There are also initiatives supporting Ukraine in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and other countries. Please suggest foundations from your country in the comments.
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Doesn't matter at this point. Everybody treats it like an insurance policy of sorts and not like a political decision, precisely to pretend they are not making a political decision.
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
Within the narrow scope of this
discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
I was in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan not too long ago (both countries just to the south of Russia, for those not savvy of geography). Met plenty of young russians who moved there recently. I didn't have to ask why. Many of them used to work in the tech sector, it's easy for them to find new work.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
Why would "right now" matter if the war has been ongoing for 4.5 years? I live in Germany, many ukrainians moved here, had several coworkers and their families move.
oh you can if you are younger than 23 and not in education. this exception initially started as "academic mobility" program - you had to somehow prove your intent to study before going abroad, I don't remember how - but then both govt and citizens realized that it's too much paperwork and impossible to organize properly, so the exception was generalized.
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
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)
Yandex is pretty good search engine. It has zero censorship. Just the raw internet. Sometimes it more than I've bargained for but as a user I'm happy the option exists.
The severity of the attacks on Russian borders have I believe still a limited effect on the course of the war, but I suppose it certainly won't hurt Ukraine's chances to in some form survive this war.
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
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.
> 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.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner.
Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Or when the same thing can be accomplished by putting nothing in a mine, but an approach as simple as having geographical diversity by paying for some 'normal' colo in Hillsboro, and more normal colo in northern VA on the other side of the continent, and duplicating your stuff between two facilities. Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
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.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
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...
dunno, Moscow to Novosibirsk is around 1,800 miles straight-line distance.
The war would be probably over by the time Ukraine would have developed those capabilities.
Novosibirsk only has cheap cooling in the winter, in the summer months it is hot. Better to go somewhere like Sabetta where they have their LNG harbour.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
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.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
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.
> 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.
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
> Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
The problem of the $ per kg to launch huge radiators and "orbital datacenter" type stuff of satellites into space doesn't seem to be resolving itself any time soon. Even if we hand wave away and say that 5 years from now the starship will be such a spectacular success than it costs only $200 per kg to send stuff into space (drastically lower than what it costs now), it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
> it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
So the "some day in the future" orbiting data centers proposed by a known fraudster will use an experimental-at-best radiator technology that has never been tested in flight yet? That tracks.
From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to December 2025, 14,999 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 40,601 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU).
> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
Why is my comment downvoted? (Rhetorical question, of course, I know what you are.)
It is the reality that Russian civilians are killed daily by the Ukranian drones, guided also by your starlink satellites.
You may not like to hear this, but this is how things are.
You may not want to hear this, but this came down on you the day russian troups entered a sovereign country, the day your missiles attacked a sovereign country.
Clarification: Starlink does not operate within Russia. If it did there would be fewer civilian casualties as drones would be guided to the actual targets.
Civilian casualties are always a tragedy, it's just that russians don't care about them anymore - malls, transport hubs etc are targeted during the day. Putin explicitly says he wants us to freeze during winter and his propagandists cry for frontline cities as well as Kyiv, Kharkiv and others to be bombed into oblivion.
Great. When do you plan to start hitting data centres in the USA and Israel? Just you remind ordinary Americans and Israelis that killing ordinary civilians around the world is not good.
One goal is probably to show average Russians that the war is not just something which happens somewhere else in the world - a side-note on the news, no need to bother about.
The question why people who do not agree with the government should also pay the price for a war started by their government/country is not specific to this war.
The best the world can do is move away from US treasuries and importing from the US, causing long term economic decline. This applies the pain broadly to the US electorate who voted for this.
You make it seem as if they are not active targets for many. Its just really, really hard to attack a datacenter in the US with a ballistic missile. Israel gets hit pretty regularly as well.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home. The moment it starts, the populance starts pulling back support. But if you are shooting random people in the desert and middletown nowhere's McDonald's are functioning, its all gravy.
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
It will mean data-centers move to space and then Musk will use his space prowess to bring weapons into space, in collaboration with the US military, and deny/strong-arm/corrupt governments around the world to protect his treasure, including the US government. He'll have a robot army to back it up.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
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
Everything in Russia depends on Yandex. The impact on both businesses and daily life is massive. You can’t order a taxi or food delivery in most parts of Russia now. Retail chains POS systems in stores and payment systems are down too. Russians on threads and Twitter are complaining they can’t even buy things in stores. Of course, Putin himself doesn’t understand the impact because he barely knows how to use a computer and never uses the Internet.
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Watch as all the good patriotic soccer mom bots with AI generated midwestern white lady profile photos disappear from X and similar social media all suspiciously at the same time.
