Category Archives: Technology

Consumer Affairs, Energy, Government, Society, Technology

Smart Meters: Energy giants can remotely cut supply

HOUSEHOLD METERING

ENERGY giants can use smart meters to cut the power supply to homes and force customers to pay their bill up front.

It is now known that suppliers have the power to switch the new digital devices to a prepayment setting without visiting the house.

This would force the occupier to top up their account before they use any gas or electricity – and if their balance runs out, their power could automatically be cut off.

More than 11million smart meters have been installed across the country as part of a national upgrade programme ordered by the Government.

. See also Smart Meters and the ‘hidden agenda’

The new meters automatically send readings to suppliers as often as every half an hour and show customers in pounds and pence exactly how much energy they use.

The aim is to make bills more accurate and help customers save money by encouraging them to reduce their power consumption. Experts warn, however, that smart meters give firms unprecedented power over their customers, including access to reams of data about how and when customers use energy and the ability to control a customer’s supply remotely.

Major energy companies said they had not yet used the feature, but admitted it was possible.

A spokesperson for auto-switching service Look After My Bills, said: “Suppliers now have a frightening level of power to hit customers in the pocket. In the past, the Big Six have proven far too eager to force expensive prepayment meters into people’s homes – despite warnings from OFGEM that they should only ever be used as a last resort.

“If they can switch someone to a prepayment meter with a flick of a switch whenever they choose, this is very worrying for families across the country already struggling with unfair price rises.”

A prepayment meter works like a pay-as-you-go mobile phone in that customers have to top it up with credit before they can use any power.

They are most commonly found in households where the homeowner or occupier is struggling financially, because they provide a better means of controlling how much is spent on energy.

Energy firms said that one of the benefits of new smart meters is that they can switch a meter from prepayment to the more popular credit setting remotely.

Energy watchdog OFGEM has strict rules on when suppliers can force customers to have a prepayment meter.

It is supposed to be a last resort when recovering debt, and suppliers should put households on to repayment plans first.

Currently, power companies need a warrant to install a prepayment meter against a customer’s wishes because they need access to their property. But if suppliers can switch someone’s meter remotely it would remove the need to go through the courts.

Under OFGEM rules energy firms would still have to show they had done everything possible to avoid forcing someone to have a prepayment meter and take steps to ensure that any vulnerable customers are protected.

An OFGEM spokesman said: “For suppliers that are considering if it is appropriate to offer prepayment to smart meter customers, the same rules apply as for those on traditional meters.

“Suppliers must be clear in their communications and establish that prepayment is practical and affordable for a customer. OFGEM would take any breach of these rules by a supplier very seriously.”

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Google, Government, Islamic State, Research, Society, Technology

Jihadi propaganda still active on YouTube

RESEARCH STUDY BY CEP

A study has revealed that YouTube repeatedly fails to remove jihadist videos within two hours of them being posted – because of “staggering holes” in its monitoring.

It found that the Google-owned video sharing site missed its target for taking down Islamic State films in one in four cases.

Dozens of terrorist-propaganda and recruitment videos were left for public viewing for more than three days at a time, clocking up tens of thousands of views, according to the three-month study by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

Disturbing, too, is that six in ten of the IS supporters who posted the hate videos were not even banned from the site and their accounts remain active.

The failings come after YouTube rejected an offer of free technology to instantly block any previously identified extremist content, preferring to develop its own system that it says deletes millions of banned videos before they are seen.

At the G7 summit in October last year, YouTube joined with Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft in an accord aimed at removing extremist content from their platforms within two hours.

But in the first in-depth independent study of IS videos on YouTube, the CEP found this was not happening because of “inexcusable” holes in the service’s monitoring system. Researchers found 229 previously identified terror videos were uploaded 1,348 times and viewed on 163,000 occasions over three months from March 8 to June 8, with 24 per cent left on the site for more than two hours.

They included the film Caliphate 4 – uploaded six times during the trial period – in which a terrorist taunts former soldier Prince Harry.

Another video called Hunt Them O Monotheist was uploaded 12 times during the study and on one occasion allowed to remain for 39 hours.

