IW/Anything Water Related-Warning in OP

Barely There wrote: »

We will be still paying - It will just end up as the usual suspects i.e. the PAYE workers footing the bill as usual.

You'd swear the march was about abolishing the cost of producing potable water the way some people go on about it.


If you're a PAYE worker and are attending the march, you're either incredibly generous or a misinformed idiot.

Ah try a little bit harder will ya, we all know water has to be paid for and as you well know abolishing the charges means we wont be paying for it twice

Shin

Muahahaha wrote: »

If the encryption exists then someone out there will be trying to crack it, it is naive of you to think otherwise. Meters are subject to data attacks and here we have Irish Water who didn't even hire a data protection officer until very recently. What confidence should people have in this one person that the data contained in 1.6 million meters is safe and secure from being intercepted ?

Did I say that nobody was trying to crack it? I said it was out of the scope of your average home burglar.

If you know of any single successful attempt to decode 128-bit AES encrypted data without the key or access to the device then multiple security companies would be very interested in talking to you. I'm not sure it's obvious what kind of resources would be required to make it possible even after a method has been discovered; we're talking supercomputers, days, and gigabytes of captured data just to figure out a single key. The meters only spit out at most a few kilobytes of data every time they transmit, and I'm pretty sure the IW ones only transmit when they're queried, not every 30 seconds. It would take a LONG time to gather gigabytes of data even if you managed to spoof query the meters, and you'd probably run the battery down in the process. They would have to do this for every house they're considering burgling. They'd be better off and much more likely to succeed in hacking the IW metering database for the AES keys, in which event IW would (hopefully) just change them all.

You're talking NSA resources, which I think we'll agree is out of the scope of a burglar. Of all the valid complaints against IW, this one is way out there. If AES was broken in such an accessible way that burglars would be using it to monitor houses, water meters would be the least of our worries.

Why would a burglar choose the above method, when they could just survey a neighbourhood the old fashioned way? Or even look at the physical meter itself?

No water usage doesn't mean somebody's not at home either, you could go for most of the day without using water. Inversely, water usage doesn't mean somebody's at home either, there could be machines using water, dishwashers etc, or a leaky tap. There are much better ways to figure out if a house is empty or not. You might as well be calling for the banning of landlines cause a burglar could determine that nobody's at home by hearing the phone ring unanswered.

There are a lot of legitimate and honest complaints about the setup of IW, but claiming things that there is no evidence for, to me, is a dishonest arguments, and I can't stand dishonest arguments.

Edit: I'm not sure water usage would come under data protection, at least when taking data directly from the meter. After all, this information is available to anyone with hands and a flat-head screwdriver.

Valetta wrote: »

That's paying once.

not sure if your trolling but ill bite, if you pay your water charge your still paying those indirect taxes as well so youll be paying twice, the government is not stopping those taxes

Shin

Barely There wrote: »

It's actually about how we want to pay for it in the future.

Personally I think everyone in society should be making some contribution rather than just PAYE workers.

The only sector of society that stands to gain from the abolition of water charges are those who are unemployed and who have no intention of ever working.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should state if you're a member of this group, as you seem very keen to ensure that it is just PAYE workers which continue to fund water-provision.

And in the interests of mind your own business no I wont fully disclose anything to you or anyone on this forum.

Shin

Tinkersbell wrote: »

Only PAYE workers contribute to the tax pool of this state?
You might want to rethink that one sunshine.

Doesn't matter. People wanting water infrastructure to be funded only by tax (indirect or not) are campaigning to have some people pay more than others, some people paying twice and some people paying nothing at all.

Everyone should be paying for water, once, and it shouldn't be based on tax.

fergus1001 wrote: »

I think people forget that they mentioned paying for "services like water and street lighting" out of the property charge

That's twice

And again any funding from the property charge (if any) to water infrastructure would stop. That's once.

Tinkersbell wrote: »

Where do you think they got the hundreds of millions to set up the water tax quango?

From the taxpayer and borrowing.

For me the only problem is that Irish Water was setup in a very poor manner.

The rest of the arguments now are just stupid.

No way we won't pay (who do you expect to pay for it?)
No I don't want to pay for usage (Why should I pay for your teenagers morning hand party or leaks you are not willing to fix?)
Water is free it falls from the sky (Water is free when it falls from the sky, so is Lightning and Sunshine)
Water is a human right (Access to potable water is a human right)
They should just fix the infrastructure first (Are they going to go out with blotting paper and put it on the floor to find the wet bits?)

For me it looks like:

The whole service was a shambles in the first place, down to local authorities to administer. The water quality is terrible, I don't know a place in the country that doesn't suffer from some sort of problem e.g. water pressure, hard water, brown water, leaks and so on.

People are mixing up water as a thing and water as a service, banging on about human rights.

People in a lot of countries in Europe don't drink water from the Tap in their house, I haven't heard the UN doing anything about it yet.

IMO caving to the pay on usage was a mistake, the cost is just hidden as it will have to be topped up and paid for by the PAYE worker, the Motorist and anyone else that pays into the General Tax pot.

The argument of already paying doesn't make any sense either, you could say that about any cost which used to be paid directly in general taxation and was converted into a direct charge. The saving is in the money you don't have to borrow on the markets.

The argument of people on social welfare not being able to pay is a topic that should be addressed by the social welfare system.

Also the Psychology of water usage in Ireland is obvious, when people say they take a Shower over a Bath its not because of the water usage, it's because they'd have to turn on the immersion.

Barely There wrote: »

Sounds like someone has a vested interest in making sure other people keep paying for their water.

and it looks like your just trolling for a reaction keep going your hilarious in your ill thought out responses

keeps me smiling anyways

Shin