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[–] 69 points 5 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 139 points 5 months ago (13 children)

    A year or 2 ago, some assholes were shooting substation in the hopes of causing major damage. Im sure data centers got a smaller version of this

    Those 5 green blocks are radiators. One of those assholes shot and damage a few of the radiators at a critical substation. It caused power loss to about 7k people including schools and a hospital. The news story said they had to truck in temp substations until they got the new parts to repair. ETA was 6 months to a year.

    Sorry, kinda went on a tangent. Good luck with your AI recipe that uses 5 gallons of salt or whatever.

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  • [–] 59 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    I'm going to take this opportunity to rant about a Ukranian tactic of drone plus thermite bucket.

    You can get fine aluminum and iron oxide powder online easily. A sparkler sets it off or even a superheated wire.

    The Ukrainians have been having great success at using thermite to forcibly evict Russians from their trenches, and sometimes, from their mortal coils as well.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    How would they even remotely trigger such a device nobody should consider building?

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  • [–] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Intellectually speaking, A strip of magnesium acting as a fuse would work, but require lighting before the trip. In practice, though, someone could get hurt, so only do this for science.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago

    A cigarette is the classic slow-acting fuse that will give you 3-5 minutes. In college, we would hook them up to firecrackers, and then go hang out near the RA, so when it went off, we had a fool-proof alibi. The bang would destroy all evidence of the cigarette fuse.

    We once set 3 at once and then were hanging in plain sight near the RA when the first one went off. We all ran to that one, and then we heard another one go off down another hall, etc. We were standing next to the RA when all of them went off. The PERFECT crime.

    Can't get away with it today, too many cameras.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The drone already has electricity from a battery. Surely you could utilize it in some way. You also know with a drone that it will be flying fast and crashing into something, maybe the force of the impact could be used. This is all for a school project right?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Thermite in a bucket melts through the bucket and then dribbles out, melting/burning through just about anything it lands on. When delivered via drone, you don't want to crash the drone since you can keep targeting that stream versus just making a puddle.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Funny those guys seem to have returned to their hedge now that Trump is back in power.

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  • [–] 68 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    I think OP has a $20 bucket of salt and is farming ideas for how to use it to destroy his local datacenter.

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  • [–] 20 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Can't farm much else with a bucket of salt.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    You don't have permission to access "http://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/champions-choice-white-salt-block-50-lb" on this server.

    That's mean.

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  • [–] 48 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The trick is replacing the salt in the bucket with plastic explosive.

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  • [–] 41 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    $20 bucket of salt? That's way too much for salt. Who's your salt guy?

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  • [–] 33 points 5 months ago*

    This is just like the Romans.

    Salting the earth so that data centers cannot grow.

    Good thinking.

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  • [–] 33 points 5 months ago (12 children)

    My views of eco terrorism are mostly from reading Zodiac : an ecothriller. The protagonist uses quick acting cement to plug polluting sewage pipes and back up the toxic waste into the polluting facilities.

    This could be done in the opposite direction as well. Plug the incoming water pipe to starve the beast pulling hundreds of thousand of liters of water.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago

    Holy shit do NOT DO THIS.

    You're assuming the failure point is going to be inside of the facility but it's WAY more likely to be an underground pipe that will speed that that sewage directly into the earth.

    This is way worse because it might not be obvious that it's happening for a looong time.

    Seriously, find some other way to ecoterrorize. This one is not worth it.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah but isn't that also an easy fix for the datacenter? Like the people running it will just shut things down, discover the cement, remove it, and start up again.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I think the hope is that the lack of water for cooling will cause permanent damage by overheating. But the reality is there are failsafes to prevent this.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    That is what I figured. Gotta do something with lasting consequences like mixing sugar into the cement.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Shutting down a data center for the cost of a bag of cement is a good cost to loss ratio though. It may only be for a day but that is easily repeatable. Shut it down every few days while they are already losing money running at a loss and trying to show some sort of usage stats that will get fucked by the repeated shutdowns.

