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Yandex doesn't seem like it would appeal to the kinds of people who comment here. If you think that having your data hosted in the USA is a privacy concern, im

Yandex doesn't seem like it would appeal to the kinds of people who comment here. If you think that having your data hosted in the USA is a privacy concern, imagine having it hosted in Moscow.

oneloop 10y ago
You seem to think that having your data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern than in USA? That's a joke. You realise that google just made location tracking mandatory for anyone using maps or app store, right? The USA is way worse in this respect. Or let me re-phrase that: we know for a FACT that the USA is very very bad in this respect, whereas Russian just has a bad reputation.
- untog 10y ago
  I absolutely think that data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern, yes - because while I don't doubt the governments of both countries are spying on that data, I trust the US government far more than I trust the Russian government. A useful series of tweets by @SwiftOnSecurity about why storing data in the US isn't a bad idea: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/775491205983371264?lang=en-gb https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/77549120598337126...
  - oneloop 10y ago
    You trust the us gov? The same that has denied manning his/her rights, driven her to suicide and now hunger strike? The same that got sweden prosecutors to re-instate assange's rape accusations after they had been independently dismissed by the initial prosecutor, so they can extradite him to the us? Ok buddy, keep trusting the us gov. I think you've been so thoroughly brain-washed by russian-hating american media that you can't even think straight any more. I realise that this isn't really an argument, but I already presented my argument (that with the usa gov you have facts, whereas the russian gov you have suspicions) and it didn't seem to make a difference, so i don't really care to continue this conversation.
    - untog 10y ago
      Jesus Christ. No. It ought to be obvious to anyone that applying black and white judgements in these situations is idiotic. Do I think the US government is beyond reproach? No. Do I think the US government is more open and accountable than the Russian government? Yes. > (that with the usa gov you have facts, whereas the russian gov you have suspicions) Yes, because the US government is open and accountable enough that this information is public. The same cannot be said for the Russian government.
      - alexro 10y ago
        Would Snowden agree with you?
        untog 10y ago
        That's actually a very interesting question. I don't know. And I doubt he is currently in a position to be very frank and honest about it.
        oneloop 10y ago
        There you go with your anti-russian bullshit again. Snowden talks shit about russia as well all the time. Why wouldn't he? Because putin comes and kill him, right?
  - daxorid 10y ago
    One word: jurisdiction. The GU might read my emails, but they don't have the authority to execute 4am raids on my property and kill me with impunity in the name of "officer safety" as an eventual consequence of something XKeyScore flagged. At the end of the day, the people who have the guns and the authority to use them against you take a more prominent place in one's threat model than a foreign entity with no jurisdiction.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > You seem to think that having your data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern than in USA? Yes. In fact, I'd say that's the case even if your only concern is with the US government. Virtually all of the controversy over US government actions with regard to local data is about violation of expectations (some of which are codified into law) about domestic surveillance by doing things which are uncontroversial in the context of foreign surveillance, and its not like the US lacks capacity or will for foreign surveillance. That said, Russia doesn't even have the constraints (legal or mere expectations) on domestic surveillance that the US domestic actions raise concern for violating, so if your concern extends beyond US government surveillance, then that compounds the problem when hosting in Russia.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  The USA is probably bad, but hides it well. Russia makes no qualms about hiding it.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  How many reporters and dissidents are murdered in the US versus Russia? Russia is way worse in civil rights and surveillance. Doesnt excuse America for the schemes they pull but it's definitely safer here unless you're in the hood.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    Well, it's kind of safe for their citizens too, if they don't get involved in the things that get them killed, as those are not random things. But civil rights aside, online surveillance there is not yet at the level of reading everyone's emails and while they really want to do that they have a hard time implementing something like this for various reasons. It's definitely safer to use those online services, than the ones in your own country or allies.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      How do you know that? Russia doesnt publish what Russian intelligence is doing. They also don't have a Snowden who leaked almost all their secrets. That we did is only reason you can make thag comparison. I'd love to see an equivalent dunp for Russia to do the comparison. ;)
      - zzzcpan 10y ago
        It's not like that in Russia, they don't benefit from hiding surveillance, they do it openly. They had SORM for some time now, but only recently, like a month ago, created a law attempting to force local companies to implement backdoors and provide access to and store everything they have on users, etc.
johansch 10y ago
They moved most of their hosting to Amsterdam (and Stockholm?) 2-3 years ago, I heard. Since then the founder has been forced out by Putin, so I guess it might be back in Moscow now though. (Haven't really had any semi-inside information for the past year.)
- bobuk 10y ago
  now it's split between Russia (for russian audience) and Netherland and Finland (for others). Also this https://sputniknews.com/world/20151024/1029057531/finland-heat-yandex-center.html https://sputniknews.com/world/20151024/1029057531/finland-he... may be interesting for you.
  - johansch 10y ago
    My feeling is that data center services are much cheaper and more reliable in Europe, so they have probably moved most things that are not directly frontend-facing to CIS there. (Everything just works and there are no insane bribes to pay to various mafias.)
    - bobuk 10y ago
      Oh no, at least not now. Electricity and land so cheap today in Russia, what Yandex starts to build and sell their datacenter to provide "cheap AWS alternative for Russian companies".
      - johansch 10y ago
        But how about the bribes (to get e.g. electricity)? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/global/12ikea.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/global/12ikea.htm...
        fpoling 10y ago
        Bribes for infrastructure is not how modern days high level corruption works in Russia. What happens is that for various preferences that a company receives from the state like tax rebates, cheaper electricity etc. one pays back to the official who authorized the deal. The payment (otkat or "rollback" in Russian) is typically indirect, like using a supplier or outsourcing to a company where the official or their relatives have a stake. The direct bribes is really for low-level clerks like police officers or fire hazard inspector s.
postila 10y ago
Let's talk Oracle vs Postgres rather than USA vs Russia
- randomnerdiness 10y ago
  So - as a long time Oracle DBA (who also loves Postgres), I've been seeing a lot of companies do this sort of move. There are a couple of downsides, but really - there's a lot more upsides to Postgres than downsides (IMO).
  - twic 10y ago
    I'd love to hear more detail. We hear a lot from the PostgreSQL team and its fans (amongst whom i count myself!), but a lot less from people on the Oracle side.
    - randomnerdiness 10y ago
      Oh, as the benefits of Oracle vs Postgres? So the biggest in my experience is not enterprise support. Folks generally expect it to be. The biggest is actually flexibility. Oracle DB is good at handling some edge-case scenarios, such as a RAC cluster with a failover cluster running an Advanced Dataguard Reporting instance in a whole different state. Basically you are running a (super expensive) near real-time cluster that's doing compressed log-shipping to another cluster, and you have a standby on that secondary cluster that's open in a read-only mode. And none of it requires cron jobs or excessively complicated setup. However... even though I've done stuff like this for a number of clients, there are SO MANY better ways to address these sorts of scenarios with creativity and elbow-grease that Postgres tends to be a better tool. The caveat, of course, is when the person who sets it up leaves, and some other person has to take over. With Oracle's scenario, it's mostly just a slightly unusual config of a standard set of tools. The more creative Postgres solution might be quite a bit more of a learning curve. This is just an example off the top of my head, but it is one that came up recently. A client had a shipping/receiving system that could not go down, so the 20k+ per node was trivial. To reduce the load for reporting, they just simply had us open a standby DB for read-only reporting on the failover cluster - and they liked that so much, we set up another one for them local to the offshore reporting team. It's absolutely possible to do something like that with Postgres clustering, but there's a whole lot fewer folks doing it.