I'm reading schleck8 comment as accusing Yandex ASN as malicious on grounds of having higher bot % traffic than Scaleway / comparably sized Cloud Provider.
It could be malicious, but that exact stat doesn't show that.
Implication was that tons of malicious traffic originate from there. I pointed out that bot % stat doesn't seem to be useful for determining that, Occam's razor and all.
It isn't. It doesn't affect Yandex's own services, but ruins thousands of businesses and projects hosted there. Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Any remaining foreign companies doing business domestically in Russia (that thought they needed to host things in a Yandex datacenter) should be completely unsurprised by this result. As for the domestic Russians, there's a magical solution, when every square cm of Ukrainian territory is back in the hands of the UA forces, and the Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop.
I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.
Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about anything. He gets money for the war anywhere he can. If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.
I do wonder about the internal mental calculus of a Putin-like dictator, essentially, "how far can I push this before I end up like Ceaușescu or Mussolini?". Not anywhere near as far as an actual 99%, I think.
The starvation years of the DPRK in the mid 1990s directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union might be the closest that such a state has come to the situation getting so dire that the people could have theoretically risen up, no matter the consequences, but for a myriad of reasons the North Koreans were unable to.
Putin does not have absolute power entirely on his own (no dictator truly does). He can only continue with what he is doing because the Russian population on average either actively supports him or is not working against him.
If literally 99% of the Russian economy was destroyed, no matter how currently oppressed they presently are, the Russian people are likely to rise up and remove Putin. It'll be bloody as all hell but if the economy were to truly and completely collapse (let's say, all refineries were severely hit and taken out of commission for months), it would happen.
"harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship."
The vast majority of Russians loved the war mostly because they made lots of money from it. Just when Ukraine started hitting oil infra people no longer liked the war. I am sorry for those 10% of Russians who didn't want the war and can't move abroad.
20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.
Surveys on the approval of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 showed numbers between 80% - 90% of people approving the war.
I assume - one would need to check - that the majority of people who left Russia after 2022 did not support the war, so those left should be on the lower end.
"20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections"
Yes, as I've said, approval dropped when Ukraine hit oil infra and gas prices went up, I can see 20% as a number. Nevertheless as show by approval ratings after 2014, that number was lower until people got hit by the impact of the war themselves.
Families of people who signed up for the war got large amounts of money. The transfer of money from the Russian national wealth fund into the economy, together with the shortage of workers, increased salaries.
[Edit] People didn't keep that money but spent it so others profited from that money too.
This is what happens in wars - beside war racketeers - salaries go up. There is a lot of research on how German profited from WW2 (and before) for example for most of the war. WW2 too seems most researched from what I see on how everyone profits until things get worse and end.
As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine can do no wrong in this conflict (within reason obviously). Russia has been hitting civilian targets, specifically trying to take civilian lives, since day one.
The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.
One important part of the war is to break up the 'deal' Putin has with the Russian population where he can stay in power and do what he likes so long as he doesn't mess with their lives too much. It's important that the everyday Russian is woken up to the realities of the war because it's ultimately them that will be stopping it, one way or another.
The billionaire tech oligarchs are owners of other Russian big tech, and they all have their own data centers. Some of them also have their own cloud services, so if anything this just redirects the money to them from Yandex Cloud.
> Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Interesting take. Last I checked, those datacenters hosted software that targeted a children's school.
You people keep thinking this kind of reasoning is some kind of gotcha. It really isn't. All citizens of the US carry responsibility for the crimes you did over the last half century.
80% - 90% of Russians approved the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 according to different pollsters. The assumption is they voted accordingly to make the second wave of the invasion in 2022 possible.
If - I assume there is - there is a post shared on HN about Israel and Gaza we can discuss that genocide there.
There are a lot of them and not many of the dictators and his cronies. They could all do an uprising. It’s funny that a country with so much history of rebellion have leaders who have become so complacent
86, 89 what's the difference? Putin is running a fascist elderly home at this point. Younger people in Russia won't be able to buy gas or hail a ride now.
You know the Zeds attacked Ukrainian internet providers , attacked hospitals, train stations etc , do Zeds really expect that that Ukrainians are less capable than Ruzzians of doing the same? Or the Zeds are surprised that the decadent West is not forcing Ukraine to be kind and gentle with the "innocents" in Moscow, those poor Moscowites can't good when the AA is firing and now they might not have access to memes and videos either.
I don't blame Ukraine for doing this. I understand it fully. Russia invades and attacks them, they defend and attack back. That's what war is. But I don't understand the people on HN saying this attack is somehow "good" for anyone.
