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Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.

Hacking is smart but happens through software, so if you have hardware (i.e. physical) barriers, that stops the hacking.

Natural disasters happen physically but they are dumb, so if you have software redundancy (i.e. by copying the data to multiple locations), that stops them from destroying everything.

A military is both physical AND smart. They can target multiple locations at once and destroy whole buildings.

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> I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.

You could choose not to invade other countries.

I guess, but that doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company.

They control their own individual contribution.

Is it just me, or didn't we just see a single company cause a bit of a dustup when they refused to provide certain services to a military that wanted to bomb another country?

If it doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company, perhaps you have something distorting your hearing.

This (as with defense) is kind of outside Google or Yandex's purview.

Said every company serving fascists ever.

No, you can choose to collaborate or you can shut it down.

Collaborators don't get to point back in time and say 'oh we had no choice', even if the choice was a painful one. Sorry it does not work that way.

A very naive take from someone who clearly lives in a place where people have real choices, economic freedom, freedom of movement, and a government that protects them. "Just shut it down, bro" risks destroying your livelihood and leaving your family financially stranded, and yourself incarcerated or sent to the war zone. And it's not like Yandex develops weapons of mass destruction, you probably assume it's a collaboration even if Yandex simply hosts the Defense Ministry's websites. No sane parent will put their family at risk for this kind of stuff. "I'm going against the government for abstract ethical reasons" is something very few people/countries can afford.

And you can't shut it down anyway. The government will just nationalize it and keep it running. As long as you're the one in charge, you can at least throw a few hidden obstacles in the way, like dragging out legal processes.

No, a pretty informed take from someone who had family members that once upon a time made some very tough choices because they thought it was the right thing to do.

You can pretend at being ethical and moral as long as there is no price to pay, but when the time comes that it matters there will always be a price tag. Whether you are prepared to pay or not is what defines whether you are ethical or just pretending.

Company execs make decisions, employees make decisions, everybody carries a part.

Everything I don't like is fascist. Bed time is fascist. Blah blah. This is an incredibly naive take.

There's better definitions to use to identify fascism.

"At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation." - Jason Stanley

Also, a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.

Yandex is a part of Russia's military. Just the same as Google, MS, Amazon etc. provide services for the US military. Google et al. are probably in the critical path of defence for most European countries as well, insane though that is.

Not defending Yandex here, but I think their military involvement might be as accidental as of an American farmer whose beef landed in the cantina of aircraft carrier. Government and military procurement in Russia is its own universe, with strong players having specific IT expertise and capable of building DCs and tech. Assuming that everywhere in the world it’s the same as in America is wrong. Consumer tech companies aren’t operating this way usually, it is the scale of American Big Tech that allows them to compete with traditional contractors.

In general it’s the price of working with government, also see AWS Bahrain. I wonder if their insurance actually pays out because those are not officially wars there so hopefully they could recover some what from the insurance.

AWS plays both sides in that conflict since they're also a supplier for Israel. Presumably the aggressive side got them more profit than the defensive side cost them.

I don't think that qualifies as playing both sides.

You can learn to quickly diversify availability (or at least data safety) beyond the region of conflict when a kinetic war breaks out. The moment “kinetic sanctions” became the strategy, the risk to data centres should have been self-evident. And if it wasn’t immediately obvious, it should have been blindingly so when targeting expanded from oil refineries to Wildberries warehouses.

I don‘t think you can build a new data center in such a short time frame that passed since attacks on WB, definitely not when you can source hardware only from the black market.

I’m not describing what Yandex should do, but rather what their customers should do. Whether that means diversifying to eastern Russia, or China, or Belarus, I don’t know what options exist.

... and in the middle of the RAM-pocalypse, no less.-

Wildberries warehouses were filled with flammable items boxed up in cardboard, packed for maximum efficiency and no wasted space. They were tinderboxes.

A datacenter is filled with server racks that wouldn’t burn as readily as cardboard. The fire videos I see of this datacenter don’t look as good as the Wildberries videos.

That said, I wish the Russian people good luck with booking their taxis and Yandex employees luck with finding RAM.

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