Yandex doesn't seem like it would appeal to the kinds of people who comment here. If you think that having your data hosted in the USA is a privacy concern, imagine having it hosted in Moscow.

oneloop 10y ago

You seem to think that having your data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern than in USA? That's a joke. You realise that google just made location tracking mandatory for anyone using maps or app store, right? The USA is way worse in this respect. Or let me re-phrase that: we know for a FACT that the USA is very very bad in this respect, whereas Russian just has a bad reputation.

untog 10y ago
I absolutely think that data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern, yes - because while I don't doubt the governments of both countries are spying on that data, I trust the US government far more than I trust the Russian government. A useful series of tweets by @SwiftOnSecurity about why storing data in the US isn't a bad idea: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/775491205983371264?lang=en-gb https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/77549120598337126...
- oneloop 10y ago
  You trust the us gov? The same that has denied manning his/her rights, driven her to suicide and now hunger strike? The same that got sweden prosecutors to re-instate assange's rape accusations after they had been independently dismissed by the initial prosecutor, so they can extradite him to the us? Ok buddy, keep trusting the us gov. I think you've been so thoroughly brain-washed by russian-hating american media that you can't even think straight any more. I realise that this isn't really an argument, but I already presented my argument (that with the usa gov you have facts, whereas the russian gov you have suspicions) and it didn't seem to make a difference, so i don't really care to continue this conversation.
  - untog 10y ago
    Jesus Christ. No. It ought to be obvious to anyone that applying black and white judgements in these situations is idiotic. Do I think the US government is beyond reproach? No. Do I think the US government is more open and accountable than the Russian government? Yes. > (that with the usa gov you have facts, whereas the russian gov you have suspicions) Yes, because the US government is open and accountable enough that this information is public. The same cannot be said for the Russian government.
    - alexro 10y ago
      Would Snowden agree with you?
      - untog 10y ago
        That's actually a very interesting question. I don't know. And I doubt he is currently in a position to be very frank and honest about it.
        oneloop 10y ago
        There you go with your anti-russian bullshit again. Snowden talks shit about russia as well all the time. Why wouldn't he? Because putin comes and kill him, right?
- daxorid 10y ago
  One word: jurisdiction. The GU might read my emails, but they don't have the authority to execute 4am raids on my property and kill me with impunity in the name of "officer safety" as an eventual consequence of something XKeyScore flagged. At the end of the day, the people who have the guns and the authority to use them against you take a more prominent place in one's threat model than a foreign entity with no jurisdiction.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> You seem to think that having your data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern than in USA? Yes. In fact, I'd say that's the case even if your only concern is with the US government. Virtually all of the controversy over US government actions with regard to local data is about violation of expectations (some of which are codified into law) about domestic surveillance by doing things which are uncontroversial in the context of foreign surveillance, and its not like the US lacks capacity or will for foreign surveillance. That said, Russia doesn't even have the constraints (legal or mere expectations) on domestic surveillance that the US domestic actions raise concern for violating, so if your concern extends beyond US government surveillance, then that compounds the problem when hosting in Russia.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
The USA is probably bad, but hides it well. Russia makes no qualms about hiding it.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
How many reporters and dissidents are murdered in the US versus Russia? Russia is way worse in civil rights and surveillance. Doesnt excuse America for the schemes they pull but it's definitely safer here unless you're in the hood.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Well, it's kind of safe for their citizens too, if they don't get involved in the things that get them killed, as those are not random things. But civil rights aside, online surveillance there is not yet at the level of reading everyone's emails and while they really want to do that they have a hard time implementing something like this for various reasons. It's definitely safer to use those online services, than the ones in your own country or allies.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    How do you know that? Russia doesnt publish what Russian intelligence is doing. They also don't have a Snowden who leaked almost all their secrets. That we did is only reason you can make thag comparison. I'd love to see an equivalent dunp for Russia to do the comparison. ;)
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      It's not like that in Russia, they don't benefit from hiding surveillance, they do it openly. They had SORM for some time now, but only recently, like a month ago, created a law attempting to force local companies to implement backdoors and provide access to and store everything they have on users, etc.

