Gas Prices Are Going to Go Up

All thanks to hackers taking control of a pipeline.

1. Don't expect the price hikes to be limited to just the East Coast.
2. Expect Republicans to blame the increases on Biden's policies.
3. Remember this the next time someone starts pushing for new pipeline construction.

Considering just about everything is subject to a hacker attack like this, i hardly see this as a good argument against pipelines

Unless you think we should shut down everything that’s vulnerable to these attacks, which is just stupid

The pipelines are touted as being more reliable than trucking the stuff. Given that it’s harder to shutdown the entire trucking industry than it is a pipeline with tightly integrated computer controls, it’s worth noting.

somebody was just on the news talking about taking steps to improve security to prevent this kind of thing blah blah blah. She wasn't blaming anyone (except the criminals who did it) just saying any security steps will be bipartisan (as they should be). The problem is the criminals will always be one step ahead unless we have psychic powers and can predict their next move.

I believe it was hackers as much as I buy the movie hackers.

No, a bunch of oil execs said they were mad because of alternative energy and Trump losing and decided they needed an excuse for pumping the gas prices up again because we elected Biden. Not that Biden does anything, but they wanted some better tax breaks and are bothered their taxes are going to go up to far less than they were before trump lowered them. One of them piped up that he heard about ransomeware and that they did not even have to stage some sort of actual terrorist damage. They do not even have to waste a drop of oil to pretend there was a leak. It is the mythical and magical ransomware attack. They had to shut it down because ransomeware. Something no one can even prove, and the police will never make an arrest for because it came out of "russia" or "China."

How to make up a gas shortage so we can up the prices and blame it on russian hackers.

There are no kids being sold in NJ pizza parlors, but the oil industry is full of crooks who just love to up the price of their goods. If gas and oil were utilities that we had regulations on where they would face penalties for failing to meet the demand and could not gouge the customers without facing huge penalties we would not have magical invisible hackers shutting down pipelines.

If prices go up while Biden's president it's definitely Biden's fault. Remember the good old days when Trump was president and gas prices went down?

The problem, however, is that the beancounters running the companies don't want to spend the necessary money to take the precautions to deal with even known threats. Remember when North Korea hacked Sony some years back and it came out that Sony had no security systems in place to prevent such things? Not as many companies as you might think learned anything from that lesson.

When the ransomware attacks started ~10 years ago, the guys were just going after anyone, then they decided to start targeting businesses (after all, they've got more money), since then, they've moved on to "critical infrastructure systems." Think hospitals, power companies, emergency services, and the like. There are mitigation steps that companies and organizations can take to blunt the damage from ransomware attacks, but they're expensive, so they tend not to do them. (Think a complete backup system that's not directly connected to the current system, but can be brought online shortly if the main system gets hacked, with little chance of cross-contamination.)

Yes, anything that can be created to stop such attacks can be thwarted, eventually, but it gets increasingly harder to do so, and requires much more specialized knowledge to pull it off. On an unprotected system, literally anyone can infect it if they want to, just by going online and finding the right software (which is floating out there for free). A robustly hardened system can only be effectively cracked if someone writes custom software tailored to the specific chips used in the computers or other components. A fifteen-year-old high school kid isn't going to have that kind of knowledge, and likely, the only people who do have that kind of knowledge are going to be working cushy tech jobs for big salaries someplace, so getting them to agree to do it is a lot harder. At that point, you need somebody with billions of dollars at their disposal to accomplish the task. I doubt if any of the current billionaires in the world are Bond-type villains willing to do that, but certainly, I can see a nation-state putting forth that kind of effort. After all, we've done it at least once, with the Stuxnet worm that we used to take down the Iranian nuclear program. And that took not only the US government, but the Israeli government, and the German government (at the very least) to accomplish.

