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Update on the FBI datacenter raid

22 points by vaksel 18y ago

briansmith 18y ago
From now on, geographic replication will have a new-found importance. I think a lot of businesses think "our customers will understand if the site is down for a few days after a giant natural disaster or bombing or whatever." But, how many customers are going to be understanding of the indefinite downtime that was caused by some other completely unrelated company not paying its AT&T bill? Imagine if this company had been hosting its service on Amazon EC2 or at Rackspace or on Google AppEngine. Would the FBI seize every one on Amazon's/Rackspace's/Google's data centers? Could you imagine all of Google's services being down for weeks or months because one of its customers is being investigated for maybe violating some contract for a few thousand dollars?
- stcredzero 18y ago
  Unfortunately, most judges don't understand these issues. They apply the same sort of thinking to a "server" as they would to a box of weapons or bags of coke. Bags of coke and boxes of machined metal can't be virtual like servers can. This needs to be addressed, and soon! Another consequence: cloud computing providers will be loath to host anything that vaguely resembles something that might be subject to seizure.
- w1ntermute 18y ago
  "Imagine if this company had been hosting its service on Amazon EC2 or at Rackspace or on Google AppEngine. Would the FBI seize every one on Amazon's/Rackspace's/Google's data centers? Could you imagine all of Google's services being down for weeks or months because one of its customers is being investigated for maybe violating some contract for a few thousand dollars?" Wouldn't happen. Google has the corporate muscle to make the government do what they want.
- jerf 18y ago
  "In a coordinated raid today, the FBI seized machines from the three data centers that Suspicious Enterprises, LTD. was using." Extends with little difficulty to the international case, too. I'm not sure geographic dispersion helps much with this.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
cracki 18y ago
> took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer). That's 278 MB/s. I call bull. At best, they're merely confusing the prefixes.
pmjordan 18y ago
I took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer). Oh, really? Really? 1TB is 1million MB (according to HDD manufacturers, let's not get into that debate again) so even with a relatively current and snappy drive and controller you're looking at about 100MB/s net. That's about 10000 seconds or roughly 3 hours to copy. You'll get faster speeds with SAS drives, but far from all hosting sites use them, and I doubt the author's "aging" Mac does. That's not counting the labour of documenting/tracking the origin of the drive, actually hooking it up to the target equipment, etc. The authorities could probably be handling much of this investigation a lot more delicately, but give them some credit on this side of things.

22 points by vaksel 18y ago

From now on, geographic replication will have a new-found importance. I think a lot of businesses think "our customers will understand if the site is down for a few days after a giant natural disaster or bombing or whatever." But, how many customers are going to be understanding of the indefinite downtime that was caused by some other completely unrelated company not paying its AT&T bill? Imagine if this company had been hosting its service on Amazon EC2 or at Rackspace or on Google AppEngine. Would the FBI seize every one on Amazon's/Rackspace's/Google's data centers? Could you imagine all of Google's services being down for weeks or months because one of its customers is being investigated for maybe violating some contract for a few thousand dollars?

stcredzero 18y ago
Unfortunately, most judges don't understand these issues. They apply the same sort of thinking to a "server" as they would to a box of weapons or bags of coke. Bags of coke and boxes of machined metal can't be virtual like servers can. This needs to be addressed, and soon! Another consequence: cloud computing providers will be loath to host anything that vaguely resembles something that might be subject to seizure.
w1ntermute 18y ago
"Imagine if this company had been hosting its service on Amazon EC2 or at Rackspace or on Google AppEngine. Would the FBI seize every one on Amazon's/Rackspace's/Google's data centers? Could you imagine all of Google's services being down for weeks or months because one of its customers is being investigated for maybe violating some contract for a few thousand dollars?" Wouldn't happen. Google has the corporate muscle to make the government do what they want.
jerf 18y ago
"In a coordinated raid today, the FBI seized machines from the three data centers that Suspicious Enterprises, LTD. was using." Extends with little difficulty to the international case, too. I'm not sure geographic dispersion helps much with this.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

cracki 18y ago

> took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer). That's 278 MB/s. I call bull. At best, they're merely confusing the prefixes.

pmjordan 18y ago

I took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer). Oh, really? Really? 1TB is 1million MB (according to HDD manufacturers, let's not get into that debate again) so even with a relatively current and snappy drive and controller you're looking at about 100MB/s net. That's about 10000 seconds or roughly 3 hours to copy. You'll get faster speeds with SAS drives, but far from all hosting sites use them, and I doubt the author's "aging" Mac does. That's not counting the labour of documenting/tracking the origin of the drive, actually hooking it up to the target equipment, etc. The authorities could probably be handling much of this investigation a lot more delicately, but give them some credit on this side of things.