Computer scientist Dr Hany Farid, from Dartmouth College in the US, who developed a system that stops child abuse films being uploaded, created a similar program that instantly identifies and removes terror videos.

YouTube, Facebook and Google were all offered the eGlyph system free by the CEP in 2016 but decided not to use it.

Dr Farid said it was “infuriating” that companies worth billions refused to implement systems that could instantly stop jihadist videos. “Spectacular failures are allowing terror groups to continue to radicalise and recruit online,” he added.

Former Conservative Party minister Mark Simmonds, now a senior adviser to CEP, said: “This study dispels any lingering myth that YouTube are doing enough to stop their site being used as an IS recruitment tool.

“The research shows that YouTube are not even meeting their own promise to delete all extremist content within two hours. For them to fail in a quarter of all cases, with much of the content still available three days or more after first being uploaded, is unacceptable.”

He added: “Even videos that stayed online for less than two hours received a total of nearly 15,000 hits – any one could become a potential terrorist.

“It is staggering and inexcusable that well over half of the IS supporters who upload this dangerous content are not even banned and their accounts remain active . . . spreading IS propaganda and grooming potential recruits.”

Google said it “rejects terrorism and has a strong track record of taking swift action against terrorist content”.

A spokesman added: “We’ve invested heavily in people and technology to ensure we keep making progress to detect and remove terror content as quickly as possible.

“We’re a founding member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which sees tech companies collaborate to keep terror content off the web.”

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Legal, Science, Scotland, Society, Technology

Forensic Science: Scientists will bring an end to unsolved crime

FORENSICS

SCOTLAND’S top forensics scientist has predicted it will be virtually impossible to get away with a crime within a generation due to advances in DNA technology.

The director of forensic services at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), Tom Nelson, said rapid improvements made it more likely that criminals would always be found out.

. Related DNA Phenotyping…

He said the SPA was looking at ’12 cold cases’ in which modern techniques were being used to analyse old evidence in an effort to bring offenders to justice.

New methods mean DNA traces can be found on clothing and other materials even when there is no blood – something that would have been impossible in the past.

Mr Nelson said one of the guiding principles of forensic science is ‘every contact leaves a trace’.

He said: ‘We may be recovering material at the moment which doesn’t necessarily allow us to detect an individual but, as science develops in the next 15 years, that will become possible – science is always moving on.’

Mr Nelson said the challenge for police forensics experts was to ‘throw everything that we have in our toolbox’ at securing genetic samples from crime scenes.

He said that thanks to improvements in DNA analysis ‘an individual may commit a crime and think they have got away with it for a number of years, but I believe that individual will be detected’.

The SPA’s current caseload features 12 cold cases, stretching back up to 20 years, in which forensic investigators are analysing evidence to gauge whether new breakthroughs are possible.

Mr Nelson pointed to forensics work which contributed to the conviction of nine members of a gang who were jailed for a total of 87 years in January for drug and gun offences.

Their crimes included the ‘merciless’ torture of a man over a cocaine debt and an arsenal of weapons hidden in a car. A report by Mr Nelson revealed that more than 200 DNA samples were recovered from seized firearms. More than 1,000 DNA samples and 1,000 fingerprints were recovered from various scenes.

The results of these tests identified all of the initial suspects in the case and uncovered an additional six people that were not initially linked to the group until the forensic results were provided.

Mr Nelson’s report states: ‘Criminals should be aware that they cannot escape without leaving traces of material at the scene of their crime.’

Modern forensic techniques include DNA 24, a profile kit which targets 24 parts of a person’s DNA, whereas in the past it was only possible to look at 11 areas.

However, the daughter of a former police officer, who was wrongly accused of perjury when a fingerprint found at a murder scene in 1997 was mistakenly identified as hers, questioned the SPA’s confidence in forensic science.

He said: ‘While forensics has come a long way, they still perpetuate this fiction of perfection which is not true – rubbish in, rubbish out. Human error in the collection of forensic evidence and in its analysis is still a contributor to miscarriages of justice.’

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