Hi. I live in Tokyo, am one of the founders of Tokyo Hackerspace, and would probably be considered one of the Japanese geeks.

Hi. Actually these are storage tanks and are designed to hold water. Once they are filled, its unlikely water is pumped out unless there's a suitable place to dump it. That doesn't seem to be the case.

Actually we're working with health physicists that were at Three Mile Island and geiger manufacturers. We also have two gamma spectrometers that we're using to identify isotopes and we're putting together data templates so that people who upload data can also mention the tube, conversion factor, CPM, orientation, etc. We're also collaborating with local universities who are also helping us collect data and will be using it in their research.

Yeah, actually we shot it on a Tuesday afternoon because the weekend would have been mayhem. A lot of the shops had no camera policies so Patrick filmed it all on his D-SLR hung at stomach level so that he just looked like a tourist rather than someone filming footage.

Hee hee hee...yes, I love enclosures. But perhaps you missed the FPGA development boards, the canine robot, 300 yen 5.6-inch LCDs, induction motors, wall of thermocouples, wall of tweezers, wall of heat sinks, wall of fans, airwolf RC helicopter, EL wire vest, RGB acrylic panel, surplus components, and the giant Mario statue.

Hmmmm...I now realize that posting on Slashdot after I'm dead drunk is not a good thing...oh well...huzzah!!!

I agree. Instead of being covered up, this kind of thing needs to be brought into the open and the vulnerabilities need to be studied and understood. That's the quickest way to get them fixed.

And of course you can buy the old Radio Shack auto-dialer and replace the crystal. That turns it into a red-box where you can emulate the DTMF tones that signal coins being dropped into the slot.

p.s. you succeed.

Uhhh...I read the article. If it were a pure software exploit. It wouldn't be an expensive issue to fix as mentioned in the last line of the article.
And if you read my blog article, you'd see that smart meters aren't able to communicate with each other and instead communicate on the utility's backhaul.
And if you read my blog article, you'd see that Travis Goodspeed posted a blog article of his own detailing a side channel attack on 802.15.4.
Uhhh...personally, I don't care if you read my blog or not, but since programmers normally try not to repeat themselves, you might want to check out my blog for details on this.

The attack in question is a side-channel attack that is limited to using a microcontroller with an external 802.15.4 radio that includes an encryption engine. The actual AES-128 algorithm wasn't broken. Instead the vulnerability is that the AES keys are sniffed on the exposed bus when you load the keys into the radio's registers. Contrary to popular belief, you can't take over the nation's smart grid from this attack, and it would be difficult to even take over your neighbor's meter unless you broke into his house. I have more info on my site where I respond to the hack from Travis Goodspeed. The blog post is at http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/Clearing-the-Air-About-Hacking-Into-The-Smart-Grid.html

Akiba
FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Project
http://www.freaklabs.org/

Microsoft is the only company I know that can get its customers to pay for a downgrade.