Guest “I hope so” by David Middleton
This is fracking hilarious…
POWER TRIP
How electric vehicles could be used to hack the 2020 election
By Justin Rohrlich December 11, 2019When former CIA director James Woolsey said in 2017 that he was “confident the Russians will be back, and that they will take what they have learned last year to attempt to inflict even more damage in future elections,” he was referring primarily to cyberattacks against electronic voting machines and voter registration databases.
That same year, professor J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan testified before the US Senate Intelligence Committee that the results of simulated cyberattacks on American voting machines were decidedly bleak.
[…]
Now, according to Yury Dvorkin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, there’s another possibility to worry about: electric cars.
A successful election attack doesn’t need to gain access to voting systems themselves. Dvorkin says plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and the charging stations that charge their batteries could enable large-scale cyberattacks on urban power grids. In a simulation he and his team conducted using Manhattan, Dvorkin found that it would take only 1,000 electric vehicles charging simultaneously to stage an attack on the city’s power grid, potentially blacking out entire sections of New York.
In the context of election security, Dvorkin told Quartz that such attacks could cause power outages in districts a political opponent might want to flip, making it impossible—or at least extremely difficult—for people who live within those boundaries to vote. Streetlights would be affected, causing traffic jams. Subways would be inoperable, and communications networks could go dark. Electronic voting machines would be useless without electricity, shutting down polling stations.
“Based on available statistics, urban populations tend to favor a certain political party,” Dvorkin said. “If on election day there is a blackout in the city, it means that this vote is going to be suppressed. And even if you take a fairly blue state such as New York, where people living in rural areas also often vote for a certain party, suppressing the urban vote may turn the state from blue to red.”
[…]
Quartz
The “I hope so” comment was sarcastic… But… Wouldn’t be a hoot if 1,000 greenies charging their Tesla’s in Manhattan flipped New York State from blue to red? It’s good to know that EV’s might actually serve a useful purpose.
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Re. voting and electronic systems I recall the mess in the BUSH – Al Gore election. . where a mark on a paper was not considered good enough to register a vote.
I recall Joseph Stalin saying words to the effect ” It does not matter how many persons vote, it does matter who counts the votes””
Keep it simple stupid comes to mind. Here in Australia we are Oh so Old Fashioned in that we still use a bit of paper and a pencil. Seems to work very well and it only takes a few hours to count them. More important the data ie the papers are still there in case there is a query such as a very close result which is resolved by simply having a recount.
Regarding Cyber crime or political hacking, just put a human between the data coming in or out and the problem is solved.
MJE VK5ELL
Actually, it sometimes takes days to count them, and sort out the preferences. I’m sure Diebold could make machines that would manage the business in a matter of minutes, and decide what we really preferred rather than what we said we preferred.
“where a mark on a paper was not considered good enough to register a vote. ”
It was not a mark on a piece of paper. The ballots used a punch out system where your vote was recorded by the machine by punching out a small tab indicating who you were voting for. The problem arose when there were not complete punch outs on many ballots, thus producing the infamous “hanging chads”. Those reviewing the ballots tried to determine if the partial punch out was an error or the intent of the voter.
This is really EXCEPTIONALLY silly. A Tesla home wall charger runs at maybe 11 kw. Other wall chargers are in the 3- 6 kW range. You could achieve a similar effect by a synchronised switching on of electric cookers or tankless water heaters
Or just use the smart plugs.
Give a couple f thousand away and hack them.
Or just hack all the smart plugs any way.
Or load couple of thousand smart plug with 3kw loads.
At hidden locations, Utility cupboards, tunnels, offices.
The 3kw loads only need to be transient, last 1min or so, possibly small and solid.
I do not advocate any body doing this, as It may possibly work. Who knows?
Nice attempt at misdirections. They weren’t talking about home units. They are talking about massed super chargers at commercial charging stations.
Mark W: Not misdirecting anyone: it didn’t specify fast or slow chargers. The number of public fast charging stations is limited and their power draw controlled by third parties
Even if the attack only affected home chargers, 11 KW times 1000 cars is 11 MW. Switching the cars off and on simultaneously will put an 11 MW load intermittently on the local grid. The power company would need to follow that….. or not.
Just like everyone switching on the electric kettles at half time in a football game
Priceless- I’ll make sure I max. out my household use that day!
I think the bigger question is if 1000 EVs can hack an election, what will happen on a daily basis when we are all forced to drive EVs?
Hopefully only Russia wants to interfere and only during elections.
No other country would even want to hurt US economy, ever.
Really digging deep to find a way to fault EVs. Interesting scenario. We could only wish.
OT sort of. Down here on the south side of Daytona Beach. SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 25 minutes to put 60 more pieces of space junk up. Should be able to get a decent view of the launch from here.
From the posted article:
“Based on available statistics, urban populations tend to favor a certain political party,” Dvorkin said. “If on election day there is a blackout in the city, it means that this vote is going to be suppressed. ”
It had always amazed me that all this “the Russian are hacking our elections” is based on the Russians wanting to help the Republicans. Why would they want to do that? It would be much better for Russia’s ambitions in the Democrats were in the White House.
Regardless which party wins, the Russians are having a good time just sowing turmoil. BTW, I agree with you; if the Russians cared who won an election, they would probably prefer to have Democrats in office in the USA.
The anti Putin crowd crowned him as the controller of all things in US politics, the one and only person who would know decades ago that Donald Trump was electable, whereas US pundits couldn’t see that a few weeks before the election.
And they still don’t see the problem here.
Essentially, it’s an Emotional Support Idea (like Emotional Support Animals): the people who designed the sanctions against Russia need to preserve their (possibly non existent) belief (but then they can believe that they believe it, even though they clearly can’t truly believe any of it) that what Putin cares the most in life is to lift those sanctions, so his entire worldview should be shaped by the issue of who supported sanctions and who opposed sanctions.
The idea that sanctions hurt French farmers a lot more than they hurt Putin is simply unmanageable for these people; so is the idea that Russia is now stronger with a more diverse economy thanks to those sanctions, the idea that market lost by European countries are lost forever, the idea that the honor of those countries (who folded to support an American idea of sanctions that America did not even impose on itself, to support America that they hate no matter what) is lost for even longer. These European countries supported that unfounded American dictate, for a silly gesture of blocking those evil Russians access to French pork, but their leaders and “intellectuals” consider very insulting the idea that they should be required to pay their fair share in NATO.
But anti Russia propaganda in Western Europe failed, especially in France where there is no more miserable failure of propaganda known since at least the H1N1 hoax. That’s why Macron is backtracking on anti Russia xenophobia (while the parties that support Macron insist that Russia is interfering in French politics).
Does anybody have a “Russian” source that the Russian government was trying to influence the 2016 elections? We have a lot of people in our intelligence services that say that. Are these people in our intelligence services the same ones that facilitated spying on the Trump campaign in 2016?
“The “I hope so” comment was sarcastic… But…”:
NY can even better – Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet – The New York Times
https://www.google.com/search?q=NY+gas+stoves+vs.+electric+stoves&oq=NY+gas+stoves+vs.+electric+stoves+&aqs=chrome.
Imagehttps://www.nytimes.com › clim…
Opinion | Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet – The New York Times
NY gas stoves vs. electric stoves von http://www.nytimes.com
01.05.2019
· Induction cooktops, running on electricity, are superior to gas stoves. These devices use magnetic waves to …
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sarc along.