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The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

berthub.eu

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Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#21

Post by panki27 »

ano-ther wrote: post #11

Eye opening for me. One of the arguments for renewable energy (besides emissions) has always been its potential for decentralizing power generation. Makes it more resilient, democratizes the means of production etc. This article shows that we inadvertently introduced new choke points. And of course the global security environment makes it more worrisome.

Hmm, almost like what happend to the internet... the idea being "everything is decentralized", but now +80% of traffic passes through Cloudflare and over 90% of mails come from 2 providers!

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#22

Post by realusername »

ano-ther wrote: post #11

Eye opening for me. One of the arguments for renewable energy (besides emissions) has always been its potential for decentralizing power generation. Makes it more resilient, democratizes the means of production etc. This article shows that we inadvertently introduced new choke points. And of course the global security environment makes it more worrisome.

It never made any sense anyways, nothing can really escape the economy of scale, whatever the technology being used.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#23

Post by grecy »

dathos wrote: post #6

I live off-grid, power and water wise, and it really irked me that the monitoring coming with my inverter is only available online. Even when there is a network available the app will not work. I fixed this by getting a raspberry pi connected and reading it from there, but if I disconnect the inverter from the internet it will create a new network so now there is always an open network in the middle of nowhere with n…

What inverter do you have? Many like the Fronius have a removable networking card.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#24

Post by yetihehe »

Nextgrid wrote: post #19
yetihehe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could, but this requires to store historical data about usage on devices. If you store that encrypted data in cloud, then getting it to your mobile phone is super slow. If you store it in cloud, you can get historical data even if your device is dead or has 256 BYTES of memory and 1 megabit of flash storage. We have such devices, very effective at managing local municipal heating network and controlling several th…

> we preemptively moved everything into VPN'ed mobile network Unless your device itself is handling the VPN, I have bad news for you if you trust the mobile network to not open your devices up to malicious attackers: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/

We consider "they hacked the mobile network VPN's AND had time to reverse our protocol before being booted out of network" as too high a level to be resolved by us. If someone has enough resources to do this, he will also just hack into standard-level secured server at municipal office and there will probably be no one there to stop him or discover what went wrong.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#25

Post by pheatherlite »

yetihehe wrote: post #5

>The owner of the panels and inverters can meanwhile establish a connection with that manufacturer using an app or website, and via the manufacturer see how their own panels are doing > It wasn’t necessary from a technical standpoint to let everything run through the manufacturer’s servers, but it was chosen to do it this way. (emphasis from article) I'm working on IoT cloud system. It was chosen to be done this way…

If we've learned anything from the security cam and baby cam scandals, then it's that convenience is king and we as a society would rather risk everything than be arsed to take few additional steps to setup/learn something to prevent such basic breaches. We (the society) don't even want to change the default password on most things.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#26

Post by paxys »

panki27 wrote: post #21
ano-ther wrote: post #11

Eye opening for me. One of the arguments for renewable energy (besides emissions) has always been its potential for decentralizing power generation. Makes it more resilient, democratizes the means of production etc. This article shows that we inadvertently introduced new choke points. And of course the global security environment makes it more worrisome.

Hmm, almost like what happend to the internet... the idea being "everything is decentralized", but now +80% of traffic passes through Cloudflare and over 90% of mails come from 2 providers!

Cloudflare absolutely does not control 80% of internet traffic. I have no idea where you got that number from.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#28

Post by lucianbr »

yetihehe wrote: post #5

>The owner of the panels and inverters can meanwhile establish a connection with that manufacturer using an app or website, and via the manufacturer see how their own panels are doing > It wasn’t necessary from a technical standpoint to let everything run through the manufacturer’s servers, but it was chosen to do it this way. (emphasis from article) I'm working on IoT cloud system. It was chosen to be done this way…

What's the reasoning for not allowing both control paths, via cloud but also locally? So that people who can and want to, will use the local control.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#29

Post by grecy »

formerly_proven wrote: post #8

Most newer solar inverters can't even be set up without internet and most functions are only available with an always-on internet connection. This is also true for EU companies like SMA for example.

I just installed a Fronius inverter (made in Austria) and 6.8kW of panels.

The inverter itself functions perfectly fine without an internet connection, and will display instantaneous power output on the screen. I could just be content with that and look at my monthly power bill to see how much I generated and how much I used each month and never connect it to the internet.

To get any kind of data logging & history from the inverter, it must be internet connected (wifi or ethernet). And all of that is through the manufacturer's website, which constantly nags me to "upgrade to pro" for some obscure feature that I'll never use.

Re: The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud

#30

Post by yetihehe »

pheatherlite wrote: post #25
yetihehe wrote: post #5

>The owner of the panels and inverters can meanwhile establish a connection with that manufacturer using an app or website, and via the manufacturer see how their own panels are doing > It wasn’t necessary from a technical standpoint to let everything run through the manufacturer’s servers, but it was chosen to do it this way. (emphasis from article) I'm working on IoT cloud system. It was chosen to be done this way…

If we've learned anything from the security cam and baby cam scandals, then it's that convenience is king and we as a society would rather risk everything than be arsed to take few additional steps to setup/learn something to prevent such basic breaches. We (the society) don't even want to change the default password on most things.

> We (the society) don't even want to change the default password on most things.

Like you wouldn't believe.

My most memorable case of insecure IoT devices - wifi socket was sending wifi ssid and password of the network in cleartext in every ping packet to chinese servers.

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