The tech sector in russia was fully centralized and monopolized prior to war. Destruction of the monopolies infrastructure (i hope sberbank, mailru, vk and the rest will be followed upon) will force russians to rebuild their tech sector in a healthy competitive way once the war is over. Treat drones as reactive anti-trust measures.
The purpose of the strikes is to increase the cost to continue the war. You said in another comment that Putin is a psychopath who will always find a way to more money, but what you have not considered is that at a certain point this will become more and more difficult. Resources are finite. It’s the proverbial immovable object vs irresistible force, except without the poetic license: at some point, it will be clear that either immovable and/or irresistible are just words, and that underlying them is a reality that is not just words but made of a finite amount of will, manpower, and firepower. It’s too early to say the war will go one way or another - and it’s a big mistake to underestimate Russia - but to answer your question, the attack is “good” because that’s how you fight a war. Most of the world wants Russia to lose and therefore it is good, for us. Us is someone, just like for some Z people out there it’s good when Russia destroys a hospital, school, Ukrainian print shop, etc… bc terrorism is part of their strategy. We will see what happens.
It is good if for example your country is invaded by rubots, like in Romanian election, you got Ruzzian bot famrs involved in promoting candidates agaisnt the election laws. I mean you get a candidate getting 50k likes from accounts in Asia a few seoncs after posintg soem video in Tik tok , it is obvious it was fake content and it was linked to Ruzzian citizens bot farms.
I hope that Putin will not attack again the electricity and power in Ukraine , hopefully the retard is scared now that Ukraine will bring the cold to the Moscowites and I am not happy for the children in Moscow to suffer because of the adults not giving a shit about the criminal they elected.
Russia's economy was always much less diversified than any western country even before the war but now what is even left as legitimate businesses nowadays? It's just the war machine and income to fund it, mainly from raw materials.
And I'm sure these data centers were also used for military purposes, no way they weren't in the current russian environment.
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
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.
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
If you want to help Ukraine, here is a list of the largest volunteer funds you can donate to:
Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/
Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/
Canada-Ukraine Foundation: https://www.cufoundation.ca/
Ukrainian World Congress: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy
United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/
There are also initiatives supporting Ukraine in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and other countries. Please suggest foundations from your country in the comments.
If I can add one, this Canadian NGO is also organizing winter aid efforts for Ukrainian civilians: https://www.cufoundation.ca/
And this group: https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
Thank you, updated
Blue Yellow - a Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military: https://blue-yellow.lt/en/ (you can specify the purpose for which you are donating, e.g. drones)
Since the very start, they already raised over €121 million.
If in doubt - pick Come Back Alive. They have spotless reputation and invest into long-term projects such as military education and veteran sports/aid.
Thank you for posting this! I regularly donate through United24.
Also, Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en and 69th Sniffing Brigade https://www.help99.co/donate is doing awesome work.
Glory to the Heroes!
Humanitarian aid initiative in Germany: https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/de/hilfseinsaetze/no...
If you want to help Ukraine, call for article 5 and enlist.
inb4: yes, I'm too scared to do it myself, thanks for asking, the person in the mirror reminds me of that every day.
Ukraine is not part of NATO
Doesn't matter at this point. Everybody treats it like an insurance policy of sorts and not like a political decision, precisely to pretend they are not making a political decision.
yet
Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.
Yep, most of talent has left
Could you elaborate? What does this mean?
Edit: thanks for answers, this helps.
There were several waves of Russians fleeing [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_during_the_...
(This is incomplete, I think there is a fourth or a fifth wave, probably since about summer 2026.)
It means you shouldn't invade your neighbours and conscript your young people or you will ruin your economy.
I hope the MAGA folk threatening Canada take note.
just neighbours?
> just neighbours?
Within the narrow scope of this discussion, yes. Ukraine would have a harder time hitting data centers around Moscow if they didn’t share a land border.
Just neighbours, otherwise people might draw awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations.
> awkward comparisons to certain other warmongering nations
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is closer to America in Vietnam or Israel in Gaza than anything even Trump has done recently. And I doubt you’ll find many on this forum defending even the latter.
It’s reasonably close to the economic murder/suicide the US has caused with its rubbish crack at Iran
That anyone with a few brain cells and enough rubels has left the country
I was in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan not too long ago (both countries just to the south of Russia, for those not savvy of geography). Met plenty of young russians who moved there recently. I didn't have to ask why. Many of them used to work in the tech sector, it's easy for them to find new work.
A lot of people who could get out of Russia after the war started, did get out.
