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This very well illustrates an inherent property of distributed systems – resilience.

Turns out digital sovereignty is a bad idea in terms of state security.

Don't put all eggs into one basket they told ya!

I'd heard (from someone trying to use them) that net connections into the Chinese clouds was very busy in the days around the start of the war, so the suggestion is they have critical stuff mirrored there.

China and America also care about digital sovereignty. Its hardly a shock that each of the big three, want to be in complete control of the core platforms. Each is an extension of the government policy.

This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.

Russia will most likely migrate/mirror to asian data centers. Is it bad or good for the west? I would say bad. China would become even stronger in a long term

Ukraine can have servers outside of Ukraine. No meed to have servers in the USA. I dont think these issues are so connected. As long as the servers are somewhere Russia does not dare to bomb.

Here's a playground hit this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfXCX_PMbA0

Yes, those sick psychopaths want to turn Kyiv and other major cities into uninhabitable deserts. They target bridges with regular cars in the middle of the day; attack buses, trains, residential buildings, gas stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, water and gas utilities. They declared a total war on Ukraine and removed all constraints on their methods.

Meh, I wish Cloudflare would break down its "bot" traffic a little more. I assume most of that is just Yandex's scraper going down. Which is good for disrupting Russian daily life but its not like their propaganda machine is knocked out.

How did you measure that?

Yes, I think they are the best. They have strong expertise (for example they were commissioned to conduct studies by Ministry of Defense of Ukraine) and excellent accountability (some is public [0]).

In my eyes one of their highpoints which demonstrates their trustworthiness is the ~20 million dollars payment they received this year by undisclosed European (I think it was European) entity (government or private donors maybe)

[0] https://savelife.in.ua/en/reporting-en

Don't you want to target short term projects directly aimed at ending the russian threat first? Long term only matters if you make it there...

Thank you, updated

Could you elaborate? What does this mean?

Edit: thanks for answers, this helps.

Yeah but I assume vast majority simply works from remote for the same companies they did?

Among them also Dan Abramov I think.

The talent has left but have you seen mass protests against Russian aggression in EU/US by those who left? I haven’t. And this is a big difference to the behaviour or Belarusians who fled - they are often seen across EU protesting against Lukashenko.

So the talent has left, but not because they disagree with Putin actions.

Czechia, quite surprisingly. But that was some time ago now, there are probably more these days (and might have been even then, I think my source is a Yandex speaker at a conference)

I guess it's France with its Qwant engine. decent for coding and French (culture, language, or both) queries. didn't use it for much else tho

Yandex, Kaspersky, Telegram, Intellij (including Kotlin), Nginx, VK to name a few. All those are coming from Russia.

I'm not totally sure about that.

Maybe Russians outside Russia.

Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.

There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.

Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.

Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.

Ordinary Russians think "yeah war sucks, I wish Ukraine surrenders so peace can be restored". I'm afraid only a tiny minority believes Russia needs to surrender.

I've seen the questionnaires from Moscow streets in the last few years on the topics of war. I've seen what different people write in social networks about it.

Maybe you can trick our naive western friends, but not me.

Being an indifferent somnambula is not the same as being against war.

Putin didn't take power in an overnight coup. Ordinary Russians didn't do anything about his growing power for what, 20 years or so? It was very much possible to act in the early stages, but it was easier not to, especially when hearing pleasing things about Russia becoming powerful.

No they don't.

Who do you think is killing Ukrainians?

It's not Putin himself, and it's not some kind of professional army.

Those are ordinary Russians who decided to join the occupational army, and who are launching drones and rockets at Ukraine every day.

Some do, but many don't. They aren't immune to propaganda.

For the time being.

Are they physically forced to vote for Putin? And how widespread is the electoral fraud?

What is this number referring to? When I google it I only find chechen war, gaza, and US gun deaths annually

Much more. It was around 60k in Mariupol alone.

I remember that during the Wagner rebellion there was a 24h-48h time frame of no Russian bot activities. Was kinda surreal.

Building any appreciable amount of compute capacity (on the scale of, let's say, a single large datacenter in northern VA) inside a mountain also becomes a huge heat rejection problem, since with the exception of the 0.00000000001% that leaves the facility as photons down a SM fiber cable, 100% of the energy consumed is turned into heat.

