Maybe that is so in the US. In Europe, "Smart Grid" technology embodies the whole thing i.e. right the way up to transmission level.
Power systems are highly interconnected and operate in real-time. There's relatively little economic benefit in just making the last mile "smart". The big wins come when the whole supply chain is smart, enabling real-time pricing, despatch, outage management, etc.
Even if this technology starts out by being deployed at the last mile, it *will* end up influencing and/or controlling the higher level distribution and transmission systems. So it's important to get the security right at this stage. Otherwise we'll end up with millions of insecure nodes out there and no way to actually gain any genuine benefits from the technology.
You may have a 50 amp service. So might your neighbours. But if you and all your neighbours actually pull 50 amps at the same time for any significant duration, the local transformer or supply cable WILL fail. It's not designed to do that.
No electricity system on earth is designed to provide the maximum rated supply to everyone. It would be ludicrously expensive.
To keep the costs down, certain assumptions are made about the diversity of the demand (i.e. you almost certainly don't need 50 amps all the time). The existing system was designed to fit with those assumptions. Electric cars change the demand pattern, resulting in localised overloads in certain circumstances.
Uh huh.
If you check your history, you'll find that America's economic power prior to independence (and right through to Edison's era) was *founded* on ignoring the copyrights & patents of other nations. Guess what? Americans may not have invented everything you think they did.
America was a developing nation once. Try sticking that fact into your neat economic hypothesis.
And that, my friend, is the most eloquent argument I've read in a while for avoiding anything from Microsoft at all costs. Thank you for your honesty.
No matter how much they might pretend otherwise, when a company's core value becomes "It's all about the shareholders; fuck the customers!" then there is very little incentive to purchase anything from them. Doesn't matter if it's cheap. Heck, doesn't matter if it's good.
If your sole aim is to screw me, why would I even consider talking to you?
This is the first time I've heard any major outage blamed on "hackers". Ususally such blackouts are caused by combination of lack of investment and/or lack of knowledge (but that's another argument).
Is there any evidence whatsoever that hackers were involved?
Physical or absolute separation of the various networks is a good idea in theory.
In practice, separation is exceptionally difficult to maintain:
There's always non-critical data to collect. Long term trends, maybe some environmental data, some trial project for some new tech. This stuff is (quite rightly) kept away from the mission critical networks and usually goes over the internet.
The mission-critical guys then find that this non critical data is useful/relevant to what they do. Maybe it's just a weather forecast, something like that. So they end up having access to the non-critical information. It's usually too hard/too expensive to make intangible data sources available through the mission-critical systems (changes are expensive and you don't know what the benfit is until you try it...). So, they'll get access in informal ways. It starts with printouts, then a "separate" screen in the control room, then maybe an info display on their main screen and before you know it, you've started to breach the separation. Still, nothing too disastrous at this point.
The next stage is that this extra information proves so useful that the idea of automation comes in. "Hey, look: if we merge this data source with this data source, we can have the system make a decision for us and it'll ease the workload of the mission critical people". At this point, you've now got mission critical data and other data all routed into the same decision box, running *unsupervised*. No-one really knows what's going on (in real time) and this is where the hackers can start to play.
I'm not sure what the solution is. The message is "Don't rely on separation to protect you." It *will* be breached. The day-to-day business processes in a utility will take care of that...
Maybe. Your argument is fine if there's nothing you need to supply with electricity any place between the two end points. Transmission systems usually need to provide tap-off points along the way - something that is difficult and/or expensive with DC.
There's no major bias or ignorance involved; when DC is cheaper, they use DC. It's just that in the majority of cases, AC is the most appropriate solution.
The current incumbents are so fekking incapable they would struggle to work out which end of a USB stick goes where. The chances of them implementing *any* form of large scale IT system is zero. Zip . Nada. Not gonna happen.
Not quite. If you've paid a lot of money for a clean energy generator, you don't have the luxury of just using whenever you happen to need it. It's too expensive. You need that baby to be working flat out, 24/7, 265 days a year - otherwise it's just not cost-competitive with the centralised power plants that DO work all the time.
It's even worse with intermittent sources like wind. As soon as the wind blows, you need to be selling/using that electricity 100% to make it pay. "Make hay while the sun shines", etc.
If you don't need the electricity around the clock, you need to be able to sell it to people who do. And to do that, you need a very good transmission system that gets the power right to whoever happens to need it any time of day or night (you can't store this stuff, remember?) The net effect is a big increase on demand on the grid, usually right in the places where the infrastructure is weakest - at the tail-end of the grid. This is what the article is trying to explain.
"...more decentralized means of production means we won't have to rebuild the entire grid infrastructure so much."