Sadly, this applies also to Ukraine. No one in their right mind will risk their limbs for clique of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs. Coincidentally children of oligarchs and mini-oligarchs left both countries as well. They basically wiped out their male millenial generation entirely, as this demographics had it the most difficult to leave these countries.
> this applies also to Ukraine
It certainly does not. There is a huge and growing [1] (albeit still below ‘22 peak) tech outsourcing industry there.
Plus, likely Europe’s most advanced defense-industrial base for drones and, increasingly, missiles of all kinds. Being on the right side of a war works wonders for morale.
[1] https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/gradual-market-stabilization-wh...
I work for a Ukrainian product firm and interviewed around 50 people in the last quarter for in-office work. Some of them are migrants discouraged by european salaries where an entry-level IT professional can make as much as a waiter.
You can't really leave Ukraine (legally*) right now if you are in the conscriptable demographics (M 18-60), unless you have good reasons.
Why would "right now" matter if the war has been ongoing for 4.5 years? I live in Germany, many ukrainians moved here, had several coworkers and their families move.
oh you can if you are younger than 23 and not in education. this exception initially started as "academic mobility" program - you had to somehow prove your intent to study before going abroad, I don't remember how - but then both govt and citizens realized that it's too much paperwork and impossible to organize properly, so the exception was generalized.
yeah, hating papers is our national trait at this point, given Diia and stuff XD
Just after they gave nepo babies below age 26 enough time to leave the country.
Ones who didn't are asking stupid questions...
Cyprus, Georgia, UAE
Among them also Dan Abramov I think.
Out of curiosity, which was the 4th nation besides the US and China?
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 is pretty good search engine. It has zero censorship. Just the raw internet. Sometimes it more than I've bargained for but as a user I'm happy the option exists.
The severity of the attacks on Russian borders have I believe still a limited effect on the course of the war, but I suppose it certainly won't hurt Ukraine's chances to in some form survive this war.
Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.
Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.
Scaleway built one of their Paris AZs in a nuclear fallout shelter: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/meet-fr-par-3/
Datacenters are full of valuable computers and related equipment, but building the equivalent space under a mountain will cost a crazy amount.
Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.
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.
> 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.
Helsinki gets its water from the 120 km Päijänne Water Tunnel, which cost €200-250 million (adjusted for inflation) to build. Peak flow is 10 m^3/s by gravity alone and up to 20 m^3/s with pumps, which should be enough to cool a 1 GW data center. You could increase the cost by 2x (because real wages have gone up), by another 2x (because middlemen have destroyed productivity), and by yet another 2x (because everything is more expensive in America), and it would still be pretty reasonable.
So they want to build it in space. Trade one heat problem for another, but put it completely out of range (for most attackers).
Pionen in sweden is a datacenter in a bunker. The Pirate Bay used to be hosted there.
A few racks or even a couple of dozen racks could be called a datacenter, but nothing on any real scale. Enough to host important and niche things? Sure. I was referring more to like the size of what you might see in Quincy, WA.
neat. why can't you put the heat in the mountain?
For broadly the same reason that many years of heat from braking has heat-saturated the london underground.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=london+un...
You could probably drill sideways into rocks and pump heat into the mountain for a certain period of time, but on a multi-month or year time scale, it would catch up with you after you had saturated it.
The bunkers are already out there e.g. limestone mines in US, Italy,
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/build-design/safer-under...
Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner. Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.
Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
Or when the same thing can be accomplished by putting nothing in a mine, but an approach as simple as having geographical diversity by paying for some 'normal' colo in Hillsboro, and more normal colo in northern VA on the other side of the continent, and duplicating your stuff between two facilities. Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
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.
It's sad that we have moved away so far from the decentralized web from the 90s and the P2P boom of the 00s. Just like solar panels on every house as a source of energy are much harder to take out than just a few power plants, local P2P storage, messaging, source management, etc. are much harder to take out.
But yeah, the economic incentives are creating unicorns and centralizing compute/capital/etc.
They will probably start building DCs in Siberia. Cheap cooling!
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...
Ukraine are hitting targets 2,500km away
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-hits-russia...
dunno, Moscow to Novosibirsk is around 1,800 miles straight-line distance. The war would be probably over by the time Ukraine would have developed those capabilities.
Novosibirsk only has cheap cooling in the winter, in the summer months it is hot. Better to go somewhere like Sabetta where they have their LNG harbour.
This is a... mischaracterization.
The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"
I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.
Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.
Power and data has to come from somewhere for those bunkers. Every fiber hut and power substation becomes a target. Can they all be protected? No.
I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure
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.
Russia is hitting everything in Ukraine… DC, power plants, rail, road housing
Ukraine has a very targeted response but notably tries to minimise civilian casualties
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.
Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.
Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.
Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.
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.
Until someone blows up a satellite and creates enough shrapnel that every other satellite is destroyed.
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...
> 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.
Starlink gen 3 satellite is designed to dissipate 250 kW. You are talking about an already solved issue, with real hardware already being built today.
> Space is a near-vacuum, so it's hard to get rid of the heat.
It's not that hard, Starlink constellation already dissipates around 100 MW of heat, split over many satellites. Any orbital datacenter would use similarly distributed satellites.
Are you asserting that we must use the exact same heat rejection architecture the ISS uses for data centers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
The problem of the $ per kg to launch huge radiators and "orbital datacenter" type stuff of satellites into space doesn't seem to be resolving itself any time soon. Even if we hand wave away and say that 5 years from now the starship will be such a spectacular success than it costs only $200 per kg to send stuff into space (drastically lower than what it costs now), it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
> it would still be vastly less expensive to build a terrestrial solar datacenter in the middle of the southern Libyan desert than it would be to do the same amount of compute in space.
Perhaps, but the parent comment posited that some people would pay the premium for orbital data center due to much better security. At $200 per kg to orbit, it could make sense.
So the "some day in the future" orbiting data centers proposed by a known fraudster will use an experimental-at-best radiator technology that has never been tested in flight yet? That tracks.
Orbital data center constellations are also studied by Google, the idea is not just from Elon.
Great! More news like this
Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good
40.000 - 100.000 dead civilians.
Estimate range is big because lots of civilians died in cities that ended up occupied.
What is this number referring to? When I google it I only find chechen war, gaza, and US gun deaths annually
Mariupol's civilian casualties are hard to establish. Some of the upper estimates [1] run to 100,000 killed. Over just a couple of months.
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/10/06/i-m-used-to-walking-...
The number is referring to the post I replied to:
"innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good".
Estimations for how many civilians Russians killed in Chechnya range from 45,000 to 80,000.
They were asking for a reference/source, not to be treated like an idiot.
"What is this number referring to?"
Does not sound like looking for a source, but I'm not a native speaker.
I am. You are correct.
I suppose they’re mixing up deaths with injuries
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/ukrai...> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").
Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.
i mean, presumably so could ukraine?
Yes, capitulate to the attacker. Cease to exist as a country, nation, people, culture. Presumably that is an option!
If Ukraine ceased military activity, why do you think Russia wouldn't continue their invasion?
How could Ukraine stop the Russian invasion?
and be overrun by soldiers who kill civilians with drones, rape and pillage? No thanks
1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)
2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.
The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".
Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).
The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.
Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).
After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.
It's likely much higher considering the completely destroyed cities and towns. E.g. Mariupol had a population of 450 000 before the war.
[–] | on: 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit
Why is my comment downvoted? (Rhetorical question, of course, I know what you are.) It is the reality that Russian civilians are killed daily by the Ukranian drones, guided also by your starlink satellites.
You may not like to hear this, but this is how things are.
You may not want to hear this, but this came down on you the day russian troups entered a sovereign country, the day your missiles attacked a sovereign country.
Slava Ukraini!
The audacity of those bots these days.
"Russian civilians are killed daily by the Ukranian drones"
Looks like Ukrainians don't believe in "turn to him the other cheek".
Clarification: Starlink does not operate within Russia. If it did there would be fewer civilian casualties as drones would be guided to the actual targets. Civilian casualties are always a tragedy, it's just that russians don't care about them anymore - malls, transport hubs etc are targeted during the day. Putin explicitly says he wants us to freeze during winter and his propagandists cry for frontline cities as well as Kyiv, Kharkiv and others to be bombed into oblivion.
Sakhalin and Kamchatka are safe I heard.
Also helps with removing bots from X (to much of Elon's disagreement)
I remember that during the Wagner rebellion there was a 24h-48h time frame of no Russian bot activities. Was kinda surreal.
Prigozhin was one of Putin's chief botmasters. He helped set up the Internet Research Agency, which was one of Russia's biggest troll farms.
Great. When do you plan to start hitting data centres in the USA and Israel? Just you remind ordinary Americans and Israelis that killing ordinary civilians around the world is not good.
US-owned datacenters in the middle east were already blown up with the drone family that Russia has been mass-procuring from Iran
One goal is probably to show average Russians that the war is not just something which happens somewhere else in the world - a side-note on the news, no need to bother about.
The question why people who do not agree with the government should also pay the price for a war started by their government/country is not specific to this war.
AWS was already struck by Iranians.
The best the world can do is move away from US treasuries and importing from the US, causing long term economic decline. This applies the pain broadly to the US electorate who voted for this.
