elephant in the room? I can't even believe it hasn't at least been mentioned??
I guess I'm used to wading through a lot of elephant dung. Which elephant are we referring to today? this week? this last 16 months?
I swear I miss ALL the good stuff!
I too would like details as to which elephant we are referring to
Add me to the list of the clueless to quote Jimmy Durante, " what elephant?"
Did I get banned and not know it? Did someone else get banned? Vetech63 got a post in here- so I know it wasn't him. Its usually him and funwithfuel getting in trouble.
Was not me
Well, whatever it is, I hope it doesn't require any attention from the Moderators.
It has to be that FWF guy! He gets me in so much trouble here . I was a choirboy til he showed up
am I in trouble for bringing up the metric system?
I won't get within a mile of that statement. Or touch it with a ten foot pole.
My ex-wife is a....???? It's OK to say it, I know. That's gotta be it
Ha- I hear you're still on parole. Don't have any hesitation about throwing FWF under the bus either
You are but that's not it.
The gas shortage. Unless what I'm reading is all made up? Sounded like the east coast was pretty much out of gas?
we were briefly. The pipeline going down was a fairly big deal but the situation wasn’t out of control until the reporters (who I hope burn in hell) decided to stir up a panic. Note the pipeline had gotten shut down several days earlier but it wasn’t until last Sunday afternoon that they really started stoking the fires of fear and everybody and their cousin started filling every vehicle and possible container with gasoline in a massive freak out which of course emptied everything that would have probably lasted until midweek when the pipeline came back online.
I've read that in New England the shortage is because of a lack of fuel tanker drivers. Some got laid off and never came back, fewer graduating from a truck driver school because schools were shut.... make up your own excuse LOL
Our fuel market here was down to a few hours supply for a few days during the texas freeze a few months ago media never peeped about local supply or shortage so the system recovered without issue pretty rapidly People would be blown away how short supply is when the pipeline goes down there was a simalar story here about 15 20 years ago with a pipeline leak shut down the pipeline for 2 weeks and the world ended
I forget, what does and elephant look like?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_the_room
Obviously it's what I thought. The lame-stream media created a false panic because fear sells.
I’ve given up on watching the news. I hate being lied to and I hate listening to B.S. I put gas in my pickup twice this weekend with no issues besides the rising cost.
Just look at all the safe handling and transportation of gasoline.
Try doing that with fuel in the back of a truck with a company name on it.
Remember way back when the news reported the actual news. There were no ratings to make, if you were in any position of power, and you fffed up everyone found out the truth. Reporters were like private investigators, and looked for the real story. Or maybe that was just in the movies, can't remember.
I tried to fit 22 gallons of diesel in my truck today but it would not fit. Does that make me a bad person?
A couple years ago we had very widespread power outages. No pumps but 1 but the line was outrageous, down the block. Due to the nature of my business I was traveling far and wide so was able to get what I needed. However I wondered if staying local, what would the line have looked like at 2am? Probably no line is my guess. Hour of the day or night is nothing but a number, I have electric lights and so does the gas station.
We are asking please don't buy fuel for the next 14 days to 'flatten the curve', then it will be over.
Where I live we have a Colonial pipeline and Plantation/Kinder Morgan pipeline that damn near cross each other. There are two tank farms in a 10 mile radius. No issues with finding fuel other than the occasional station outage. Last Tuesday we had 500 gal on road and 1000 gal off delivered to our yard on it's normal schedule.
No problems with hoarding a little fuel here, I've got a couple inconspicuous vehicles so they don't spot me at multiple stations. Word to the wise- rubbermaid containers aren't what they used to be. And the new biodegradable trash bags aren't all that great either. I've also got some good deals on N-95 masks and TP if anyone needs it......
You know the world has to just be waiting for the next show to drop so they can laugh at all the stupid people in America
humans have always been this lazy. Why would you face critical systems out to the 'net, but to be lazy and save money? "Look here, we can automate this and that, that thing over there, make that so we can check it from the central office and cut 1 million a year in staffing!" " oh yes the stockholders will like that! Sign me up for my golden parachute!" The folks who made this possible have probably all been retired out with huge bonuses. They should have a drawback clause.
I enjoyed rolling into a station in my service rig and filling up at a green nozzle will everyone was looking for gas tho. Comes down to a basic theory of mine, that's been proven over and over, system operators are a lazy lazy bunch.
And the worst part of this whole situation, the pipeline paid the cyber-thugs ransom. The precedent has been set. They'll just do it again, next month.
No. Just no. The problem was leaving the keys in the door in the first place. The power grid heard the wake up call and took steps. The pipeline people were deaf to the warning. They are listening now and so are the regulators.
Yes, the tech exists to secure this stuff. They just saved a little money and it cost them a lot. The next chapter is here now. It won't happen to them again, hopefully others get the message before it happens somewhere else important.
