112 pointsby johnbarron5 hours ago10 comments
  • time0ut4 hours ago
    Data centers are such great targets in modern warfare. A few cheap drones can inflict billions in damage with low direct casualties (if the attacker even cares). I have heard AWS in particular is secretive about the exact location of their data centers, but no doubt every major country knows exactly where they are.
    • cheney_20043 hours ago
      Which is why peace and diplomacy is so important. The last thing we need is to be war hardening everything, which is likely impossible in this day and age.
      • croisillon2 hours ago
        your handle tho :D
        • lostloginan hour ago
          Cheney is just salty that targets weren't hardened before he shot his friend in the face.
    • jmalicki3 hours ago
      Just look on satellites for giant buildings with no cars or semi trailers parked in the parking lots.

      I wonder if data centers will have to start doubling as automobile junkyards to conceal themselves.

      • time0utan hour ago
        Some data centers are more valuable as targets than others. For example, those comprising us-gov-east-1 and us-gov-west-1 or, god forbid, us-east-1. I don’t expect it is a difficult task to find them and other critical infrastructure for a state, but probably more involved than popping open google maps.
        • jdxcode21 minutes ago
          I've always wondered what "us-east-1" is, presumably it's more than just 1 building
        • jmalickian hour ago
          The US government's security priority should be moving critical us-east-1 services into Cheyenne Mountain.
      • throwaway8943452 hours ago
        Some Paris data centers are disguised as apartment buildings with the classic Hausmannian facade, and then you open up Google maps and see a ton of AC units stacked on the roof. These aren’t likely major cloud data centers mind you, and the motivation for concealing them has more to do with the city’s aesthetic codes than military defense.
    • robotnikmanan hour ago
      I'm surprised they did not build them in a bunker or other hardened location. The region is not exactly known for its political stability.
    • fvdessen2 hours ago
      That's why the SWIFT backup data centers in Belgium are camouflaged as posh villas (or so i've heard)
    • ameliusan hour ago
      Can't you use internet geolocation from a distributed botnet, and triangulation based on timing?
      • dantillberg40 minutes ago
        Yes, and this could perhaps determine location within a few miles.
    • kdheiwns4 hours ago
      Big tech's love for cheap labor is a great mechanism for finding where all their most valuable assets are and mapping out any and all vulnerabilities. I imagine state actors are applying to any and all low paying jobs that have seemingly juicy job requirements and feeling out details during interviews. Even better if you offer to accept a salary far below standard rates and actually get the job.

      While probably not a state agent, I've personally done online interviews with some people that were clearly lying about everything and trying to feel out details about the company. People claiming to live in our country and being citizens but having little ability with the language, saying they would love to come to our city but it's a bit far, saying they graduated from a major university but being unable to describe anything about the town (with their resume mentioning graduating from a different university, and their LinkedIn a different university from either), random people moving around and arguing in the background, all their work was with random crypto businesses that shut down within months. I had to stop my coworkers from saying too much. I had to convince them why hiring that person for remote work and giving them access to our servers was a bad idea. There are without a doubt companies giving similar people physical access to their hardware. And there are undoubtedly people who practice interviewing to better deceive companies.

    • cute_boi4 hours ago
      I wonder if you can uncover where the data center is just by using ping command.
      • yabones4 hours ago
        It could give you a rough idea, but it's far from precise. The delay added by a single router could throw you off by several KM.

        It's much more effective to just go through satellite imagery and land title records.

        https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.01+ms+at+speed+of+lig...

      • tcp_handshaker4 hours ago
        >> I wonder if you can uncover where the data center is just by using ping command.

        Not exactly, but you can uncover cloud providers like Google and Azure, who forget to tell you, their "availability zones" are in the same data center ;-)

