It was fun and exciting at first. However when phone batteries started getting low and the streetlights were still off you could see that changing. Candles and the relaxed Spanish attitude to life helped a lot :)
replyMight have been less fun if it had been in the depths of winter. The fact that it was a balmy sunny day in springtime made it a pleasantly novel experience, I agree. Of course, the "sunny day" seems to have been correlated.
replyWe're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?
replySpain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North and the inner part of the country can have crude winters, specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one of the most diverse countries in Europe.
replyIt can get pretty bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Filomena
replyI didn’t even know about it until the next day - totally off grid, and starlink for internet access - and no mobile signal where we live to give it away either.
replyand then people accuse social media of making people paranoid...
replyyou are able to be paranoid on your own just fine
The hack thing spread wildly, indeed. Weird experience.
replyIn Germany a few months prior saw CCC publishing a method for destabilizing energy grids using radio waves a cheap hardware: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st... and presented an attack vector to which most infrastructure in Europe is exposed.
replyAbout 4 hours before the grid collapse on the 28th of April 2025 was recorded the largest purchase of Monero in the past 3 years (to remember: monero is coin of choice for special operations), making it surge +40% in 24 hours. The initial Spanish reports mentioned conflicting power information from dozens of locations at the same time which is consistent with a sequential attack using the blinkencity method so the grid itself is forced to close down.
Well, if that's really the cause, then thanks CCC, I guess. For such a serious vulnerability which is probably non-trivial (not to mention expensive) to patch, is it really responsible to give only 3.5 months of time before disclosing it (according to slide #56 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5f6498c074436c349716e747/..., they notified EFR about the vulnerability on 2024-09-12 and disclosed it on 2024-12-28)?
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