Why do you make it sound like a rhetorical question?
You make it seem as if they are not active targets for many. Its just really, really hard to attack a datacenter in the US with a ballistic missile. Israel gets hit pretty regularly as well.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home. The moment it starts, the populance starts pulling back support. But if you are shooting random people in the desert and middletown nowhere's McDonald's are functioning, its all gravy.
The beautiful thing about US war is that it never gets back home.
Have you checked the diesel prices?
From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
This should have a material impact on SpaceX stock. Wouldn't it be much easier to harden datacenters against attack under ground than in space?
> Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?
Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?
No, just more underground construction
And sky rocketing (...) prices
It would be cheaper for most businesses to just go on prem again.
RTO also for the servers?
It will mean data-centers move to space and then Musk will use his space prowess to bring weapons into space, in collaboration with the US military, and deny/strong-arm/corrupt governments around the world to protect his treasure, including the US government. He'll have a robot army to back it up.
He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.
Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.
People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.
He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.
So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!
Is https://habr.com normally down?
https://uptimerobot.habr.com doesn't say it's down, but it time outs.
Should likely share https://status.yandex.cloud/en/timeline as well, though it only shows two of them being hit, not three.
https://status.yandex.cloud/
Ironically, doesn't open for me at the moment :)
3rd cloud data center so far.
They only have 3. At least, the main ones
Looks like 4 in Russia, 1 in Kazakhstan if you select the Zones drop down on the status page.
My information may be outdated, but the others are much smaller and less relevant
Well, that was fast then. Maybe /somebody/ shouldn't have targeted Parkova data center and mobile network cores.
Reuters says “Yandex operates five data centres” [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-yandex-says-sec...
Well, tomorrow we will be hearing about the 4th being struck.
That's great!
data centers are civilian targets and globally very poorly defended. if this starts to escalate.. you think ram is expensive now..
They are often dual-use targets today.
Example quote from Azure documentation:
> Azure Government is used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) entities to deploy a broad range of workloads and solutions.
Calling such a DC a civilian target is essentialy incorrect now, and has been for years.
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
Everything in Russia depends on Yandex. The impact on both businesses and daily life is massive. You can’t order a taxi or food delivery in most parts of Russia now. Retail chains POS systems in stores and payment systems are down too. Russians on threads and Twitter are complaining they can’t even buy things in stores. Of course, Putin himself doesn’t understand the impact because he barely knows how to use a computer and never uses the Internet.
Nice! Keep it up boys!
They should start putting data centers underground like deep under central park
Nice.
Massive data/compute centers should be replace to lot of mini data/compute centers in our homes.
How many major DCs are there in Russia?
I am still not sure if Russia attacking Ukraine was the best or the worst thing for Europe.
Meaning, if they went around Ukraine for any other country it probably would have folded way earlier.
But this way with Ukraine defending itself, the EU(rope) is somehow keeping head in the sand much much longer.
tough luck
I was going to use Yandex search for find an extremely tiny violin to play, but the yandex search is broken. Oh well.
Is it yandex ir nebius?:)
Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)
What's an alternative way to find torrents if Yandex goes down?
1337x.to works just fine
run your own dht crawler
The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.
Refreshing is also a wording. Drone attack during the war is called "an incident".
Great!
How is this “great”?
Bot traffic by ASN
Yandex: > 99 % https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as13238
Scaleway: 90 % https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as12876
Watch as all the good patriotic soccer mom bots with AI generated midwestern white lady profile photos disappear from X and similar social media all suspiciously at the same time.
Scaleway doesn't have a search engine?
Google ASN is at 98.7% https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as15169
Both of them are search engines; web page crawling is what they do; What did you expect?
I'm reading schleck8 comment as accusing Yandex ASN as malicious on grounds of having higher bot % traffic than Scaleway / comparably sized Cloud Provider.
It could be malicious, but that exact stat doesn't show that.
I never understood whataboutism.
It's not whataboutism to call out a proving too much fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
Thanks!
Where you saw whataboutism?
Implication was that tons of malicious traffic originate from there. I pointed out that bot % stat doesn't seem to be useful for determining that, Occam's razor and all.
And bot traffic from Yandex is down 100% as of this moment according to the graphs.
People on X comment on the noticeable drop in bot comments.
Agree: not great not terrible.
Great will be when all huge data center are visited by free range unknown drones, like what happened to the Wildberries.
It's in Russia, that's why.
It's just karma, Russians fascists reaping what they sow.