.
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, "is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Wait for it... CDC recommends...
When I was in Woodstock/Atlanta, Georgia last week the day I was picking the backhoe up every fuel station within 40 miles between where the rig was parked and where the backhoe was was either empty or packed with about 30 plus cars. Interesting thing is where the rig was parked there was no panicking, in fact I filled up the car and put 180 gallons of diesel in the semi for $2.89 a gallon. Not needing to hoard just what was needed to get 1200 plus miles down the road.
The railroads and military have had dark fiber for decades now. If you have the pipeline right-of-way, you can string your own dark fiber and have NOTHING facing the internet. I dug in the railroad's own dark fiber alongside the new tracks in Tacoma, and dodged the military's dark fiber while doing it. Some of it was so obscure that nobody wanted to claim it when I first dug it up. It may have been abandoned but nobody wanted to say one way or the other. Fiber is not impervious, but if you concrete case the conduit and physically secure the end points it is pretty tough to break into. You have to disconnect it to tap in, there is nothing to pick up by induction or any other means. That will set off all sorts of alarms.
From what I heard it wasn’t the pipeline controls that got hit it was the company’s administrative network and they shut down the pipeline controls as a safety measure to preempt any attempt on them.
that is my point. The pipeline controls on standalone dark network would never need to be shut down. The corporate offices could burn down, as long as you can drive your lazy ass out to the pipeline you can control it. Clearly they ran a slipshod operation if they had to shut it down that way.
Hard to hack into a couple of trained humans in a utility truck that know how to turn valves and such. Just a thought on the "Internet-of-Things"
all you have to do is take it off the interweb and put it all back on secured dedicated lines, problem mostly solved.
I suspect they could have backed up the system on a $10 thumb drive and been back in business the next day.
Those ransomware attacks are a little more than a $10 thumb drive fix. They are designed to exploit the network infect all the host computers all the servers, files. I have been through one at one of my clients. I had all of their files backed up, but I didn't have all of the machine images backed up so it took some doing but we never paid them a scent. Actually I've been through two. The first one I was on a cruise ship in St Petersburg Russia when the hack went down. Naturally I was disconnected from the internet while I was in Russia there was no way I was going to put my phone on their network. I didn't get the news until we were in Estonia. The servers there were all Linux, so I was doing command line work using my phone. We found the infected computer and got it off the net, then I started restoring files. Our next Port of call was Stockholm Sweden. You get good internet coverage for about 3 hours sailing in there through all of the islands. I got most of the work done before we got to the dock.
This pipeline was built I think in the 1960s? Operators and telephones. It would be hard to get enough operators in place to replace the robot gear all at once like this but you would think even running at 20% capacity would have been better than zero. But I am outside looking in.
I'm not sure the issue is about valves and indicator lights. I think it is more about administration of who gets how much fluid and then gets billed for it. In the old days fuel had to be manually measured using dipsticks and sight glasses. Say you wanted to sent 100K of diesel from Houston to South Carolina, you had someone in Houston who set the line up of valves all the way through and then someone had to read the level in the tank as fuel was moved out. Now you have digital flow meters all along the lines reading flow at all the various outflow ports along the way. Ransom was paid because they would lose more money not knowing where the bills were supposed to go.
I've been involved in custody transfer of fuels on a smaller scale, and while it is usually done very carefully, when the chips are down, a pen and paper, start and stop gauge readings, and a little math are all that is really needed. But putting together enough people at each end who can do that might pose a challenge, when nobody working there has any experience with it, I guess. On the other hand, do they normally rely on the computer to do everything? Is there zero manual cross checking of tank height beginning and end, etc.? What if, under ordinary conditions, something fails or gets programmed wrong?
Birken Today it is what the computer says, when computer fails whe scrath the head and say ***?
How did you get involved in fixing the problem on the cruise ship, you offered up your expertise?
I was on vacation Dave on a cruise ship and I got an email from the client in the US.
You must be pretty well known for these kind of fixes. That's way more than coincidence you just happened to be on that cruise ship but a darned good thing you were. How did you go from digging dirt to cyber security?
You're reading way too much into that Dave. Somebody opened a stupid email at a client that I did part-time work for. I was the first guy they emailed. I wasn't a cyber security expert I was a jack of all trades doing phone systems security cameras servers Network wiring etc. I fired them this year. Maybe we fired each other I don't know but I'm glad I don't have to worry about something that's 160 mi from my house. EDIT: to be absolutely clear I was not working on the computers on the cruise ship! I was fixing servers and files 9000 miles away in the US. I was also stuck with using my phone to do the work which is really a pain in the ass typing on the small screen. I've always dabbled in computers and Linux in particular, and network infrastructure. I've supported half a dozen small businesses over the years. Just something different to keep the brain engaged.
Wow, good job for such a fluke type e-mail.
Fixed that for you