Comments on: FBI: Smart Meter Hacks Likely to Spread

By: Baudouin

Baudouin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:43:11 +0000

Very interesting.
There’s an intention in European Commission to roll-out the smart meters to 80% of European citizens. The lobby European Smart Metering Industry Group (ESMIG) pretend the bill of consumers reducing 10 % with the smart meters and the Electric company can fight more easily the fraud. So if, the smarts meters can be hack so easily (as it’s proved recently in Germany), the consumers could lowered their bill more and more (50 %-75%), and the Electric company must face a more important fraud.

By: jdub

jdub — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:00:43 +0000

Care to give me manufacturer names and model numbers? I’m looking to purchase one of these for a research project. Infrared transceivers are available for as little as $20 but I want to ensure I buy the correct thing. Thanks.

By: Angel

Angel — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:57:29 +0000

This is old news. As a resident of PR I have been offered to have this done to my reader, but this was with the pre-smart ones. I had a co-worker that used the magnet trick with some success with the smart readers back in 2010. I never modded mine and he stopped doing it once the PREPA started taking measures to combat the thefts. Local newspapers and tv news gave the stories related to the thefts and the fines associated with plenty of coverage discouraging additional potential theft. Puerto Rico is almost 100% powered by petroleum that is shipped in. As you can expect, the cost to the subscriber are very high and the “purchase of fuel” cost variance is passed straight to the consumer and it can easily be double of what the actual energy consumed by Watt/h.

By: JCitizen

JCitizen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:47:42 +0000

Probe requirement seems odd to me, as all the gas companies here use radio telemetry in close proximity. They just drive around and the data feeds into their truck by wireless. I’ve not heard of any shenanigans on that model(locally anyway).

I must admit, most of our local cities do use probes on a stick for water meters; I’m not sure how they work, but a guy on an ATV with a wand simply touches the top of the man hole cover and the data transfer only takes a second, and he is already moving on!

I haven’t seen an electric meter reader for a long time, but since the city owns the grid here, I assume they are mechanical and they read them the old fashion way, from a truck. The area utility is still doing it that way so far.

It sounds like this design you point to, is not a very good one, if the technician has to go through that much time and trouble to make a reading.

By: MrUnFixit-Maybe

MrUnFixit-Maybe — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:16:34 +0000

‘Fart in a whirlwind’ (like the terminology) is for normal operation where extremely short bursts are all that is necessary to collect challenge/response meter readings at regular intervals of days/weeks/months/quarters for each meter, but checking each meter to examine their settings, update their firmware, and reset passwords on a regular basis needs quite a different bandwidth load, and often weighted in the push, rather than the pull direction, uninterrupted and with full reliability. You don’t want an utility employee physically going from meter to meter to update the firmware by shining their optical doodad into each meter for five minutes – far too expensive from a time and personnel aspect, and the existing smart-meter installation probably hasn’t got the memory capacity to take the added code anyway.

I can predict some white papers being presented at conferences coming up real soon on exactly this subject, and imagine wikileaks hosting some background briefs to industry outlining the anticipated depth of grief they will be asked to bear.

By: CZehfus

CZehfus — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:32:01 +0000

Logic fails in saying there are already other toxins, so what’s one more? Especially when the “one more” is causing hundreds of, thousands of people to lose health and become refuges from their homes and cities worldwide. People experiencing Radiofrequency Sickness (as noted by Russians when they did tests on people, and bombarded our embassy 70-some years ago, and as noted among telephone operators in the early days).
THIS is also worse than cigarette smoke in scope (you can’t escape in your own home) and in cover-up. Read Disconnect by Devra Davis. See Harvard lecture by Franz Adlkofer. http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2011/11/18_safra-center-cellphone-radiation-corruption.html
Yet the public are acting as lemmings. It is really sad.

By: JCitizen

JCitizen — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:58:26 +0000

I just can’t get excited and join the RF scare bandwagon, when I drink water contaminated with Uranium, live in homes with Radon poisoning, am bombarded by loads of cosmic rays, and the sun blows though the Van Allen Belt regularly and bombs me with some pretty horrible radiation everyday. All of this – every day. The world is corrosive.

I feel we just gotta get over it.

By: JCitizen

JCitizen — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:09:02 +0000

So does my weather station. It has to report quite a variety of conditions to the WeatherUnderground, in whatever time increments contribute to accuracy. I believe I have it set to every 5 seconds; I’ve never noticed a hit to my bandwidth at all.

By: CZehfus

CZehfus — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:27:00 +0000

True, smart meters do not create continuous signals, but they burst and pulse over 24/7 with no breaks. Some send multiple bursts of RF every 6 seconds, including “talking” to other meters in the mesh. The power densities have often been measured to exceed the limits of the HFE35C analyzer, which is 1999 µW/m2.

Chronic pulses of these power densities have not been tested over the long-term for safety. The FCC only looks at tissue heating in a 30 minute continuous exposure on a large man, but ignores other biological effects of RF exposure that the scientific literature documents. For a provocative, informative exploration of U.S. exposure guidelines/levels, see these sections at the link below:

*Low power RF doesn’t mean low biological effect
*The FCC limits are a terrible joke
*Time-averaging RF erases peak spikes
*The best analogy to these spikes of RF energy is a strobe light
*Many questions are utterly unaddressed by FCC guidelines

http://stopsmartmeters.org/2012/03/09/a-primer-on-the-fcc-guidelines-for-the-smart-meter-age/

By: JCitizen

JCitizen — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:04:13 +0000

Bandwidth allowance is definitely not a concern. Even if more duties were required in a more sophisticated smart grid system; it wouldn’t take anymore data bandwidth than my weather station does 24/7. Basically like comparing a fart to a whirlwind.