Apple pie & solar power

 

Image from Pixabay

You’re going to bake an apple pie. The ingredients are lined up in battle order on the counter, eager with impatience. The mixer is shining in pride of place, ready to mix everything together nicely. You pour the first ingredients into the mixing bowl and set the switch to position one, for starters. Nothing happens. Oh, stupid, you realize with relief, of course you have to plug it in first. But still nothing happens. It slowly dawns on you: the pie is being delayed. Your once faithful mixer no longer works.

Since the invention of the light bulb, we know that electrical appliances break down over time. A few decades ago you could still assume that expensive appliances, such as a TV or washing machine, would last about ten years. If there was something wrong with them in the meantime, you had it repaired. Nowadays we often don't make it to ten years, and repairing has also gone out of fashion. But hey, things do break.

With us it was not the food processor, but a solar panel. Unlike with a food processor, this is not so easy to find out. Yes, we regularly check the solar power harvest of that day in the app, but then we see the total yield of all panels. In our colorful weather it is normal for these values to differ from day to day; so you can't tell that one panel doesn't contribute. Fortunately, there is another screen that shows the daily yield per panel. If there is a zero there, you know there’s a problem. But we didn't look at that screen that often. A reconstruction showed that the panel had been out of service for about two weeks. So I quickly called the installer. He concluded that the electronics box of that panel needed to be replaced. The technicians have been on the roof and we are fully operational again. Just turn up the sun.

We discovered this defect by chance. I talked about this with the technicians, who said that our supplier is also monitoring. But because we do not have a maintenance contract, there is no permanent monitoring. In other words: the data indicating that something is wrong is there, but no one is looking at it.

It works the same way in IT. Tons of data is logged, but not all of it is analyzed. You can think of all kinds of things when it comes to logging: a user logs in to his laptop, a printer runs dry, someone reads sensitive data, and much more. But yes, if no one is watching, error situations can survive for quite a long time. Fortunately, it is not all manual work. Smart software receives instructions as to which notifications are really important and brings them to the attention of specialized teams. The software acts as a sieve, meaning that only a fraction of all events need to be further investigated by employees.

There is also log data that is never looked at, unless there is reason to do so. Someone may have done something that is contrary to the rules. Most organizations couldn’t care less about an employee logging in to their laptop. Unless a manager has signals that the employee is going off the rails. Then he might want to know at what times the employee will start work. Things become more intense if someone is suspected of passing on internal data to criminals. In such a case, investigative authorities want to know, for example, who looked up a certain license plate and the associated details of the vehicle owner. That kind of information is not always available at the push of a button, sometimes it requires a lot of digging. Unfortunately, sometimes that is necessary, because in an organization as large as ours, statistically speaking, you are entitled to a certain percentage of black sheep. That is why I would like to see the logging of data required for this type of forensic investigation expanded - so that you can answer certain questions at the push of a button. You only know to a certain extent in advance what data you will need in an investigation. The fact is that events that you do not log now will not be available for analysis later. Another fact is that logging costs money. A good assessment is therefore necessary.

We have had a second set of solar panels for a few months now. Recently I had to be on the flat roof where they are located, and on that occasion I cleaned them. In doing so, I discovered that each of those panels showed several white spots. Not on the material, but in it. A few photos and an email later, the installer informed me that this problem was known to the manufacturer and that the panels would be replaced under warranty. Some things you really have to keep an eye on yourself.

 

And in the big bad world...

• three million hotel doors worldwide will open for these researchers.
• certain Apple chips have a serious crypto vulnerability.
• the aerospace sector has become a prime target for cybercriminals.
• there is now coincidentally an investigation into security and privacy at American airlines.
• a quantum computer can do jigsaw puzzles very quickly.
• cloud configuration is still very difficult.
• the internet lawyer is annoyed by a ruling by the Supreme Court.
• AI checks the programmer's work.
• it is still quite a job to investigate whether a data breach is real.
• the Spa Grand Prix has been hacked.