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Comment by yannvon | Hacker News Reader

I experienced it first hand in Madrid. This was much scarier than I would have imagined.

News travelled extremely slow: phone coverage was just barely enough to receive a couple text messages every 15 minutes or so. News spread on the street, I even saw a group of 20 people hunched around someone owning a hand-held radio in the streets.

Just before power was restored, things started to get worse, as the phone coverage went completely out (presumably batteries were depleted). People were in between enjoying the work-free day, and starting to worry about how tomorrow would look like if power didn't come back.

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When the northeast blackout hit in 2003 in NYC I dont remember any panic. We still had house phones and they still worked in the blackout thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.

I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollution. Next day was totally in the dark as well and again, no panic. More beers were enjoyed.

The choice to move to electronic everything without having to give a shit about reliability is a failure of modern government. Move fast and break society for a dollar.

> thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.

Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the telco DSL would drop instantly with utility power so I don't have big hopes and I wasn't willing to pay $60/month to find out.

Around when I moved, stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat. Cash might work, and I've got some, but I don't think many people in my community do; people don't have cash for the snack shack we run at my kid's sports, so I doubt they have it for restaurants and stores either. And we get frequent 2-4 hour power outages, at least one, usually two or three per year; and ~ 24 hour outages every few years. The snack shack runs during summer where electricity is most reliable, but I doubt people stock up on cash in the fall and use it all up before spring/summer; they probably just don't have any.

> stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat

It's the other way around: Cards are flat because a carbon imprint doesn't afford the merchant any payment guarantee by the card issuer anymore anyway. (In other words, the "floor limit" above which cards require electronic authorization is now zero.)

At that time merchants probably still checked the signature on the back of your card against your signature on a bill. These days nobody bat an eye when I use my unsigned card. I guess at that time a matching signature would give the merchant enough confidence to process the card offline.

The merchant's confidence is irrelevant if it's not backed by a guarantee of the scheme (effectively forcing the issuer) to pay even in case of fraud.

The people operating these imprinters are sales clerks and waitstaff, not graphologists or experts in detecting altered physical credit cards. The sophistication of fraudsters has also advanced, and as a result, a system that might have been good enough in a pinch 20+ years ago isn't necessarily good enough today.

That said, in my view there's no excuse to not leverage the physical chip present on effectively all credit and debit cards these days, which is technically capable of making limited autonomous spending decisions even with both the issuer and terminal offline in scenarios like this. It probably won't happen without regulatory pressure, though.

IIRC tapping credit cards on London’s underground turnstiles use offline chip authorization to avoid delays.

It uses offline authentication (i.e. checking whether the card is authentic), but not authorization (i.e. whether it’s funded, not stolen etc.)

Unfortunately, too many cards, and all mobile wallets, don’t support offline authorization for that to be viable.

I started signing my cards with an all caps "ASK FOR PHOTO ID" 30 years ago. It raised a few questions when I would travel to the US and use them there, but was never refused a transaction.

I've been signing "CHECK ID :)" for several years now and it's only a few times a year that someone notices.

That’s an urban legend, and stores are not required to actually do so. (And as far as I know, a thief could sign the receipt in all caps, ASK FOR PHOTO ID, and it would be a valid signature :)

In fact, even verifying the signature is no longer required in at least the US.

Signature verification also only solves cardholder authentication, not card authorization (i.e. figuring out if the card is funded, still valid etc.)

Meanwhile (some) politicians in my country (Poland) and EU say that we should limit cash handling or eradicate it at all

Who? Please provide names.

Please point at particular people and parties without wording it as "some politicians".

In Poland alone we have far right, a lot of centric parties and some more or less leftist parties.

The most popular (by popular votes) "right wing" PiS is not "right" for the most part for several years now, had a Marxist/socialist prime minister and gave so many social benefits away to grab votes that it made "left" blush. They are "right" only on the level needed to get church-goers votes.

And, with antisemitist agenta, PiS was buying Pegasus subscriptions from NSO to spy on opposition and unvafourable journalists just in hopes that they'll get something from it.

So - which "particular politicians" are you quoting?

That sounds like the sensible reaction, at the time at least.