So you build your stuff inside a mountain and run a bunch of big ass liquid cooling loops to heat exchangers in the atmosphere outside the mountain. The requirement of the cooling system being out in the open air means it can also be hit by air strikes, an adversary doesn't need to penetrate the mountain, just take out its cooling.

You'd have to build a fully underground cooling system that goes to a nearby river (or huge lake) and use the cold water from that, which would get costly quick.

The bunkers are already out there e.g. limestone mines in US, Italy,

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...

It might be possible to do on the cheap; underground mines get decommissioned from time to time and could be repurposed as a data centre.

Although I personally would expect some sort of decentralisation option to be more effective. It's difficult to even theorise because we don't know exactly what sort of damage these strikes are doing and what countermeasures are already in place. If this strike has caught Yandex by surprise after almost 5 years of hot war then they really should hire a dude to check up on current events every so often. They must have some sort of contingency planning around a Ukrainian strike.

Commodity hardware may be disposable, but data that is not reproducible is worth it. I suspect most storage will move to secure environments.

Military personnel use the same Yandex services as regular people: delivery, maps, taxi, etc.

Also Yandex is a large cloud provider, they host a lot of government-connected companies.

Also Russia has been targeting Ukrainian digital infrastructure so they make these things fair game IMO.

I don't have specific information about Yandex but don't forget how heavily involved Amazon were with things like: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/world/europe/ukraine-cybe... it wouldn't be a huge stretch to suggest that a lot of cloud hosting providers are neck deep in national security.

That's probably not going to help much. Ukraine has been able to hit targets very far inland with drones. They are also rapidly making advances in ballistic missile development. FP-7 has a range of 200-300km, their new FP-9 will have a range of up to 855km and an accuracy of 20m. I know that Russia is (extremely) large, but with development going at this pace...

Datacenters are not only "data"

Fibers? Yes, they are easy to protect. The hard part is power generation.

One of a few sensible comments in a sea of delusion.

Those data centers participate hugely in generating of internet misinformation and propaganda that shapes deterioration of support in European populations. Those are valid military targets.

I don't think this really works out. Putting a data center in orbit is basically a question of moving lots of mass which is always going to have a large energy cost for accelerating all that mass. On the other hand someone wanting to damage that data center only has to get the mass of one decently sized bomb to the same velocity.

Unless you're talking about an adversary who has ~no launch capability then the person trying to put the data center out of reach is always going to be massively disadvantaged in terms of the physics.

Until someone blows up a satellite and creates enough shrapnel that every other satellite is destroyed.

Ground to orbit antisat lasers are already plausibly something various militaries have.

Welding lasers are pretty cheap, the two hard parts are a big enough apperture to focus 500 km away, and adaptive optics, both of which have already been demonstrated decades ago in astronomy.

I'm not saying Iran and North Korea already have such capabilities, but I am saying I think neither would have trouble building it six months ago if they'd wanted to.

Except that doing this at scale is currently still a pipe dream. Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.

The active thermal control system (ATCS) on the ISS uses an ammonia loop and radiators measuring 13.6 x 3.12 meters, or about 42.5 square meters. It can dissipate 16 kW, which is enough for 16 H200s, or one-quarter of a rack on Earth. For 200 kW, you would need a system 12.5 times larger, about 531 square meters—2.6 times larger than the solar array. The satellite would be enormous, larger than the ISS, and all of that for only three racks.

https://codedtrip.com/en/blog/data-centers-in-space-disastro...

And sky rocketing (...) prices

To merely destroy "space data centers", you need not have very advanced targeting technology nor space lasers or whatnot. Just launch a few things releasing little ball bearings or steel needles or something like that - and "poison" the entire orbit.

If all you seek is to destroy (how en-vogue...) then that's more than perfect; not just destroy what's there but also make sure that by virtue of what remains (debris) nothing will get re-built.

Why? Orbital DCs are completely impractical and unrealistic.

The SpaceX stock is floating solely (and temporarily) on fairy dust, it will not have any impact on the stock what-so-ever.