johansch 10y ago

They moved most of their hosting to Amsterdam (and Stockholm?) 2-3 years ago, I heard. Since then the founder has been forced out by Putin, so I guess it might be back in Moscow now though. (Haven't really had any semi-inside information for the past year.)

bobuk 10y ago
now it's split between Russia (for russian audience) and Netherland and Finland (for others). Also this https://sputniknews.com/world/20151024/1029057531/finland-heat-yandex-center.html https://sputniknews.com/world/20151024/1029057531/finland-he... may be interesting for you.
- johansch 10y ago
  My feeling is that data center services are much cheaper and more reliable in Europe, so they have probably moved most things that are not directly frontend-facing to CIS there. (Everything just works and there are no insane bribes to pay to various mafias.)
  - bobuk 10y ago
    Oh no, at least not now. Electricity and land so cheap today in Russia, what Yandex starts to build and sell their datacenter to provide "cheap AWS alternative for Russian companies".
    - johansch 10y ago
      But how about the bribes (to get e.g. electricity)? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/global/12ikea.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/global/12ikea.htm...
      - fpoling 10y ago
        Bribes for infrastructure is not how modern days high level corruption works in Russia. What happens is that for various preferences that a company receives from the state like tax rebates, cheaper electricity etc. one pays back to the official who authorized the deal. The payment (otkat or "rollback" in Russian) is typically indirect, like using a supplier or outsourcing to a company where the official or their relatives have a stake. The direct bribes is really for low-level clerks like police officers or fire hazard inspector s.

postila 10y ago

Let's talk Oracle vs Postgres rather than USA vs Russia

randomnerdiness 10y ago
So - as a long time Oracle DBA (who also loves Postgres), I've been seeing a lot of companies do this sort of move. There are a couple of downsides, but really - there's a lot more upsides to Postgres than downsides (IMO).
- twic 10y ago
  I'd love to hear more detail. We hear a lot from the PostgreSQL team and its fans (amongst whom i count myself!), but a lot less from people on the Oracle side.
  - randomnerdiness 10y ago
    Oh, as the benefits of Oracle vs Postgres? So the biggest in my experience is not enterprise support. Folks generally expect it to be. The biggest is actually flexibility. Oracle DB is good at handling some edge-case scenarios, such as a RAC cluster with a failover cluster running an Advanced Dataguard Reporting instance in a whole different state. Basically you are running a (super expensive) near real-time cluster that's doing compressed log-shipping to another cluster, and you have a standby on that secondary cluster that's open in a read-only mode. And none of it requires cron jobs or excessively complicated setup. However... even though I've done stuff like this for a number of clients, there are SO MANY better ways to address these sorts of scenarios with creativity and elbow-grease that Postgres tends to be a better tool. The caveat, of course, is when the person who sets it up leaves, and some other person has to take over. With Oracle's scenario, it's mostly just a slightly unusual config of a standard set of tools. The more creative Postgres solution might be quite a bit more of a learning curve. This is just an example off the top of my head, but it is one that came up recently. A client had a shipping/receiving system that could not go down, so the 20k+ per node was trivial. To reduce the load for reporting, they just simply had us open a standby DB for read-only reporting on the failover cluster - and they liked that so much, we set up another one for them local to the offshore reporting team. It's absolutely possible to do something like that with Postgres clustering, but there's a whole lot fewer folks doing it.