Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
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Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
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Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#12It could be worse, from the Wikipedia page of notable power outages (yes there is such a page):
"On 7 June (2016), about 100% of Kenya went without power for over 4 hours. The nationwide blackout was caused after a rogue monkey got into a power station and triggered a nationwide blackout. However, it is notable that only about 1 million citizens were affected by the outage as the World Bank estimates that only 23% of the country's population have access to electricity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
I am not seeing any of these power outages being due to crazy al-qaeda terrorists or any of the other bad guys our government clowns get excitable about. It's the rogue monkeys and Enrons I fear.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#13Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
The biggest part of that economic war would be letting everyone know the grid has been compromised, not the actual outage, there's no advantage to keeping it secret.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#14I lived in NYC during the 2001 blackout. It was the first power outage since 1977. The lights don't go out in NYC...it's a really big deal when they do.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#15Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
It's a valid hypothesis and not crazy at all. If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant.
It might not be covert economic warfare, but more of a covert demonstration whose audience is intended to be the US government. "We have lots of dangerous 0-days, and there's a lot more where these came from." In that case public credit would never be claimed.
It reminds me of how GitHub kept getting DDOSed for no reason. Turns out GitHub was a popular demo target for vendors of DDOS botnets to show their power.
Edit: could be exactly that... a demo of wares by a black market vendor of 0-days for a potential buyer.
Edit #1: a non-malicious explanation might be a vendor pushing out a bad software update to something.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#16Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
Not likely because of Hanlon's razor: "don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#17The seeming reluctance to spend lots of money on infrastructure maintenance and modernization really worries me, especially when I read these kinds of stories.
Isn't this a self-correcting problem? The grid will become more robust when there is an economic need to do so.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#18Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
Can it be called crazy if exactly that has happened in the recent past? Russia did it to the Ukraine just a few months ago.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#19Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
The biggest part of that economic war would be letting everyone know the grid has been compromised, not the actual outage, there's no advantage to keeping it secret.
There's a benefit to keeping it out of public channels if it's a warning rather than an economic war.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#20Search "power outages" in Google news and scroll through a few days worth. They happen all the time, everywhere. I would be very surprised if there's any correlation across events here.