One of the best things that companies could do is to stop relying on Windows to run their critical systems. Not because Windows is a terrible OS, but simply because by it having such a large share of the market, by default, attackers know what kind of systems they're going to have to attack. If the operating systems used for critical systems were more diverse (MacOS, assorted varieties of Linux distros, custom OSes, and the software packages for the systems were closely tailored to what they were going to be used for, so no email clients on a machine that's just running a pump or something) it'd be much harder to pull shit like this off. A program designed to hack a Windows PC can't do anything against a PC running a different OS, and if you try to hack a Windows PC with something designed for a different OS, you're not going to accomplish anything, either.

Good.

I luv high gas prices.

Joke's on all of you, I've been paying high gas prices this whole time!

Abolish oil.
Slap solar panels on everything.
Get this nightmare over with.

I volunteer UA's jeep.

It's the Russians. Of course it's the Russians.

And we'll see quite a bit more of it, because they got all of our secrets a decade ago and then got their guy elected and somehow penetrated vast swaths of the US infrastructure and government.

Good comrade.

ISWYDT

and now China got their guy elected - what a country!

Idiot, china was caught funding the proudboys attempt at overthrowing our government from Biden. Get with the program here, you do not give 80k to the people trying to kill the dems and overthrow the election Biden won.

Are you fucking stupid? Oh, obvious answer is yes. How fucking stupid does your dumbass hole go?

Yeah, the Proud Boys are really a force to be reckoned with! They couldn't get China to fund their bar tab.

DNI stated China didn't interfere in the election. You might want to occasionally read real news - you'll look less like an idiot.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ejects-trump-claim-of-china-election-meddling

Pfft. Show's what you know. A good comrade would have also called for the execution of the fossil fuel executives, and a redistribution of their wealth to members of the Proletariat. An excellent comrade would have also called for the execution of those who enabled the execs, or made vast fortunes off of them, and required that their organs be donated for transplant in those who are presently on waiting lists.

Dicky is too low level communist for that.

Then he's not a good comrade like you said.

Agree

I am pretty sure 80 thousand dollars is at least funding a bar tab.

If it makes you feel any better, I work for an auto referral company and there's a fuck ton of demand for electric and hybrid vehicles. There's just not the infrastructure for longer trips outside of the coasts, or for people like me who wouldn't have a regular place to charge the damn thing. And this in areas one wouldn't think there's been demand like Texas and Ohio.

And many on the market today can get up to speed without feeling like a shopping car, so that helps.

Just like the toilet paper thing, people are lining up for gas.

Back when Katrina hit, some guy I knew from a local message board went out and bought around 40 or so 5 gallon gas cans, then filled them up at a station that was price gouging. He paid something like $8 a gallon for diesel for his truck. So figuring in the price of the cans, say $20 each, he paid something like $12 a gallon for diesel. I called him out on it, he defended himself by saying he'll have gas while everyone else is out. We never had a shortage here, he tried to sell the diesel later on at retail, no one took him up on it. In the long run the dumb fuck wound up paying 4 times as much for the 200 gallons of diesel he hoarded.

Also, stopped to get gas since I had about 1/3 of a tank. Took a drive to go to one of the waterfalls in the north Georgia area, it was a 280 mile round trip. At the station that had gas, some stupid cunt fills her tank, then goes inside blocking the pumps so no one could even move for a good ten minutes. Comes back out with three one gallon container. I told her she was blocking 4-5 cars by then. The stupid cunt was driving a Sequoia, those three gallons would really get her far.

From what I could tell, the more rural spread out areas in the North Georgia area have run out of gas at about 50-70% of the stations. The areas that have a higher density, about 2/3 of the stations still had gas around 6pm.

a real man would put cans of gas into the back of a Ford Pinto! You youngsters might have to google that one.

I would say I'm surprised, but I was pretty much expecting this. On my way home from work yesterday traffic was jammed up on the busier roads with gas stations with people just waiting to get to the pumps. Hey dumb fucks! You just might be creating a shortage in your neighborhood with your hoarding! My wife is concerned I won't have gas to get to work .....I wish!

That said North Carolina is really getting hammered with 16 percent of the gas stations being completely out of gas.