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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
by ceejayoz 1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- senordevnyc 1mo agoDoes the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
- esafak 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
- ceejayoz 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- chews 1mo agoit's fair to say they do and have for ages... it's not that hard to assume a well trusted TLS cert is under their control.
- strictnein 1mo agoWhat does having a "well trusted TLS cert" enable for them in this case, exactly? Having a magical cert doesn't mean you can just intercept everything.
- odo1242 1mo agoOn the contrary, it lets you MITM encrypted communications by swapping the website's original certificate for the "well trusted TLS cert"
- strictnein 1mo agoNo, it doesn't. HSTS and other methods prevent this from happening.
- kelnos 1mo agoHSTS doesn't protect you from this at all. It only requires HTTPS, which a spoofed-but-trusted cert passes just fine. No mainstream browser (or any browser?) is doing cert pinning. What "other methods" are there that are deployed and actually in use?
- peanut-walrus 1mo agoTransparency logs. It's mandatory for a cert to be in CT logs for browsers to trust it. Those are public, if this was happening, someone would have noticed already.
- chews 1mo ago[dead]
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- monax 1mo agogrep is pretty fast
- bakies 1mo agoI dont think it requires a lot. I think of them as data hoarders more than anything else. It doesnt seem out of their capabilities to store a ton of chats. Maybe they're having scaling problems with the increased data rates they're hoarding and it led to an outage.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- usernomdeguerre 1mo ago"AI Traffic" is just traffic. If the infrastructure exists to monitor/buffer traffic (it does) then this can be monitored as well. Whether this hiccup was due to them hitting their limits briefly (or turning it on, or etc) who knows.
- esseph 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- keeda 1mo agoTraffic doesn’t need to be routed through it though, just tee’d to it,
- arm32 1mo agoIn the context of arbitrary line-level traffic, sure. But we're talking about robust reverse proxies here if this _is_ what's going on, again, not a fiber tap inside a closet. In that case, there's no such thing as tee'ing to it.
- snowwrestler 1mo agoWorth mentioning that this room takes a split from the main feed and is not in the path of traffic. Whatever is in this room could go down and it would not cause an outage.
- novok 1mo agoAnd if the hypothetical splitter is the thing that breaks? Then it would break main traffic too.
- AlexandrB 1mo agoInterestingly, fiber signals can be split passively[1] (without a transducer), which should be extremely reliable. No idea what technology this kind of application would use though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_splitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_splitter
- novok 1mo agoWe don't know the architecture of this hypothetical spy splitter tho in the current case. It can be less covert and more of a complicated config, etc.
- snowwrestler 1mo agoHow often does the entire west coast of the U.S. lose Internet connectivity to the entire continent of Asia? That gives you a constraint on how often that type of failure actually occurs.