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> I don't know about arrogant Does Google or Amazon have enough compute power to compete with the NSA? My guess would be yes. They certainly have a good cove

by xscott 7y ago

> I don't know about arrogant Does Google or Amazon have enough compute power to compete with the NSA? My guess would be yes. They certainly have a good cover story if they were interested in using it for exploits. :-)

ixtli 7y ago
They’re profit driven though so they have no ability to focus more than a fraction of their resources on a single problem. What makes governments powerful at solving problems is the ability to justify larger expenditures. EDIT: to be clear when I say “no ability” I mean practically. Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t.
- xscott 7y ago
  > Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t. It wasn't all employees, but all servers, that I was thinking about.
  - ixtli 7y ago
    yeah after the fact i realized i should have specified this. i should have just said "capital" because in our society it's all interchangeable because everything (time, resources, etc.) is related to its dollar cost
derefr 7y ago
Companies operating legally under governments, are much more transparent to states (any state, not just the one they exist under) than other states are, because they interact through markets rather than through handshake deals. Amazon and Google have "public APIs" that they get all their chips through, and the NSA can see the "API calls." :) On the other hand, this is exactly the reason that entities that do operate through handshake deals with no visible economic activity—organized crime and the zaibatsu/chaebol type of conglomerate—tend to be considered imminent threats to states. They're opaque to logistical analysis! (Not that your average mob boss would have any inherent reason to commit treason against the United States, but other nations might be rather motivated to give them extrinsic reasons.) For this reason, even "benign" domestic crime syndicates or conglomerates will have their intelligence opacity hacked through with the application of good old-fashioned HUMINT.
- vonseel 7y ago
  Don’t most government contracts tend to go through competitive bidding processes and such? Sans NSA and some top secret military ones, I’d think a bunch of this stuff is pretty open knowledge, at least somewhere out there.
- toyg 7y ago
  Why would you throw zaibatsu/chaebols in with criminals...? They are just business conglomerates, their only difference from American-style corporations is that the ownership is organised around families a bit more explicitly on average - something that happens in the States as well, just with less success. The various governments they operate under have the same degree of visibility into them as in any other business. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t know they are zaibatsu in the first place. Are you confusing them with the actual Yakuza...? Why would you class the likes of Samsung as some sort of criminal enterprise outside the law?
  - derefr 7y ago
    It’s basically just the fact that they’re large enough to have a “complete economy” composed entirely of their business units. Samsung (or, for example, GE) doesn’t have to go outside itself to source chips, or trucks to transport them, or, well, anything, really. One business unit can “buy” those products/services from another business unit without anything necessarily appearing on a balance sheet of either business unit. (It’ll appear if it’s beneficial for them to do so, but half the reason they’ve conglomerated in the first place is to hide the things that’re not beneficial.) Thus, such entities can do an entire skunkworks project without needing to touch the economy. Just like a state can.
    - toyg 7y ago
      That’s completely theoretical. They still have to report on plenty of things, starting from detailed payroll, handling of substances and so on. In some countries (like Australia or the US, no idea about JP/SK but I bet there too) the government can compel workers to reveal data without anyone else knowing. Zaibatsu are complementary to (corporatist) governments, not adversarial. They feed off each other.
CalChris 7y ago
That is a good question. My first intuition was yes. But Google has about 2.5M servers at say $2000 per. That's $5B which is chump change for the NSA.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bashinator 7y ago
  I’d be very surprised if that were even close to the average cost of a cloud datacenter server. Wouldn’t they be optimized for physical density and power efficiency (which is to say, maxed out CPU/RAM)?
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Interested to know more about this. I don’t think much public information is out there, but a quick Google revealed Snap signed a five year $2B contract with G back in 2017, and that’s just one major customer.
  - mr__y 7y ago
    if those were equipment dedicated to brute-forcing I would expect it to be ASICs/FPGAs rather than typical servers. You'd get orders of magnitude faster solution[0]. At the expense of flexibility of course since those chips would be single purpose. [0] For a very simple example compare the hashrate on any CPU vs a bitcoin miner ASIC with a comparable size.
- mr__y 7y ago
  The thing is that not all servers in datacenters are maxed out to 100% usage all the time. A low priority process using idle resources could be used allowing for huge total cpu-power (given the scale of goog/fb/amzn datacenters) at no additional cost while if an agency wants $5B worth datacenter an agency must buy a $5B datacenter. On the other hand those idle resources could be rented to an agency at a discount price

by xscott 7y ago

ixtli 7y ago

They’re profit driven though so they have no ability to focus more than a fraction of their resources on a single problem. What makes governments powerful at solving problems is the ability to justify larger expenditures. EDIT: to be clear when I say “no ability” I mean practically. Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t.

