I think you'll find that electricity won't flow out of the solar supplier if the voltage in the line is at 120v, as there's nowhere with a lower voltage for it to flow to. Anyone who draws current from the system creates a region of lower voltage, and current flows toward them until the voltage is the same everywhere. Think of it electricity as being rather like water in a sealed watertower: no more flows in if it's full, plenty flows out if someone lowers the pressure by opening a tap.
Therefor the spike from all the solar installations just offers more power. If no one takes it, current doesn't flow, the solar folks' ammeters don't budge and they don't get paid by the power distribution company. If somebody turns on a light, current flows, and some supplier's ammeter moves, usually a supplier close to the lightbulb. Ditto the consumer's ammeter, what we call the "electric meter"
Linemen don't like becoming part of the circuits, so they successfully called for the disconnect-if-zero laws.
Power companies (at least in Canada and large parts of the world) already have equipment to deal with the fact that the power can flow both ways. In fact, claiming they don't have equipment is only true IFF the power companies are the ones who like electrocuting their employees (;-))
the rule change, as requested by the department, would allow judges to grant warrants for remote searches of computers located outside their district or when the location is unknown.
The government has defended the maneuver as a necessary update of protocol intended to modernize criminal procedure to address the increasingly complex digital realities of the 21st century. The FBI wants the expanded authority, which would allow it to more easily infiltrate computer networks to install malicious tracking software. This way, investigators can better monitor suspected criminals who use technology to conceal their identity.
But the plan has been widely opposed by privacy advocates, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as some technologists, who say it amounts to a substantial rewriting of the rule and not just a procedural tweak. Such a change could threaten the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizures, they warn, and possibly allow the FBI to violate the sovereignty of foreign nations. The rule change also could let the agency simultaneously target millions of computers at once, even potentially those belonging to users who aren’t suspected of any wrongdoing.
Obstruction of justice is typically things like bribing witnesses, which is specifically mentioned in the law. Not refusing to unlock oa locked cell-phone, which the courts have held requires a warrant in other circumstances.
From the information in the article, this sounds like an attempt to scare a citizen into doing something.
Attempts to widen this particular law to cover less serious crimes get rejected by the courts: the very first case on the subject inCanII says (emphasis added)
[19] Moreover, an assertion that the mere attempt by an accused to identify an informant is a crime, fails to take into account that the types of conduct which constitute obstruction of justice, even though not fully articulated in the Criminal Code, are relatively well and narrowly defined in the law, and must remain so narrowly defined in order to have certainty in the law. Offences against the administration of justice have always included such conduct as attempting to influence a jury or to threaten a witness, or publishing sensitive information when a matter is working its way through the justice system, a general category of conduct which lawyers sometimes call an infraction of the sub judice rule. I have been unable to find a single suggestion anywhere in the law that an accused cannot take steps to identify a police informant; the court should act with restraint in opening new classes of obstruction of justice. Although obstruction of justice is an evolving concept, its main tendency is to narrow the categories of conduct which may constitute a crime rather than to enlarge them: Sunday Times. Recent examples of the narrowing of the categories include the removal of scandalizing the court as a matter of contempt, Kopyto, and the striking down of the publication ban on bail hearings, White.
Only on-disk, non-addressable controller proms are "read" by the software in the proms.
The boot prom has to boot stuff or the product can't be sold, and in this case is used to boot a program that runs on the hardware that continuously reads the prom. That HW can verify it, and all the other proms which are reachable from the CPU, including all sorts of stuff plugged into the various busses. That includes some disks, the ones we were worried about viruses wiping.
For some specific disks, you may have to pull the drive and clamp directly to the prom's pins.Those are the ones a spy would want to subvert.
Boot from a randomly chosen Linux rescue disk, and check the various proms. You've used the boot rom to boot a CD/DVD, but what you've booted is wildly different from the Windows systems that are the common target, so the attackers will have great difficulty in hiding what they've done from an unfamiliar system.
It's actually easier to hide evil stuff in disk proms, as your only access to them is via routines *in* the disk prom, as one of the other commentators pointed out,
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