Not true - since the economics of most decentralized technologies depends on being able to sell the surplus back to the grid.
If you want to do that, you'll find that the existing grid is utterly incapable of accommodating any significant take-up of distributed generation. It was designed to be one-way (from the central power plant to you), not bi-directional (between you and your neighbors).
Adapting the grid to cope with this is horribly expensive, and typically doubles the cost of implementing distributed generation. Which kills the economics of the whole thing and brings us back to square one.:-(
Just for the record: companies don't usually invest money in IT systems to make the IT sysadmin's life easier; they do it to make the company more productive.
If you "like the fact that [HP] make it a complete PITA for the end user to do anything to their workstation", that's your call. Just don't expect that attitude to help you up the corporate ladder.
That's really fascinating. The consequences of this are pretty serious...
The UK government are currently trying to get as many people as possible into the national DNA database. Let's assume they get less than half the population in there: say 25 million people.
Using your approach, for any given DNA sample there are likely to be 25/113,000 * 25,000,000/2 ~= 2,500 'matches'
If I understand this right, a perfect match of "my" DNA at a UK crime scene could actually have been left by any one of 2,500 other people. How on earth can such evidence be used to convict someone (in the absence of any other evidence)? Surely many of these DNA based convictions are entirely unsafe?
But surely M$ will just claw all this money back in Windows Mobile licensing fees (aka Monopoly Tax On Every Device Sold).
If LG can't use Linux in their phones, what *else* are they gonna use??
Isn't the effect/aim of this to *prevent* LG from using Linux in any device once GPL3 is out?
Question: Can Samsung/LG/etc legally use Linux in their product once 1) They have signed one of these satanic "patent deals" 2) GPL3 is out
If not, have Microsoft have effectively cornered the entire embedded systems market? Maybe they finally figured out that the future of computing is not necessarily on the desktop...
...and can link it to YOU as soon as you "register" for Gmail.
I felt pretty dumb, having given them my prime email address (myfirstname@mylastname.net), then realising afterwards that through the magic everlasting cookie I had just enabled Google to link every search I had ever done back to ME personally. Like, DUH! Heck, I don't even know what "interesting" data might be in there, but seeing as it's about ME, I damn well ought to be able to get access to it (under UK law).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that is so in the US. In Europe, "Smart Grid" technology embodies the whole thing i.e. right the way up to transmission level.
Power systems are highly interconnected and operate in real-time. There's relatively little economic benefit in just making the last mile "smart". The big wins come when the whole supply chain is smart, enabling real-time pricing, despatch, outage management, etc.
Even if this technology starts out by being deployed at the last mile, it *will* end up influencing and/or controlling the higher level distribution and transmission systems. So it's important to get the security right at this stage. Otherwise we'll end up with millions of insecure nodes out there and no way to actually gain any genuine benefits from the technology.
You may have a 50 amp service. So might your neighbours. But if you and all your neighbours actually pull 50 amps at the same time for any significant duration, the local transformer or supply cable WILL fail. It's not designed to do that.
No electricity system on earth is designed to provide the maximum rated supply to everyone. It would be ludicrously expensive.
To keep the costs down, certain assumptions are made about the diversity of the demand (i.e. you almost certainly don't need 50 amps all the time). The existing system was designed to fit with those assumptions. Electric cars change the demand pattern, resulting in localised overloads in certain circumstances.
Uh huh.
If you check your history, you'll find that America's economic power prior to independence (and right through to Edison's era) was *founded* on ignoring the copyrights & patents of other nations. Guess what? Americans may not have invented everything you think they did.
America was a developing nation once. Try sticking that fact into your neat economic hypothesis.
Cheap, no contract, available over the counter almost everywhere as a SIM only or including dongle:
http://www.medionmobile.de/index3.htm
Enjoy the trip!
And that, my friend, is the most eloquent argument I've read in a while for avoiding anything from Microsoft at all costs.
Thank you for your honesty.
No matter how much they might pretend otherwise, when a company's core value becomes "It's all about the shareholders; fuck the customers!" then there is very little incentive to purchase anything from them. Doesn't matter if it's cheap. Heck, doesn't matter if it's good.
If your sole aim is to screw me, why would I even consider talking to you?
You may well be right.
This is the first time I've heard any major outage blamed on "hackers".
Ususally such blackouts are caused by combination of lack of investment and/or lack of knowledge (but that's another argument).
Is there any evidence whatsoever that hackers were involved?
In practice, separation is exceptionally difficult to maintain:
I'm not sure what the solution is. The message is "Don't rely on separation to protect you." It *will* be breached. The day-to-day business processes in a utility will take care of that...
Because when the line breaks/falls down/gets struck by lightning, you lose your vital communications right when you most need them.