It's interesting to think about and realize how much things have changed now though, and how reliant people are on everything, and especially their tiktoks etc. working all the time.

Some of the panic is likely related to the war in Europe too, and especially the general talk about war

> Some of the panic is likely related to the war in Europe too, and especially the general talk about war

We were just two years removed from 9/11 so terror talk was the first thing that happened. We got that news from AM radio in our cars. Still no panic.

2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones. I’ve been in Lisbon today and it’s surreal being 100% cut off from friends and family back home and a big relief power is back on, we’ve become very used to and reliant on seamless instant connection. Our mindsets and how we live our lives with that instant communication is totally different to 22 years ago.

> 2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones.

Maybe it depends on the country, but my memory of 2003 is almost every non-elderly adult I knew (in my own upper-middle class milieu) already had a mobile phone. Not a smart phone as we understand the term today, but a lot of phones back then had primitive smarts that are now largely forgotten, such as WAP/WML browsers (which maybe not many people used, but I certainly remember using one), JavaME applets (vaguely remember using them too-maybe post-2003, but higher end 2003 phones definitely could run them), vendor-specific mobile app formats such as Symbian

It must be. Most people I know got their first cell phone in 1997. That year over a few months it went from almost noone has a cell phone, to almost everyone having one.

Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.

Like 10-15 years ago before VOIP I sold internet/landline services door to door for a summer. My biggest selling point was explaining to people (usually who had children) that the VOIP service they switched to would not work in an emergency where power wasn't available... Worked like a charm to get people to switch back.

Similar experience in a town in Madrid's metropolitan area.

Electricty went down (something kind of frequent). My UPS kept PC up, and alarm system with sim and small UPS mantained wifi up for an hour or so.

Scary moments started when people I was in a call with in Portugal texted 'Grid is out'. Later no phone signal nor data.

At first, it might seem people running towards supermarkets an overreaction on being without TikTok for a couple of hours, but you have to live how scary it is to experience this in Europe's current political status to know 60 million people (plus industry) in three countries are out of the grid.

If you see Snowden's film (this might not be the most trustworthy source) it is exactly how CIA's agent describes the feasable attack towards these countries. Again, not a valid source, but I'd love to understand if that could be feasable.

Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other canned food.

All gas stations closed because they could not sell gasoline/diesel. Today there are lines on all gas stations, people filling their car tanks and bottles..

Oh, let me tell you about electric cars! Many people had to spend the night somewhere away from home because they could not charge their cars.. My sister (with her job's electric car) had to stay the night some 200km away from home, and since the ATMs (Multibanco) didn't work, she didn't have physical money to pay for food. Luckily a stranger paid for the food (yogurt and some cookies). Petrol cars, because of their range, had better luck!

Pure fear and panic..

I can only blame the authorities (Portuguese/European) for not having contingency plans for keeping people informed, and thus letting fear spread like wildfire.

During a bad storm here many people used their electric cars to power their house. There were still places to charge it and then come back to the house to power it until the house was re-connected.

I have to ask: what's with "many people buying toilet paper" when there's the smallest probability of a disaster? Why? Why? Why?

It's because of Rule #3!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs8ayvLzqxY

At the point where the catastrophe has already started, it's too late to be taking up cardio, but rule #3 is one of the rare ones under your control.

Because you're always buying toilet paper in bulk, and everyone needs it.

Toilet paper is cheap and bulky, so stores only stock what they absolutely need. If a store is supplied once a day, it'll have something like two day's worth of toilet paper on its shelves.

Some incident happens, and people start to panic. By sheer coincidence one brand of toilet paper happens to be out of stock. The shelf space is huge, so as you walk past it you immediately notice it and think "geez, wouldn't it be awkward if that were to run out". You don't know how much you've got remaining at home so you grab a pack, just to be sure. Ten people do this, and because the packs are so massive another brand has just run out - making even more people consider picking up toilet paper.

You normally buy toilet paper maybe once every month, so if only 1 in 15 people pick up toilet paper during their panic shopping, those two day's worth of stock will quickly run out!

