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Comment by salmon | Hacker News Reader

Aren't the locations of most of the AWS data centers kept pretty private for reasons exactly like this?

Wikileaks leaked them in 2018, so the majority are known, I think. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/wikileaks-publish...

For what purpose?

I can think of one valid purpose: GHG emissions.

Amazon, unlike say, Google, does not disclose their carbon emissions. Like at all. It is important to have this information public, for the sake of our planet. Amazon gets an F for disclosure, while Google is getting some A's:

https://www.cdp.net/en/responses/658?queries%255Bname%255D%3...

https://www.cdp.net/en/responses?utf8=%E2%9C%93&queries%5Bna...

I assume the reason is that doing a GHG assessment gives a lot of information about the operations of your company, so Amazon would rather be secretive about its operations. Knowing the location of datacentres allows you to deduce what power grid they're attached to. Scope 2 emissions depend a lot on where the electricity is coming from, and they're likely the vast majority of Amazon's emissions due to the size of AWS. Their Scope 3 emissions due to deliveries might also be significant, but it's harder to be secretive about that.

> I can think of one valid purpose: GHG emissions.

I can think of another purpose which is valid to some people: sowing chaos.

I don't think potential chaos sowers would have much difficulty finding the data centers themselves. All they'd need to do is to narrow the location to a town or several towns, go there, and start asking pizza delivery people for directions.

I'm sorry what?

How secret could they realistically be?

Pretty secret, it's easy to make shell companies to disguise who actually owns and operates the building. My job we have no external markings on our IT building so customers don't get confused and try to come manage their 401k there instead of our retail locations.

Wouldn't they be easy enough to triangulate quite precisely anyway?

*Insert joke about Qs using trig*

* Insert riff about Qs using non-euclidean geometry and circular reasoning *

* Insert GPT-3 generated Q-style mystery clues in vomit-haiku-meter.

I think I love you. Don't worry, there's a shot for that.

network distance =/= physical distance

Network triangulation =/= trig.

I would have thought so, too. But I know for certain that with enough accurate measurements around a network, you can determine the location of an unknown with pretty good accuracy. I've seen it done.

There were geostatistical methods that made certain assumptions about routing, network propagation speeds, etc. and with a large enough targeted sample using places with known geolocations, you could narrow down to a somewhere around 50 miles (this was many years ago). I imagine techniques have improved since then (as have counter measures to add noise to the data).

If you know the general area you can probably use public satellite imagery to narrow it down a bit. I suspect there some other clever information you could use to find the locations if you really wanted to.

Even with all the information I'm not sure how feasible it is for any small group to orchestrate a real disruption given how distributed data AWS centers are. Lots of failovers exist and probably a lot people outside AWS know little about.

You can do _much_ better than that with PTP hardware in specific places around the network. And there are several companies doing this.

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