It isn't. It doesn't affect Yandex's own services, but ruins thousands of businesses and projects hosted there. Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Any remaining foreign companies doing business domestically in Russia (that thought they needed to host things in a Yandex datacenter) should be completely unsurprised by this result. As for the domestic Russians, there's a magical solution, when every square cm of Ukrainian territory is back in the hands of the UA forces, and the Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop.
"Russians have withdrawn back across the border, the strikes on datacenters will stop."
I'm also surprised that people can't see this simple solution to the situation.
I did not expect Russian shills on Hackernews.
Destroying heating units in Ukraine also affects innocent users in much worse ways than losing a datacenter.
I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.
You understand that a country's military capacity depends on its economy right?
Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about anything. He gets money for the war anywhere he can. If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.
> If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.
This is impossible, even in a dictatorship.
I do wonder about the internal mental calculus of a Putin-like dictator, essentially, "how far can I push this before I end up like Ceaușescu or Mussolini?". Not anywhere near as far as an actual 99%, I think.
The starvation years of the DPRK in the mid 1990s directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union might be the closest that such a state has come to the situation getting so dire that the people could have theoretically risen up, no matter the consequences, but for a myriad of reasons the North Koreans were unable to.
Putin does not have absolute power entirely on his own (no dictator truly does). He can only continue with what he is doing because the Russian population on average either actively supports him or is not working against him.
If literally 99% of the Russian economy was destroyed, no matter how currently oppressed they presently are, the Russian people are likely to rise up and remove Putin. It'll be bloody as all hell but if the economy were to truly and completely collapse (let's say, all refineries were severely hit and taken out of commission for months), it would happen.
"harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship."
The vast majority of Russians loved the war mostly because they made lots of money from it. Just when Ukraine started hitting oil infra people no longer liked the war. I am sorry for those 10% of Russians who didn't want the war and can't move abroad.
Where is 10% coming from?
20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.
Surveys on the approval of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 showed numbers between 80% - 90% of people approving the war.
I assume - one would need to check - that the majority of people who left Russia after 2022 did not support the war, so those left should be on the lower end.
"20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections"
Yes, as I've said, approval dropped when Ukraine hit oil infra and gas prices went up, I can see 20% as a number. Nevertheless as show by approval ratings after 2014, that number was lower until people got hit by the impact of the war themselves.
How did they make money from the war? The war is a huge burden on the Russian economy
Families of people who signed up for the war got large amounts of money. The transfer of money from the Russian national wealth fund into the economy, together with the shortage of workers, increased salaries.
[Edit] People didn't keep that money but spent it so others profited from that money too.
This is what happens in wars - beside war racketeers - salaries go up. There is a lot of research on how German profited from WW2 (and before) for example for most of the war. WW2 too seems most researched from what I see on how everyone profits until things get worse and end.
Sounds accurate!
Same millions of random people who eager to enlist, travel thouthands kilometers and die in a ditch in Ukraine in exchange for some extra cash.
Same random people who works and support military machine with money and labor.
“That is thy loss. A small crack might let in some wisdom.”
As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine can do no wrong in this conflict (within reason obviously). Russia has been hitting civilian targets, specifically trying to take civilian lives, since day one.
The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.
One important part of the war is to break up the 'deal' Putin has with the Russian population where he can stay in power and do what he likes so long as he doesn't mess with their lives too much. It's important that the everyday Russian is woken up to the realities of the war because it's ultimately them that will be stopping it, one way or another.
You don’t suppose it harms the billionaire oligarch shareholders more than the pizza shop that happens to run a website?
The billionaire tech oligarchs are owners of other Russian big tech, and they all have their own data centers. Some of them also have their own cloud services, so if anything this just redirects the money to them from Yandex Cloud.
> Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.
Interesting take. Last I checked, those datacenters hosted software that targeted a children's school.
Innocent users who voted for killing tens of thousands of civilians in Ukraine.
I guess for some definition of "innocent".
How do you know how they voted ? By this logic there not a single innocent in the United States or Israel either.
You people keep thinking this kind of reasoning is some kind of gotcha. It really isn't. All citizens of the US carry responsibility for the crimes you did over the last half century.
80% - 90% of Russians approved the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 according to different pollsters. The assumption is they voted accordingly to make the second wave of the invasion in 2022 possible.
If - I assume there is - there is a post shared on HN about Israel and Gaza we can discuss that genocide there.
Oh no
Those aren’t real elections.
What about the innocent users who didn't? Russia is not a democracy.
There are a lot of them and not many of the dictators and his cronies. They could all do an uprising. It’s funny that a country with so much history of rebellion have leaders who have become so complacent
I'm sorry for those of the 11 percent innocent (1) that are left there, happy that many fled the dictatorship.
