Seems PG&E is installing smart meters for electricity and gas in our neighborhood. They use some kind of mesh networking.
Anybody know how they might be secured?
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Comment by flutterby.net/User:DanLyk… — January 12, 2010 @ 4:06 pm
I’ve been talking with a friend of mine who’s been deploying a pay-as-you-go metering system in less developed areas of the world. In general the attitudes he’s running into are roughly “we’ll physically check the metering every once in a while, so any skullduggery with the signals will be caught”. I’d imagine PG&E is probably going to do something similar, they already have the infrastructure for reading the meters physically, and if they just let those departments die by attrition they’ll still have the manpower to audit the electrical readings for years and years.
Which is something they probably also need to do just for safety’s sake: I know they had a guy last year walking our street and to our gas meters with a sniffer (he found a leak under the street at the next address down), having someone out to do a visual on the power lines at least once a year is probably also necessary.
Comment by Johannes Ernst — January 12, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
I just so hope not.
On the other hand, if one can watch drone feeds, as one apparently can, one might also be able to watch (or change) power data.
Scary.
Comment by flutterby.net/User:DanLyk… — January 13, 2010 @ 8:36 am
Changing will only have an impact ’til the next physical inspection.
On usage, my neighbors, if they’re so inclined, can already walk by my house and look at my meter. Yeah, it’d be easier for them to monitor usage, but frankly I’m more excited by the prospect that I can have better real-time feeds (I’ve already got a “BlueLine Power Monitor” that I’m not terribly impressed by) than I am worried about my neighbors knowing that my dishwasher’s running or my lights are on.