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Our power went down yesterday afternoon (December 12). The utility posted a message on their 1-800 number with expected repair time (a few hours later), but no explanation except that ~2000 customers were affected in our suburban area (Northeast USA).
Here's the weird bit -- LED bulbs stayed on, at reduced brightness. I got out a meter and measured 16 VAC in the house. This was enough to make useful light from "dimmable" LED bulbs (happened to be GE brand). After it got dark, we could also see that incandescent bulbs were giving off a faint reddish glow.
16VAC was also enough to keep a Netgear home router/Wi-Fi box going, it must have a switcher in the wall wart that accepts a really wide input voltage range?
Called a friend on the other side of the country who is an EE (with hardware background). He didn't have a good explanation, but suggested that in the process of bringing the grid back up there might be some big voltage swings--recommended unplugging everything we could. Went out to dinner and all was restored when we got home (no damage).
He also told a story from a rural area (near CA-Nevada border) where there was a power failure that upset the normally-balanced split phase -- instead of ~120V on both sides of neutral, the power went to 80V on one side and 160V on the other side of neutral. Equipment on the high voltage side failed due to extended over-voltage, seems that surge suppressors won't deal with this much energy.
Anyone? How does the grid fail-soft?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:38AM
They are using power outages to give the NSA a narrow window to breach home networks to compromise computer systems.
Consumer grade routers fail to 'dumb switch' mode at poweron without router processor intervention. Given that consumer routers can take upwards of 15-30 seconds to initialize and flip the switch chips back into secure mode, it would give government agents plenty of time to access consumer networks, snoop mac addresses, gain access to management engines, etc before the wall goes back up, at which point compromised systems can phone home for further instructions.
This is hopefully just a paranoid rant, but food for thought among the more security conscious soylentils: Is your router the weak link in your chain of anonymity?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:41AM
Brownout conditions can cause routers to fail into dumb switch mode until the next blackout or physical reset (unplugging and replugging power).
(Score: 2, Funny) by Some call me Tim on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:00AM
My DSL modem and router are on UPS power and behind seven proxies, so I'm not too worried about this.
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:23AM
Yeah, I also thought of getting power from UPS, but the guys at United Parcel Service told me they deliver only parcels, not power.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mth on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:05AM
Most people use a router they get from their ISP. It would be much easier for the NSA to work via the ISP to put a backdoor into the router firmware: only a handful of people would have to be in the know for this to work and stay secret. A power outage is going to be noticed by pretty much everyone working at the power company.
Also, the security offered by a router firewall is often overestimated: typical setups don't restrict or monitor traffic coming from the inside, so if there is any program or device on the inside that is compromised, an attacker can use that to tunnel through.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:24AM
Consumer grade routers fail to 'dumb switch' mode at poweron without router processor intervention.
Your tinfoil is too tight dude.
Consumer grade switches are simple linux or BSD devices, and they route NO INBOUND connections until iptables is loaded.
Just like every other linux box. They don't default to dumb switch mode. In fact, most won't even pass outbound traffic until iptables is loaded.
Pretty sure I saw an NSA guy climbing your up your down spout up to your gutters. You might want to go stand watch on your roof for a few hours.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:45AM
He does have a point in, in some cases.
A firewall usually require two network interfaces. However, you can instead use a managed switch with two VLANs and only one network interface. If you're building your own, a managed switch is a more expensive solution, but when building millions of devices, we're likely talking chips at a few cents a piece. And here's the thing: Most home routers already have a four port switch built in. Except that's at least a five port switch (one port is hard wired to the router), and might as well be a six port one, with the last port used as the uplink port on a separate VLAN, thus saving a network interface.
In this case, switch may very well start out with no VLAN configuration, and only have that loaded when the router starts up (saving a separate memory chip to store switch configuration).
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:23PM
Except not a single one that I have found works that way.
The WAN port is not physically on the switch group. Separately wired. So just because you can imagine a situation where this might happen doesn't mean this is common or that there is even ONE consumer router that operates that way.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:54PM
Unfortunately while the tinfoil might be on tightly, I can confirm that at least some consumer routers can fail into an unmanaged switch. It isn't the most common scenario, but it does happen. Now whether undervolting is a good way of triggering this, I can't tell you.
As for why, it is because you aren't dealing with a Linux or BSD box with these interfaces directly, you have an intervening switch ASIC either built into the router SoC or standalone. In braindead operation, you therefore just get a switch.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:34AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday December 15 2015, @11:51AM
So in order to stop the NSA all you need is to stick your router on an uninterruptible power supply? :)
(Score: 1) by driverless on Wednesday December 16 2015, @05:18AM
You can get 12V UPSes, it's basically just a 12V SLA with a trickle charger and a failover switch. Unfortunately they're a bit hard to find (although you can homebrew one with a PicoUPS), the least difficult to source are the CyberPower ones, e.g. the DTC36U12V. So you replace your router PSU with one of these and get outage-proof (or at least resilient) power from it.