(1) 89% of Russians approved Putin and the 2014 Crimean invasion
> 89% of Russians approved Putin
According to Putin.
No according to different pollsters.
Lewada, the pollster which got sacked later as a "foreign agent", got 86%
86, 89 what's the difference? Putin is running a fascist elderly home at this point. Younger people in Russia won't be able to buy gas or hail a ride now.
seems like Russia has achieved the paradoxical form of government where it is both a perfect direct democracy and a fascist dictatorship
You know the Zeds attacked Ukrainian internet providers , attacked hospitals, train stations etc , do Zeds really expect that that Ukrainians are less capable than Ruzzians of doing the same? Or the Zeds are surprised that the decadent West is not forcing Ukraine to be kind and gentle with the "innocents" in Moscow, those poor Moscowites can't good when the AA is firing and now they might not have access to memes and videos either.
I don't blame Ukraine for doing this. I understand it fully. Russia invades and attacks them, they defend and attack back. That's what war is. But I don't understand the people on HN saying this attack is somehow "good" for anyone.
The tech sector in russia was fully centralized and monopolized prior to war. Destruction of the monopolies infrastructure (i hope sberbank, mailru, vk and the rest will be followed upon) will force russians to rebuild their tech sector in a healthy competitive way once the war is over. Treat drones as reactive anti-trust measures.
It's good because it's a victory for Ukraine. They thought it was worth spending resources on this so clearly they think it's good for them too.
The purpose of the strikes is to increase the cost to continue the war. You said in another comment that Putin is a psychopath who will always find a way to more money, but what you have not considered is that at a certain point this will become more and more difficult. Resources are finite. It’s the proverbial immovable object vs irresistible force, except without the poetic license: at some point, it will be clear that either immovable and/or irresistible are just words, and that underlying them is a reality that is not just words but made of a finite amount of will, manpower, and firepower. It’s too early to say the war will go one way or another - and it’s a big mistake to underestimate Russia - but to answer your question, the attack is “good” because that’s how you fight a war. Most of the world wants Russia to lose and therefore it is good, for us. Us is someone, just like for some Z people out there it’s good when Russia destroys a hospital, school, Ukrainian print shop, etc… bc terrorism is part of their strategy. We will see what happens.
It is good if for example your country is invaded by rubots, like in Romanian election, you got Ruzzian bot famrs involved in promoting candidates agaisnt the election laws. I mean you get a candidate getting 50k likes from accounts in Asia a few seoncs after posintg soem video in Tik tok , it is obvious it was fake content and it was linked to Ruzzian citizens bot farms.
I hope that Putin will not attack again the electricity and power in Ukraine , hopefully the retard is scared now that Ukraine will bring the cold to the Moscowites and I am not happy for the children in Moscow to suffer because of the adults not giving a shit about the criminal they elected.
Russia's economy was always much less diversified than any western country even before the war but now what is even left as legitimate businesses nowadays? It's just the war machine and income to fund it, mainly from raw materials.
And I'm sure these data centers were also used for military purposes, no way they weren't in the current russian environment.
Incorrect, and the mental gymnastics at play here is rather telling
>you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran
Huh?
But how on earth are they able to penetrate through all their defensives
Several reasons.
First, a long-running SEAD / DEAD campaign by Ukraine last year and early this which thinned Russian air defence throughout occupied territories and left Russia with difficult deployment decisions for what remained.
Second, improvements to drones (speed and EW resistance) and expanded production - meaning the air defence can be saturated.
Third, Russia's vast geography itself, leaving countless approaches to targets impossible to defend.
Their lines of 50+ years old junk which have been rotting for decades because of corruption and are operated by low iq conscripts with no training?
A mystery really...
"What air defense doing?" is apparently still an unsolved riddle.
Masses of drones. Some get shot down, but not all.
Bold of you to assume they have many defenses left.
Russian air defence equipment bad, organised even worse, and has been severely degraded over 4 years now.
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.
Yandex is the best search engine for stuff banned by the "rotten wect" btw. F Google
While I appreciate the sentiment, the decline of American/Western companies into modern Puritanism is nothing new - but considering the staunch conservatism of the average Russian, I’d say they would do the same thing if they could, they just don’t have the engineering capacity to do the same thing.
not for long
was*
Roskomnadzor are laughing their asses off reading this comment.
Everything is fair in love and war. Unless the war stops, they can completely destroy each other.
The general decency of condemning any/all types destruction won't apply here.
This sounds like you're equating the defender's right to counterattack with the attacker's right to continue the attack?
Words are cheap and don't end wars, we can condem all day long it won't change a thing. Fuck russia