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Comment by algoth1 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lived through the blackout it was wild. I felt back into the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. It was pretty cool actually. The rumor mill spread so fast that Within hours the official word on the street was that we were getting hacked by a foreign military and people were joking that we had nothing of interest to be conquered xD

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Might 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.

We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?

Outside, right now, it is about 6 degrees C. Much of Spain is a high plateau where you're entirely dependent on sunshine for warmth in winter.

From pleasants 20-25C to -30C in some peaks. Castilles? Snow for granted. The north? Chilly as hell. Not snowy, but the humidity fro the Atlantic will make you feel cooler than the Castilles themselves even if freezing.

Can be hard, and NOT just because of Filomena. Not all Spain it's a Mediterranean beach, trust me. Some winters in Leon can be harder than the average Winter in Poland.

How hard a Winter can be? Pick a height map of Spain... and you will deduce something by yourself.

Spain 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.

Why do you use Fahrenheit?

It can get pretty bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Filomena

TL:DR Spain is not just Andalusia, and the US is not just Texas.

Spain is like a condensed minigame map of the US. Remember when the Morrowind videogame looked megadiverse because of the mountains generating lots of different terrains and curves? That's Spain. You cross a mountain tunnel by car and your warm 28C degrees in May at Leon somehow shifted to a cloudy, gray sky with 15 degrees in Asturias in -literally, measured by clock- ~10 minutes.

You would think that you where somehow abducted and teleported from a UFO in the road. But no, it's just the rough nature.

And the Winters in Leon are bipolar being a dry, continental climate. So you can have scorching summers... and freezing winters with -10 degrees with ease.

So, yes, Winters outside the Mediterranean sea can be rough.

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 :)

I 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.

and then people accuse social media of making people paranoid...

you are able to be paranoid on your own just fine

My theory is that social media simply increases the connectivity and reach (of the “rumour mill” or what have you) and thus it amplifies an existing social “failure mode”.

(That and earlier mass media was heavily moderated and regulated, while things like Facebook or twitter/X are basically a free-for-all).

Facebook/etc aren't a free-for-all, they're much worse than that - they selectively provide a stream of news designed to drive "engagement", of which angry obsession is one type. Social media aren't "platforms", they're content distributors (despite the industry's own efforts to establish use of the term "platform", which sounds far more neutral).

The hack thing spread wildly, indeed. Weird experience.

In 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.

About 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)?

IMHO wouldn't make much a difference, the issue had been known to them for years up to that point. To a large part still exists, the Spanish grid only committed to upgrade the hardware after this incident. Even so it will require about another year to complete the upgrade over there.

I don't follow in detail the news on other European nations but haven't seen much focus on hardening their security until they actually get breached. A recent example (albeit different attack vector) would be the Polish grid: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/wiper-malware-targe...

Rumour huh.

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