cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10061950

Security researchers from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) have exposed critical vulnerabilities in Hoymiles solar inverters that allow attackers to remotely control, manipulate, or destroy hundreds of thousands of solar installations across Europe. The Chinese manufacturer holds roughly 20 percent of the European microinverter market, making the security flaw a widespread threat to balcony power plants and small rooftop solar systems.

...

During experimental tests, a modified handheld scanner located two dozen foreign inverters and their identification numbers within 20 minutes. In Augsburg, Hunz identified 42 hackable systems within just one hour. The radio signals can travel several hundred meters, making it feasible to mount attack equipment on drones for systematic scanning of residential areas.

Once attackers have the serial numbers, they can switch inverters on or off, alter power limits, and inject malware through an unprotected firmware update command. Tampering with sensitive network parameters or erasing bootloader memory could lead to fires, electrical accidents, or device destruction requiring physical repair.

...

The CCC informed Hoymiles [which is headquartered in China] about the vulnerability in February but received no initial response. Only after the German Federal Office for Information Security contacted the Chinese authority CNCERT did Hoymiles react at the end of June. The company announced a security update for mid-October.

...

Archived

Thermodynamics has given us the concept of emergent behavior. There are properties that billions of particles possess that thousands do not. As the saying goes, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Nowhere is this more true than in cell-phone radiological detection. The ubiquity and density of many millions of phones would give rise to two-dimensional image tracking, instead of simple zero-dimensional thresholding. And once the real-time geographic background has been recorded, innumerable machine learning and astronomy algorithms could compete for detection supremacy in ways we could not have anticipated two decades ago; this democratizes the stopping of nuclear terrorism and converts the problem into a machine learning competition.

Convincing a society is a slow percolation problem. Years ago, Japan’s MEXT was interested, and Chiyoda Technol Corp was curious. Eventually, SoftBank released a phone with a small dosimeter in it and an app for putting push-pins on map locations. While we researchers were grateful for these increments, we failed to persuade our colleagues on central points: large detection aperture, spectroscopy, ubiquity, real-time reporting, automatic 2D geo-mapping, without human intervention, with server-side algorithmic source detection, are all required components. But so far, the systems that have been built have had only unconnected pieces of that puzzle.

Systems of thousands of nodes have been done as demonstrators. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (the folks who funded the internet, and did much of the early research into satellite navigation, among other things) showed the effectiveness of this approach at first, with 100 detectors, and then 1,000 detectors around the year 2016. By 2018, there was a roll-out to state, local, and federal authorities, but these likely remain in the thousands of nodes. We applaud every baby step, but we wish to be clear that life begins in the tens of millions. Tens of thousands won’t cut it. We will keep insisting after every future radiological crisis that ubiquitous, real-time, internet reporting, gamma-ray spectroscopy, has to be on every smartphone if you want to save the world from nuclear terrorism.

I understand this is potentially dystopian, I get that, but also just focusing on a distributed capacity for Nuclear Radiation Detection that is impossible to completely sabotage and that requires little additional build out and maintenance (since everyone already has a smartphone) could genuinely change how a Nuclear Emergency might unfold. Even if large Nuclear Radiation detection systems were able to get a message out through centralized systems, the ability of individuals to monitor it themselves would decrease panic and uncertainty even if it didn't actually change the message or conclusion being conveyed to the civilian population to flee or take shelter. This also reduces the potential benefit from a bad actor to sabotaging centralized state run emergency responses to a Nuclear radiation emergency since at the very least everyone has a detector to give them some ground truth to the wildly frightening things being said about a force that is mostly invisible to the human eye. Wild fabricated claims using AI generated footage deployed to manipulate and spread panic would be far less effective if people generally knew how to check themselves what the environment was like around them.

Outside the context of disaster, radon buildup in houses is also a thing...

City plans to triple system of underground pipes that distribute chilled river water, reducing need for individual cooling units

I made a post on !gardening@lemmy.world about the different methods I use to automate my plant watering.

It features "solarpunk" ways to achieve that, mostly low-tech that isn't reliant on any electricity or water grid. I want to spread the solarpunk spirit on Lemmy, to safe lots of water, labour and stress.

Check it out if you're interested! :)

Industrial electrification potential much higher than commonly assumed

https://fluxer.app/blog/roadmap-2026

Some good news on this FOSS alt to discord. Moving along well but still in beta and testing of Mobile versions. Still nice that the work is pushing along and might not be a spur of the moment fad

Lovely! Now my domains are safer :D

Just discovered her.

Watching her vids brings peace to my mind.

Plus she's super cute.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/51621587

The European Commission has decided to restrict EU funding, including through the European Investment Bank and European Investment Fund, for solar, wind, and energy storage projects using inverters from so-called high-risk countries, namely China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, citing cybersecurity risks.

...

For projects outside the EU and not connected, or planned to be connected, to the EU grid, inverters from high-risk suppliers should be phased out by 15 April 2027. Technologies covered include inverters across all renewable energy applications. The rules also apply globally to companies owned or controlled by those countries.

...

According to [EU] documents, the Commission notes “Energy storage systems / Power Conversion Systems (PCS) are explicitly included,” which places EU-backed battery energy storage projects on notice, particularly those relying on integrated PCS supply from Chinese and other suppliers.

In terms of sourcing, many batteries that are supplied from Asian sources include all-in-one options that package the batteries and cells with the PCS. For those projects that are now facing bans on inverters, sourcing lists may be constrained or require changes.

Christoph Podewils, Secretary General of the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC), confirmed to ESS News that the decision doesn’t have exemptions based on power class.

“It’s really a strict regulation, without many loopholes… It also concerns inverters supplied from entities under control of the high-risk countries, so for instance, a company producing, in Europe, inverters belonging to a Chinese entity.”

...

Web Archive link

When you're building the solarpunk future, it's possible you might spend hours in the workshop. If you need a PPE solution for airborne contaminants - consider building your own powered air respirator (PAPRa). You can build this PAPRa for less than $200 in parts. Originally created during the pandemic when supply chain issues made it difficult to acquire these devices. Wearing a PAPRa is more comfortable and safer than wearing an N95.

https://openwrt.org/

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/46711471

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/46710548

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46526992

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2095495622003485

Another banger from the Low Tech Magazine. This time : the trusty handcart.