In message snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com, snipped-for-privacy@gowanhill.com writes
They see you when you're sleeping
They know when you're awake
They knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake
That is rather funny. What the dodgy smart meters do permit is for a sufficiently advanced adversary to thrash controllable load on and off the national grid in very large chunks sufficient to cause blackpouts and possibly damage generating equipment and trip out circuit breakers. The present generation are too weakly encrypted to be considered safe (but it is a threat to the infrastructure not the homeowner).
All the people I know where the installation droid has turned up to install a smart meter have not had one installed because there was no mobile phone signal to take the readings away. Odd that they don't check for network coverage before sending someone out to install them!
Some from the crossover generation when TDTV decoders and main power was left on continuously by default so that any connected recorder could use the output. There is a way to disable this behaviour hidden deep in the setup menu of older sets and it was more like 20W in decoder running standby vs 70W with the display lit and driven. The default setting though was quite power hungry when in standby.
Most modern kit has standby consumption that is well <1W. Many of the CPUs still tick over or wait for intterrupts in standby to allow it to respond to buttons and obviously the remote control receiever has to be powered.
The other less obvious one is some computer sound systems really do consume as much power when "off" as they do when "on". They are best put on a smart peripheral switch off device so that when the PC is off they are physically disconnected from the mains.
Knowing your base load is a useful contribution to saving power on an annual basis since every 10W wasted continuously amounts to around 1kWh every four days or 90kWh per year (approx £12 pa at current prices).
They did ask me.
Have any smart meters *actually* been hacked?
My last domicile, they kept pushing smart meters on me. I told them there was no signal 'OK we will take you off the database' They didnt.
They don?t.
Not unless you tell the iphone to do that.
Martin Brown used his keyboard to write :
I used one of those on desktop PC, to switch all of its peripherals off when the PC goes off. I also had one on the TV, to switch off its sound-bar and a sat system. As sat is now built in to the new TV, I have removed the sat system.
I agree, but I likely still have a large base load than I would like, which would be difficult to improve upon without causing inconvenience. LAN routers, time clocks, occupation switches, fridge and fridge/ freezer.
I once worked for a company, which put money and effort into trying to reduce its base load. The company had many thousands of printers scattered around its many offices. Some energy advice external company had come up with the bright idea to issue and install thousands of plug in timers, so the printers were powered down outside normal office hours.
The scheme had several gotchas - Staff sometimes needed to work and use the printers out of hours, hence there was much fiddling with the time-clocks when print was needed, by less than savvy staff who initally assumed their printers had gone faulty.
A power cut would also often cause chaos, when an office full of printer would then suddenly fail to work at all. All of the printers were modern anyway and modern printers if unused for while, go into a very low power standby mode. The standby mode consumed less than the time clocks and when the clocks switched on, the printers would waste power initialising and running the heaters.
My 'easy to remember' figure is that a 1W load costs about £1/year if left on continuously. OK, probably a bit more now (as you say above) but it's a pretty good 'ball park' figure to work out whether a new lower power device of some sort is going to pay for itself.
AFAIK only by academic researchers but the fact that they can quite simply be hacked means that they will be. Hot tubs are apparently another target with serious load potential and near zero security.
You have to "blame" that on the EU who set limits on standby power for various items.
lol, the spooks have now been told. From the start there were requirements for mobile phones to permit government access to data. It has nothing to do with any visible apps or user permissions.
I read that one as the hackers having to be within wifi distance, rather than anywhere on the internet?
It is installed.
The `enable flash` bar doesn't even show up(Iceweasel) anymore. They (youtube/google) seem to have switched completely to broken HTML5 now.
Try a different browser. Works here ihn Firefox, Opera & Chrome.
Here also.
Yup, it's all done in the hardware, folks.
Do you remember, I think it was quite recently (less than 18 months I'd guess) there was a massive hoo-ha in the mainstream media about Apple refusing to give the FBI access to some guy's Iphone. He was refusing to hand over his password and there was "nothing the FBI could do about it without Apple's assistance" ROTFLMFAO! Talk about contrived! :-D
Not in an iphone it isnt. That?s why the FBI made such spectacular fools of themselves with Apple.
Apple said that they couldn?t do that.
He was refusing to
Nothing Apple could do to bypass the lack of a passcode either.
Easy to claim.
I know. Some great free publicity there. Get all those paranoid crooks trusting in Iphones.
So they wanted everyone to believe.
Likewise.
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