-smart-meter kooks out there, these are active targets for hacking. Even if open source is used they images would inevitably have to be signed. Yes, only Telefonica (or other provider) will be able to fix these meters, but that's normal and expected and required under many regulations. Yes, someone can fiddle with them, open them up, cut some wires, etc, but you break the seal on the meters and the owners will notice soon enough.
If the network ceases to exist, then the meters still continue to work. Just read them by hand like we used to do. Assuming no one else buys out the meter company and takes over the network. Or the new utility removes the meters and replaces them with something else. How is the "thirty years" thing even remotely a problem, since in that time many networks may come and go. Firmware gets upgraded, or the utilities may decide that they want the new features and replace them before thirty years.
As for can and will be hacked, compare that to phone networks. They can and will be hacked, and the owner of the phone can do nothing since only the phone company will be able to fix that. No panic there I see. Only panic with smart meters. I think phones are too cool for conspiracy theories to take root.
Experience causes people to think about security. Thus the old codgers who have the most experience are also more experienced at having run into these problems before. I see plenty of young coders repeating the same mistakes that were made back in the 70s.
The same group of kids who think that their parents will never see their drunken pictures on instagram are not the ones who have the proper paranoia to code securely.
You need other subcategories of number 10. Those who care about security, have to interface with security and use security features, but who are not the security expert. These are different from the developers who actually implement the security. Who may also different from the people who decide the policy of security (who may or may not be software/firmware people).
Startups also lie to workers, telling them that the stock options are going to make them wealthy some day. You get better pay and better hours working at an established corporation.
Well you explained it right there. "Best and brightest CIO" really isn't all that smart. When you're at the C level you are not supposed to have any idea whatsoever what the departments under you do, it's not your job anymore. At the C level you just cheer on your other C level colleagues and collect stock options and hope they pan out some day. The only thing you need to know as a CIO is how to suck up to the CEO and recommend anything Microsoft tells you to.
Slashdot Mirror
We just need someone to get rid of PHP and we'll be all set.
I’m sorry, Taylor Swift is good and all, but Beyonce had one of the best presidencies of all time!
But these blockers and such also rely on trust. I trust older reliable stuff and am not going to jump on some new piece of unproven software just because someone on slashdot says to. Adblock works, I don't see ads, why should I change?
Evade them? I can't even spell them!
Should not be used, or must not be used?
And which of them are you referring to and what are the bad reasons? Because one day someone noticed the proliferation of spaghetti code and wrote a paper to encourage use of structured programming does not mean he intended to have a fundamental prohibition against one construct.
But then, programming seems to be all about superstition. It had superstition in the 60s and it still has superstition today. Someone learns a rough rule of thumb as a student and keeps sticking to that for their entire career without thinking about why that rule of thumb was created. Someone had a bad day with threads and declares jihad against them for all time. The adherents of CamelCase struggle for dominance against snake_case believers. One exit from a function shall rule them all. Eat eggs from the little end and not the big end. It all boils down to letting others do the thinking for you.
I use goto. Sometimes. When you're in C then it's can be effective way to do a function clean up before exiting. Sure this can be over done but trying to avoid a goto like a religious taboo can also result in some pretty nasty code to replace it.
And I wrote my own OS in C while you were busy doing that.
If you're using a professional code base, then you're better off NOT using all the latest features just because they're new! Sure, learn about the new language features, but that doesn't mean you should embrace them. Let other people be the guinea pigs.
And reference counting has been known to be a terrible garbage collection technique for four decades. Yes, it's problematic to add good garbage collection to a language compiled to bare machine code, especially with smaller CPUs or less memory, and so it the reference counting technique keeps getting used even in modern times.
It is actually easy to manage the memory yourself (though less efficient than incremental generational scavaging techniques) but there has been a generation of programmers trained to believe that manual memory management is evil. There also seems to be this sort of mystic vision that if only we could solve the memory management problem that programming will finally become pain free and we will no longer need to learn to be disciplined. The whole goal, probably driven by management, is to allow poorly trained engineers to write software.
C++ is great. Where else can you reinvent bad garbage collection techniques every day? Modern languages like Java come with bad garbage collection built in!
Check out the comments for some online forums from the anti-smart meter people. Ie, they say they're waking up every night at 2:00am with a headache and thus they conclude that this must be the time when smart meters are transmitting. Or they person who complained about potential health effects which also interfered with the baby monitor. Or from the other angle, that the smart meters are just a government scam to raise electricity rates, or a plot to spy on home owners.
No, if you've got a digital meter then that's a "smart meter", lower case S. If it's networked then that's part of a smart grid. I'm in the US and most of the utilities here have been moving away from the older analog meters.
Actually causes some controversy just switching to digital meters. Ie, the analog ones would slowly wear out over a few decades, meaning the gears. This meant they would report less electricity consumption than was actually used. So swap in a new accurate meter and the monthly bill goes up too. If the utility adds a fee to install the new meter, this also increases community objection to getting rid of the old meters. Some of these utilities are just plain awful at public relations and don't know how to read an angry crowd (like mine, PG&E).
Wait, your smart meter is inside the home?
It goes to the utility. The utility may or may not contract with someone else to collect, store, and process the data on their behalf. This isn't "cloud" storage, it won't be Amazon, it's probably the company that built the solution. Over time the utility may take over this task once they're more comfortable with it.
Ie, in this case it's possible that Telefonica does this.
You will still get a "smart meter", in the sense that no one is makes the old analog systems with gears anymore. It will be an electronic system with solid state digital parts. It may not be terribly fancy, maybe just an MSP430 doing the thinking. It will store the data in eeprom so that someone can come by later and suck out the data once a month. But because you opted out of the Smart Meter networking portion and someone has to come out once a month, you'll most likely be charged an extra fee (that's what they do with PG&E).