        • jmalicki3 hours ago
          As long as they're on opposite sides so the same Shahed missile doesn't hit them both.
      • sophacles4 hours ago
        You can find data centers by looking for hvac units in satellite photos.
        • hirako20003 hours ago
          You can make a few phone calls. Maintenance is not avoidable until boston dynamics figure out how to clean the toilets at least.
        • Ekaros4 hours ago
          Probably also grid connections like size of transformers and if there is prominent number of trucks going in and out.
          • jmalicki3 hours ago
            The relative lack of trucks is what would identify the data center. The only other buildings like that are warehouses, which have a lot more trucks going in and out relatively speaking.
            • hnlmorgan hour ago
              In rural areas maybe. But plenty of data centres are in cities too. And European cities are not generally known for an abundance of parking spaces.
              • jmalickian hour ago
                The giant kilometer by kilometer hyperscaler data centers aren't in cities.
      • fragmede4 hours ago
        That's some of how geolocation works. Ping can't go faster than the speed of light, so that gives you a circle for where something is. Ping from enough places and you can get a good enough idea, if you're the Iranian Guard or otherwise.
    • walrus013 hours ago
      You can be secretive all you want, but it's extremely difficult to hide massive heat exchanging systems and/or generators from aerial/space photography. Particularly at the scale of an AWS-like datacenter.

      Building a fully camouflaged datacenter could be done at much greater cost, but you still can't hide its thermal emissions from infrared. Basically every watt hour used in a datacenter environment turns into waste heat ultimately rejected into the atmosphere (except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber), so if you have N megawatts of waste heat from a rectangular shaped building located on a 300 x 400 meter sized plot of land, it's going to stand out.

      • s1mplicissimus3 hours ago
        Wouldn't it be possible to pipe away the heat to the next city and use it as heating there? That way the heat emissions wouldn't be as noticeable
      • jmalicki3 hours ago
        > except for the 0.000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a fiber

        Realistically you're getting photons returned too.

      • throwaway8943452 hours ago
        Geothermal exists, but you would have to take care to design accordingly and even then there are plenty of other ways for a state actor to locate you. It probably doesn’t make much sense to spend money trying to hide from state actors; it’s probably better to (1) avoid conflict prone areas to the extent possible and (2) make it expensive for an attacker to shut you down (use more smaller data centers within a sensitive region, put some of them underground, etc) or (3) accept the risk of data center disruption.
    • mugivarra692 hours ago
      [dead]
  • logickkk13 hours ago
    "Stops billing" makes it sound generous. If those regions can't run customer apps, not charging for them is just the minimum.
    • pwarner2 hours ago
      IDK your S3 data may be fine, they're still incurring the cost to store it on those drives - even if they're buried in rubble /s
      • essefjo9 minutes ago
        There is already a S3 storage class for that: Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive
      • jabiko13 minutes ago
        Also you have to remember the basics of statuspage messages: Its always just elevated error rates. Even when the error rate is elevated to 100%.

        "We are observing elevated error rates when accessing objects stored in the affected region. Impacted customers may experience increased latency or intermittent failures while retrieving debris adjacent data." /s

  • nerdsniper4 hours ago
    I'm surprised this reportedly only affected 19 server racks. Some of the small FPV quadcopter strikes I've seen videos of have collapsed entire homes. Even if the structure is more resilient than a fragile home, I would have expected the blast from a larger long-range drone like a Shahed to damage more server racks than that.
    • readams2 minutes ago
      Yea it's hard to reconcile such a small number of affected racks with such a widespread impact though, so this must not be the whole story. They're talking about a half a year to restore the data center. It must be more than a roof repair and 19 racks.
    • bluegatty4 hours ago
      It's either 100lb or 100Kg, with a direct hit on a dense centre, it would damage a lot of racks, but if it's oblique, or indirect, impartial, the damage could be less pronounced. They could also be misrepresenting by diminishing the damage as there's a lot of information suppression going on.
    • downrightmike4 hours ago
      The sheer amount of metal on every rack makes DCs very dense
  • opengrass31 minutes ago
    ZOMG free egress!?!?
  • neuroelectronan hour ago
    When I was working at AWS, which was a new service at the time, the example we often heard was a natural disaster or comet strike; would be what we were making our data centers redundant for. I don't think we were ever considered to be targeted during war and I'm sure they considered that they just didn't want to that affect that morale cost on the staff.
  • juliusceasar3 hours ago
    Thanks 2nd Epstein War for all the fuck up in the world.
    • 2ndorderthought2 hours ago
      It had to have been cheaper to just pay more in taxes then this outcome.
      • neuroelectronan hour ago
        Not if you're rich and own representatives.
  • snickerbockers3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • HotGarbage4 hours ago
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  • righthand4 hours ago
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  • debo_an hour ago
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    • dirasieb43 minutes ago
      maybe raise some pigs on the premises of the data center so that iran can't bomb them? or a big painting of muhammad with his child bride