xscott 7y ago
> Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t. It wasn't all employees, but all servers, that I was thinking about.
- ixtli 7y ago
  yeah after the fact i realized i should have specified this. i should have just said "capital" because in our society it's all interchangeable because everything (time, resources, etc.) is related to its dollar cost

derefr 7y ago

Companies operating legally under governments, are much more transparent to states (any state, not just the one they exist under) than other states are, because they interact through markets rather than through handshake deals. Amazon and Google have "public APIs" that they get all their chips through, and the NSA can see the "API calls." :) On the other hand, this is exactly the reason that entities that do operate through handshake deals with no visible economic activity—organized crime and the zaibatsu/chaebol type of conglomerate—tend to be considered imminent threats to states. They're opaque to logistical analysis! (Not that your average mob boss would have any inherent reason to commit treason against the United States, but other nations might be rather motivated to give them extrinsic reasons.) For this reason, even "benign" domestic crime syndicates or conglomerates will have their intelligence opacity hacked through with the application of good old-fashioned HUMINT.

vonseel 7y ago
Don’t most government contracts tend to go through competitive bidding processes and such? Sans NSA and some top secret military ones, I’d think a bunch of this stuff is pretty open knowledge, at least somewhere out there.
toyg 7y ago
Why would you throw zaibatsu/chaebols in with criminals...? They are just business conglomerates, their only difference from American-style corporations is that the ownership is organised around families a bit more explicitly on average - something that happens in the States as well, just with less success. The various governments they operate under have the same degree of visibility into them as in any other business. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t know they are zaibatsu in the first place. Are you confusing them with the actual Yakuza...? Why would you class the likes of Samsung as some sort of criminal enterprise outside the law?
- derefr 7y ago
  It’s basically just the fact that they’re large enough to have a “complete economy” composed entirely of their business units. Samsung (or, for example, GE) doesn’t have to go outside itself to source chips, or trucks to transport them, or, well, anything, really. One business unit can “buy” those products/services from another business unit without anything necessarily appearing on a balance sheet of either business unit. (It’ll appear if it’s beneficial for them to do so, but half the reason they’ve conglomerated in the first place is to hide the things that’re not beneficial.) Thus, such entities can do an entire skunkworks project without needing to touch the economy. Just like a state can.
  - toyg 7y ago
    That’s completely theoretical. They still have to report on plenty of things, starting from detailed payroll, handling of substances and so on. In some countries (like Australia or the US, no idea about JP/SK but I bet there too) the government can compel workers to reveal data without anyone else knowing. Zaibatsu are complementary to (corporatist) governments, not adversarial. They feed off each other.

CalChris 7y ago

That is a good question. My first intuition was yes. But Google has about 2.5M servers at say $2000 per. That's $5B which is chump change for the NSA.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bashinator 7y ago
I’d be very surprised if that were even close to the average cost of a cloud datacenter server. Wouldn’t they be optimized for physical density and power efficiency (which is to say, maxed out CPU/RAM)?
- vonseel 7y ago
  Interested to know more about this. I don’t think much public information is out there, but a quick Google revealed Snap signed a five year $2B contract with G back in 2017, and that’s just one major customer.
- mr__y 7y ago
  if those were equipment dedicated to brute-forcing I would expect it to be ASICs/FPGAs rather than typical servers. You'd get orders of magnitude faster solution[0]. At the expense of flexibility of course since those chips would be single purpose. [0] For a very simple example compare the hashrate on any CPU vs a bitcoin miner ASIC with a comparable size.
mr__y 7y ago
The thing is that not all servers in datacenters are maxed out to 100% usage all the time. A low priority process using idle resources could be used allowing for huge total cpu-power (given the scale of goog/fb/amzn datacenters) at no additional cost while if an agency wants $5B worth datacenter an agency must buy a $5B datacenter. On the other hand those idle resources could be rented to an agency at a discount price