I've asked the same question. I think people are so pampered in western societies that the worst thing they can possibly imagine is not being able to wipe their ass with a fresh piece of toilet paper.

What, no. The toilet paper hysteria began in Hong Kong.

And the irrational urge to panic buy toilet paper became rational since enough people were irrationally buying it.

If you are old enough to have a conversation with someone who lived through the 1930s United States Great Depression, they had to resort to tearing pages out of the Sears catalog. After that, they would hoard toilet paper. And every generation since has done the same thing. But it started with the Great Depression.

I think this is where F-droid and Briar have a (short-lived in this instance) chance to shine. Since Briar allows communication between phones without access to the Internet, and F-droid allows to direct transmit apps between phones as well.

I wonder what similar solutions exist in the iOS ecosystem.

Until you have to charge your phone.

we tried briar during the recent mass protests in Serbia and the bluetooth connection never worked, it was unable to connect to any of the contacts that were previosly added using the normal 4G connection.

My son was at the university outside of Barcelona, and I lost contact with him for 6 hours. He was traveling home, and I knew that the roads had no working semaphores, and there were dozens of incidents...

I lost some years today.

My son is fine, thanks to a random person (“the man with a rabbit”) who just decided to give a lift to my son and his friend to the edge of Barcelona.

Glad you are all ok. There have been many stories of people supporting and helping each other, very uplifting in these troubled days.

I come from a world where I faced power outage for 17 hours for weeks. Each day there would be power at random time of the day. Life is just bleak. And when I see these kind of posts, I sympathize with them. You can't do anything in that situation. Modern world itself is so complex, you are left to thoughts. If this continues for a month, most people will go insanse especially those who rely on technology to stay sane.

I hope this comes back ASAP.

no one has emergency fm radios there? I thought that was pretty much ubiquitous. that's the first I'd go to check what was going on I think, other than my phone

From my personal experience, mostly just in the car. Here in Portugal there was a rather well-timed rail strike today, so a lot of people who would've taken the train drove instead and had a way to get back and listen to the radio. From what I could tell from the radio reporting, handheld radios and batteries were rather quickly sold out.

I've got to give massive props to Antena 1 too, which is the national broadcaster's main radio station, who stopped all normal programming and did an all-day massive report on this situation to keep people informed. From what I could tell they didn't even run any ads during that period, just all-day reporting continuously repeating key information for people who'd just tuned in.

> From what I could tell from the radio reporting, handheld radios and batteries were rather quickly sold out.

Indeed, visited the local hardware store and some bigger stores like Decathlon, and they were out of all batteries, gas-powered stoves and anything else related. Seems they ran out of it just hours after the power was cut too.

> I've got to give massive props to Antena 1 too

RNE did a great job, and together with the response of the previous crisis of Covid, I feel relatively safe as a Spain resident during a crisis. People around you are so caring as well, like when I tried to figure out how to open my garage door without power, a young guy stopped while passing by to ask if I needed help. Simple stuff, but gives a larger feeling of that we'll survive together no matter what.

I did not see much fear. I was at work and it took about two hours for us to realize the outage was not just local. The cafeteria had gas burners and served everything they could to empty the refrigerators. We all at lunch and discussed whether those who lived far away (train trip) would need to sleep at work (they might have, I don't know what happened to them). I made the relatively short 75 minute walk home across the city.

The atmosphere was quasi-festive and most people were quite relaxed, enjoying an unexpected afternoon off. Younger people filled the bars which were serving everything they could. There were long lines at supermarkets and an occasional fellow toting a box of supplies, but mostly there were just huge numbers of people in the street and completely collapsed traffic flow (the police were out in force almost immediately, directing traffic). In the part of Madrid I was in about 1/4-1/3 of the population is from South America and I suspect most of them have seen this all before anyway. The only real stress I saw was from people that need a train to get home (because the trains weren't running) and a had a walk of more than 2-3 hours.

I got cell phone signal when I was near two hospitals which were fully operational.

It was interesting that almost immediately, while I was still at work, everyone said power was out in Portugal and France too. After an hour or two some were claiming problems in Germany, but this seemed already to be unfounded rumors.

Some younger people couldn't walk home because they didn't have google maps ...

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