    Obviously you have to find multiple ways to fuck with them like bad additives in their diesel generator fuel tanks. Drones dropping epoxy into the cooling fans on the roof.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    Neal Stephenson. good stuff, before he kinda went... corpo with Termination Shock.

    I wonder if he's concluded 'if anyone is gonna stop the cycle it'll have to be a disruptor who just seeds atmospheric blockers', because I wasn't impressed with that book.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Unplugging a pipe is easy

    Unknowingly having salt water corrode your cooking system over time is a disaster

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  • [+] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    So you are saying, there are humans in these facilities we could target to disable those systems?

    They decided to work for the clankers. They chose to be targets.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    They don't just blindly use whatever water comes from the lake and put it directly into the loop.

    They'll have treatment, filtration, and cossosion-resistant parts, and probably separated loops where the only liquid that directly interacts with anything important is completely isolated from the intake and outflow water.

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  • [–] 31 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Are datacenters like slugs or buckets of salt in any way like computers or what am I missing here

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Im confused, what will salt do. My brain basically autocorrected it to suger cause you can put it in concrete and it will ruin it but what does salt do?

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago

    If the point is to put the salt in the water to corrode its cooling systems, you need way more than $20 bucket of salt. Far more water is used

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago

    I imagine pouring salt in the water tanks for their cooling systems. It'll make a giant expensive mess and potentially could shut down the datacenter for a while for repairs

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  • [–] 34 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I'd think the data center would win

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    Sugar keeps diesel engines from working and keep concrete from setting

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    Carthage moment

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago

    Uhh, you might cause some damage with the salt, but you will need like literal tons of salts for it to destroy and data center

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Why you're bendin' the wrong element there, son! I say- I say boy, you're lookin' like a monk in a zen garden pushing' all those particulates around! What you need is a fine, fierce fire! Have them CEO and AI tech types screamin' like you done pinched their momma!

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Contaminate the cooling lines with salt somehow?

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  • [+] 11 points 5 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

    Just set off an old school roadway safety flare inside of one.

    Decent chance that'll set off the fire suppression system, which will functionally ruin the datacenter, at least temporarily.

    $23 bucks for 6 of em at Walmart.

    Also substantially lighter and easier to handle than a bucket of salt.

    Uh for legal purposes this is a joke, dark comedy.

    Get it?

    Because... a flare... is actually... really bright?

    Hahaha!

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    50/50 it's a data center fire suppression. Doubt they use water. Probably co2 or some other inert gas

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah...you don't want to be in the data center when the fire suppression systems go off. That's exactly it...they starve the fire by displacing oxygen.

    Most datacenters have strict no-cardboard-in-cage rules for this reason.

    And one of the points of a data center is for multiple people to pool shared costs. One of those big costs is physical security, which is where most of a datacenters payroll goes. So good luck getting a road flare anywhere near the servers.

    But if you do get in, just hit the EPO switch. Problem solved.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago*

    The data center??

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    It's for putting in the floppy drives

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    The guy selling his shit to companies to build the data center is the big money winner. Those things have huge amounts of copper.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The companies building the data centers are likely owned by people with a large stake in the AI company they are building for

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    a bunch of J-Lube and dish soap would be way more fun, though

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  • mmm salty chips

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    I offer instead:

    One glassy gassy boi!

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Genuine question: would people be less angry or the same about data centers if all the water used to cool them was taken from the ocean and desalinated?

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago*

    How about the power they use, driving up prices for the rest of us? How about the destruction of the computer components market so that regular folks can't buy an affordable computer that doesn't suck? How about the jobs they destroy while replacing humans with computers that do inferior work? You're missing so much about why they're hated. They do like 10 kinds of major societal and environmental damage while only meaningfully contributing in specific contexts. Would it be better if they didn't waste insane quantities of water? Yeah, but they'd still be terrible.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Hmm..idk anything abt this but maybe the salt!

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago