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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

A squirrel can bring down a city's power grid as well, so YMMV. https://www.publicpower.org/blog/defending-against-outages-s...

This tactic of elevating your pet issue by linking it to a hypothetical catastrophe seems a bit unserious. A network model of how memes and beliefs spread is interesting, but they seem to adopt someone elses model in support of their idea. It's useful to apply extra skepticism to papers that link ideas to catastrophe, since it's likely using it as a vehicle.

However, an alternative interpretation from this is they may show it's possible to ascertain someone's political beliefs or alignment and select them for further investigation using their electricity consumption patterns, which if true, would be right out of the anti-smart-meter infrastructure conspiracies we encountered during SMI rollouts.

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Cyber Squirrel 1 tracked animal-inflicted power outages around the world, up until early 2019: https://cybersquirrel1.com/

> "They like the taste of the insulation on the cabling, so they start chewing on it, and they keep chewing on it, until [...] and that's a bad day for the squirrel."

From: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/raccoon-blamed-for-seattle-... at 2 min 50 s.

My favorite power outage story is the 1998 San Francisco / Peninsula outage. Contractors were working on a substation so they disconnected the 115 kV line and strapped it to ground to protect against stray current. When they were done, they powered up the line. Unfortunately, they forgot to remove the ground straps.

It turns out that the power grid doesn't like it when you connect 115 kV directly to ground. By the time the ground straps vaporized, the fluctuations caused all the generators in San Francisco to go offline, cutting power to a million people.

Bringing the power grid back up took hours. Among other problems, they discovered that the SCADA modems in several substations ran off AC without backup, so they couldn't access the substations remotely when the power was down. Oops.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/System%20Disturbance%20Report...

> This tactic of elevating your pet issue by linking it to a hypothetical catastrophe seems a bit unserious.

I see it in the spirit of computer security research. "Here is a way evildoers could hack this system". Neither the form of attack nor the target need to be the most general to churn out such results.

The difference is that we actively take measures to defeat squirrels from impacting infrastructure.

Social media information warfare is happening and is novel. Institutions don’t have a good process do deal with it.

> This tactic of elevating your pet issue by linking it to a hypothetical catastrophe seems a bit unserious.

I definitely have to agree. Seeing papers with such blatantly clickbaity sounding titles gain a lot of traction is pretty disheartening.

One squirrel shouldn't be able to bring a whole grid down. Grids are supposed to be resilient and have a couple of safety features

A squirrel could bring power to a street down, or maybe a neighborhood. In the same way falling trees do

> One squirrel shouldn't be able to bring a whole grid down. Grids are supposed to be resilient and have a couple of safety features

A very big outage in North America occurred from the cascading effects of a single breaker working as intended. The grid is a very complex system because it is dynamic and subject to states of vulnerability that may not be well understood.

Yes but it was not "just the squirrel" it is a combination of factors (usually faults or overloads upstream).

Exactly my point, the grid is a complex dynamic system.

Something being a complex dynamic system doesn’t make it vulnerable to squirrels. It may be vulnerable to squirrels, but it also may not be.

For sure but in the interest of national defense seems like we should work to amend that

Link for anyone who didn't know about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

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