It's usually a good idea to have the control channel physically separate from the thing you are controlling...
Maybe. Your argument is fine if there's nothing you need to supply with electricity any place between the two end points.
Transmission systems usually need to provide tap-off points along the way - something that is difficult and/or expensive with DC.
There's no major bias or ignorance involved; when DC is cheaper, they use DC. It's just that in the majority of cases, AC is the most appropriate solution.
Agreed. But nuclear is somewhat useless without a fairly large electricity transmission system. You've gotta get rid of all that energy somehow.
Nuclear plants are only happy working 100% day and night. You can't just turn these things up & down like a coal plant.
It's like the problem of managing wind power, only reversed...
Concerned? Nah, not really.
The current incumbents are so fekking incapable they would struggle to work out which end of a USB stick goes where. The chances of them implementing *any* form of large scale IT system is zero. Zip . Nada. Not gonna happen.
They'll be out of office in a year or so anyway.
Holy Cow, are you saying that if there's a CDFS partition on the drive, the program specified by autorun.inf will run *regardless* of any settings?
Wow. I guess that "feature" will be coming to the next evolution of Conficker in, say, some time in the next 5 minutes?
It's even worse with intermittent sources like wind. As soon as the wind blows, you need to be selling/using that electricity 100% to make it pay. "Make hay while the sun shines", etc.
If you don't need the electricity around the clock, you need to be able to sell it to people who do. And to do that, you need a very good transmission system that gets the power right to whoever happens to need it any time of day or night (you can't store this stuff, remember?) The net effect is a big increase on demand on the grid, usually right in the places where the infrastructure is weakest - at the tail-end of the grid. This is what the article is trying to explain.
Not true - since the economics of most decentralized technologies depends on being able to sell the surplus back to the grid.
If you want to do that, you'll find that the existing grid is utterly incapable of accommodating any significant take-up of distributed generation. It was designed to be one-way (from the central power plant to you), not bi-directional (between you and your neighbors).
Adapting the grid to cope with this is horribly expensive, and typically doubles the cost of implementing distributed generation. Which kills the economics of the whole thing and brings us back to square one. :-(
I'll see your sysadmin and raise you a CEO.
Just for the record: companies don't usually invest money in IT systems to make the IT sysadmin's life easier; they do it to make the company more productive.
If you "like the fact that [HP] make it a complete PITA for the end user to do anything to their workstation", that's your call. Just don't expect that attitude to help you up the corporate ladder.
That's really fascinating. The consequences of this are pretty serious...
The UK government are currently trying to get as many people as possible into the national DNA database. Let's assume they get less than half the population in there: say 25 million people.
Using your approach, for any given DNA sample there are likely to be 25/113,000 * 25,000,000 /2 ~= 2,500 'matches'
If I understand this right, a perfect match of "my" DNA at a UK crime scene could actually have been left by any one of 2,500 other people. How on earth can such evidence be used to convict someone (in the absence of any other evidence)? Surely many of these DNA based convictions are entirely unsafe?
Hey, I'm posting this from an 800MHz G3 iBook, you insensitive clod!
[look, it was _cheap_, and it's only on its second mainboard...]
Bonus points for the "Lawrence Lessig" presentation style too... :-)
But surely M$ will just claw all this money back in Windows Mobile licensing fees (aka Monopoly Tax On Every Device Sold).
If LG can't use Linux in their phones, what *else* are they gonna use??
Isn't the effect/aim of this to *prevent* LG from using Linux in any device
once GPL3 is out?
Question: Can Samsung/LG/etc legally use Linux in their product once
1) They have signed one of these satanic "patent deals"
2) GPL3 is out
If not, have Microsoft have effectively cornered the entire embedded systems
market? Maybe they finally figured out that the future of computing is not
necessarily on the desktop...
I stall can't figure out what's in it for LG.
sshblock is your friend.
OK, I just emailed my Euro MPs.
You can find out yours from here (it's easier to navigate than the main EU site...)
If you just want to avoid X11, give NeoOffice/J a try. ;-)
It's a bit of a dog, but it does *kinda sorta* work...
I felt pretty dumb, having given them my prime email address (myfirstname@mylastname.net), then realising afterwards that through the magic everlasting cookie I had just enabled Google to link every search I had ever done back to ME personally. Like, DUH!
Heck, I don't even know what "interesting" data might be in there, but seeing as it's about ME, I damn well ought to be able to get access to it (under UK law).
More here.
That is what people are getting annoyed about - not the email service itself, just the registration process.
What if Microsoft were behind the recent (and very clever) attempt to insert a backdoor into the Linux kernel??
They wouldn't do that. Would they? {*shudder*}