But you may as well opt out of using a mobile phone as well. Or even the old land line. Those are already known to share data with the NSA. Worry about the hospitals and do all your health care at home, because the hospitals have been lax with security breaches.
It's telecows, the article had a typo.
Many of them may have some open source components (probably not GPLd though), but that does not mean the home user gets to paw through the code because the home user does not own these meters.
As far as trust goes, some utilities have paid for security penetration testing on their third party meter and network solutions, and those guys do get to see every line of code (if you think you get some nit picky code reviews, wait until you deal with one of these).
The old systems used MORE power and had a high potential for failure. They were just plain awful. No one is going to be making the old 50's style analog meters with the rotating disk and gears that wore down over time. And the old meters could be read remotely with a telescope just like the new meters, giving high resolution data on what you've been doing (tedious and impractical though).
But once a month is too long a time. That's the problem with most utilities these days, the literally do not know where their electricity is being sent or how much is being used at any one time. The big transmission companies do know this, the stuff that cross state lines, those guys pay attention to it like a hawk. But the smaller distribution guys are less concerned, and the local utilities are mostly blind. The old model was to take power from one place and stick it on their wires and try to forget the details except once a month. For instance, most utilities do not send someone out to check on a power outage until at least three people phone in complaining because they have no way to tell that there's a neighborhood outage without the customers calling in (and with everyone on cellular, that means phoning in will be harder to do). Another problem is even knowing what voltage is being supplied. The monthly read does not tell you that the neighborhood has been under voltage for a long time. A device on the transformers or cap banks in the neighborhood lets the utilities know when they're not working right (it's not uncommon for some people to use transformers for target practice).
How can they run and manage their grid effectively if they don't even know what's happening on the grid? That's why those old systems were the stupid grid. Not the average-intelligence grid, or even the occasionally-needs-tutoring-grid.
But if you don't like it, in some areas you are allowed to opt out. It costs more, as they have to pay someone to go read regularly, but it's an option for you.
There are conspiracy theories about this. When the meter was read only once a month (sometimes less) then the user didn't have to worry that the utility could discover them cheating. But if it can read usage once an hour, which is typical, now the cheats are caught more quickly. Though more seriously, the concern is that someone can figure out when you're not home by breaking into the utility and reading the data.
But, people can already figure out if you're not home by breaking into the phone company and reading their records and notice that all your calls are coming from a vacation site. Why aren't the conspiracy theorists worried about that? Or break into the credit card company and learn that you've bought g gas on the other side of the country an hour ago, good evidence that you're not at home.
One reason some of these networks have proprietary protocols is because the need for those particular protocols did not exist before smart meters. Wifi and cellular are impractical for them in many ways (though some companies use those in some cases). But there are standardization committees with active arguing participants (mostly trying to figure out how to lock out a competitor).
Hacking the meter will almost always be in an attempt to either disrupt the network (conspiracy theorists pretending to be the saviors of humanity) or to reduce charges on their own meters (by preventing transmission, not by rewriting the data). Plenty of people have screwed with meters and power systems before smart meters, so the utilities already have a vested interest in tamper detection and security.
I work in this industry. Proprietary networks can still use freely available frequencies; most of them actually do. Other spectrum is extremely expensive and often impractical for this sort of stuff (unless they plan to blast out at high dB to collect data from further away). The article mentions wifi and cellular, and wifi is freely available spectrum, and cellular may be used in some cases where connectivity is a problem and the telephone companies have paid the big bucks to buy that spectrum (expensive to use cellular so it's a last ditch resort).
For open source, that's not practical. First off, the customer here is not the home owner. The customer is the utility. The utility does NOT want the home owner to be hacking on the meters. Given the number of anti-smart-meter kooks out there, these are active targets for hacking. Even if open source is used they images would inevitably have to be signed. Yes, only Telefonica (or other provider) will be able to fix these meters, but that's normal and expected and required under many regulations. Yes, someone can fiddle with them, open them up, cut some wires, etc, but you break the seal on the meters and the owners will notice soon enough.
If the network ceases to exist, then the meters still continue to work. Just read them by hand like we used to do. Assuming no one else buys out the meter company and takes over the network. Or the new utility removes the meters and replaces them with something else. How is the "thirty years" thing even remotely a problem, since in that time many networks may come and go. Firmware gets upgraded, or the utilities may decide that they want the new features and replace them before thirty years.
As for can and will be hacked, compare that to phone networks. They can and will be hacked, and the owner of the phone can do nothing since only the phone company will be able to fix that. No panic there I see. Only panic with smart meters. I think phones are too cool for conspiracy theories to take root.
Experience causes people to think about security. Thus the old codgers who have the most experience are also more experienced at having run into these problems before. I see plenty of young coders repeating the same mistakes that were made back in the 70s.
The same group of kids who think that their parents will never see their drunken pictures on instagram are not the ones who have the proper paranoia to code securely.
You need other subcategories of number 10. Those who care about security, have to interface with security and use security features, but who are not the security expert. These are different from the developers who actually implement the security. Who may also different from the people who decide the policy of security (who may or may not be software/firmware people).
Good analogy :-)
Startups also lie to workers, telling them that the stock options are going to make them wealthy some day. You get better pay and better hours working at an established corporation.
Well you explained it right there. "Best and brightest CIO" really isn't all that smart. When you're at the C level you are not supposed to have any idea whatsoever what the departments under you do, it's not your job anymore. At the C level you just cheer on your other C level colleagues and collect stock options and hope they pan out some day. The only thing you need to know as a CIO is how to suck up to the CEO and recommend anything Microsoft tells you to.
How is Uber not a taxi service?