As the market goes, so goes the multiple being granted to SPCX. That is, when the AI bubble contracts on the multiples being granted, SPCX will decline dramatically. In my observation HN typically widely can't differentiate properly between the real AI economy being developed and the multiples being temporarily granted in the stock market, it's common on here that people think they're the same thing ('when the AI bubble ends'). Back in reality what is going to happen is an implosion of the multiples when the growth slows (or suddenly stops due to an economic shock), and despite that the AI economy broadly will radically expand regardless over 10, 20, 30 years. See: the Internet build out (and market valuations), it will occur much the same conceptually.

Data centres will not be moving to space. The physics and economics don't work.

It's not that it can't be done at all, but heat dissipation at scale in space is an insane engineering challenge, the tech to make giant radiators work doesn't exist yet, and even if it did it would extremely costly to develop and deploy.

Musk is a textbook narcissist. His consistent pattern is to make grandiose promises - literal future faking - fulfil a small percentage of them, then make even bigger and more grandiose promises and hope investors have a short memory. (They do.)

As a narcissist his primary relationship orientation is contempt for others. He's more interested in damaging projects he doesn't like - like the left-leaning community on the original Twitter, using promises of Hyperloop to kill high speed rail, ignoring the CSA from Grok, and of course the USAid fiasco - than seeing through the projects he claims to be developing to completion.

He fits in perfectly with Thiel, Altman, and the rest. The tech is sometimes interesting, but the alignment is fundamentally hostile to the rest of humanity.

In 2016, Musk was forecasting no-asterisk-needed cross country self driving and Mars launches within two years.

He may have been a wrong'un before that, but he was definitely already doing a confidence trick by that point.

It would not be a first time Ukraine did bite a hand that feeds them. It happened every time, including with western allies, see even western-covered scandals with weapons, leaked stuff, recent ongoing south korea scandal etc. If you would count all cases over the years, it would be in hundreds or even thousands.

It probably is incomprehensible to a western mind.

That is a status update of sorts.

History does not support this, unfortunately. Russia has always been aggressive towards outside world and invaded its neighbors multiple times. Putin is just the latest in a long string of aggressive leaders.

not all datacenters are created equal. Remember the consequences of the AWS outage caused by problems in just a single region

Well, that was fast then. Maybe /somebody/ shouldn't have targeted Parkova data center and mobile network cores.

Looks like 4 in Russia, 1 in Kazakhstan if you select the Zones drop down on the status page.

Still few left. BTW someone built a map of russian largests DCs (use Google Translate): https://hackyourmom.com/karta-data-czentriv-na-rasii/

Reuters says “Yandex operates five data centres” [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...

> Because it was wrong. It was regular crawler traffic that had nothing to do with disinformation.

You got a source for that?

> 50% of Russia's oil infrastructure and refining capacity has been taken out

No, it has been merely hit (usually once) and typically repaired in the span of a few days. The whole "double-digits percents have been destroyed" typically comes from not so high quality news agencies. Some things were destroyed more thoroughly, but their margin is largely negligible.

I think it entirely depends of what censorship you care about. If political censorship is irrelevant to you and puritanistic and copyright censorship is what's in you way then western search engines are more heavily censored.

Lots of civilian government agencies also use Azure for government / AWS GovCloud data centers because they’re FedRAMP compliant. It’s not just the DoD.

i think you miss interpreted, they are poorly defended because they are civilian, meaning globally data centers are universally undefended from military action. meaning this sort of action can spiral out of control very fast. and would have major global economic adverse effects.

its also important to understand that government isnt non civilian, in this context its non military

If I had any data in a middle eastern or Russina data center I would have moved it all out months ago. If companies still have stuff in there which is not replicated elsewhere then they are basically asking for anything they get.

The news itself is not so refreshing, I just appreciate the level of transparency and honesty here.

Hey, it's you again :) I think that map features quite prominently on a wall in your home country somewhere with little red 'x' marks on a couple of places. May there soon be many more.

It also seems like a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. UA put logistics/distribution centers under threat (wildberries) and refineries under threat, so the Russians moved their scarce air defense resources around on the map in an attempt to cover those, but oops, that left little or nothing covering the yandex datacenters and similar. There's not enough to go around to cover all of the possible geographically distributed pain points in the economy.

American companies and not "Western". American companies have very puritarian rules compared to European cultures.