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One side of me wants to cheer the Ukrainians, but the other laments that they… “hurt science”. I wish they could have stolen the data before they wiped it so it wasn’t lost, but that’s a lot of data to swipe.
I get it, it’s just I’m sad all of that knowledge was lost. Space Hydrometeorology isn’t really relevant to war-waging. It wasn’t a strategic target.
I will drink two toasts tonight: one for Ukraine’s victory, and one to lament lost knowledge.
I agree with you completely. Any time knowledge like this is destroyed, it illicits the same feeling for me as thinking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
Fuck russia, but also fuck destroying knowledge in the name of war...
but also fuck destroying knowledge in the name of war…
That's why War sucks, and Humanity should never fight them.
Weather forecasting is actually really important for military operations. Consider weather advisories for aircraft, for example. Or planning an offensive on a clear day.
That said I don't know if this place was doing climate science or weather forecasting (or both).
I wish they could have stolen the data before they wiped it so it wasn’t lost, but that’s a lot of data to swipe.
Ukrainian hackers could cryptolocker it and exchange the keys for Ukrainian POWs.
I am sure somebody would get suspicious if the servers are on 100% CPU + IO to encrypt 2 petabytes especially if you encrypt the data in place.
Yup, we have certain monitors in place for if a server is maxed out above ~90% CPU/memory utilization for a certain period of time. Wouldn't take that long for someone to realize if they were properly monitoring their systems.
I am sure they have offline backups. Also sometimes most of the data is garbage in the sense we collect anything in case we need it.
I will also eat two toasts tonight one because i am hungry and the other because i am also hungry.
I see all the comments saying Ukraine targeted non-military entity. But IMO, Russia can get fucked. I am not sure if they shared the data with anyone, or kept it to themselves, but no loss.
For sure they use it for war purposes.
They sure as fuck aren't using it for climate research. They dgaf about climate.
Ed: hack was maybe part of a bigger defense strike: https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/01/27/ukrainian-cyberattacks-cripple-russian-defense-contractor-weather-center/
The Russian Federation actually does give a fuck about climate... They want to make global warming worse. They get to sell more gas, they get more arable land up north, and they open up shipping routes in the Arctic. Putin is Captain Planet levels of evil, fr.
This has "they deserved it" energy.
Yes, they did
Following that logic, civilians should be fair game because "Russia can get fucked".
Ukrainian civilians are fair game to the Russian military, so...
Israel 2 electric boogaloo
Yeah Russian citizens supporting Putler can eat dick and die, but it's not Ukraine's right to go after them
They’d be morons if they didn’t back up important data off site.
Have you ever seen any academic IT systems? They are all underfunded ans run by grad students.
Even worse, they are often a case of accretion by generations of grad students and undergrads.
E.g. a university was redoing how it hosted student club websites. When it eventually killed the old hosting, 1 site stayed working. It was eventually tracked down to a little mini pc mounted above the false ceiling. It had been plodding away for 20 odd years, most of that without any maintenance at all.
and here we have underfunded science with lots of russian corruption on top
real chance of backup system money disappearing in pockets...
You’re insulting grad students. ;) But yea, I imagine it is very underfunded!
The only reasonable excuse for attacking this data was that it helped the Russian war effort. Eg. flying in supplies, planning offensives, missile and UAV flight planning, etc.
Planeta is a state research center using space satellite data and ground sources like radars and stations to provide information and accurate predictions about weather, climate, natural disasters, extreme phenomena, and volcanic monitoring.
That’s just fucking stupid of them.
This massive volume of information would be difficult and costly to store in backups, so if Ukraine's claims are true, this is a catastrophic attack on Planeta.
A 45tb tape would cost me a consumer $98, 45 of them would be 2pb and cost a whopping $4,320, it would surely be even cheaper for a bulk order at non-consumer costs. Hardly difficult or costly.
A 45tb tape would cost me a consumer $98, 45 of them would be 2pb and cost a whopping $4,320, it would surely be even cheaper for a bulk order at non-consumer costs. Hardly difficult or costly.
it’s not just the cost of the tape (or whatever storage medium). it’s the cost of maintaining a secure off-site backup system. surely, you understand this, and how one is much more expensive than the other, especially at scale.
2pb is nothing if we're talking about a small datacenter backed up by the government. That said, Russia has a history of special kind of dumbassery
I think the main problem is that if, for example, they got 1 million allocated in the budget for maintaining the server farm, after corruption and shit only 250k would be actually available
Yeah that's the start of dumbassery. Next comes cutting corners
I can pretty much guarantee that the cost of creating an offsite backup is trivial compared to the budget used to collect and analyze those data. I can’t read Russian anymore and it’s probably not published in a discoverable way, but I’m going to offer up the possibility that the sat network, research scientist teams, sys admins, and everything else that goes into the portion of the Russian government’s budget for this work wouldn’t have even seen that as a rounding error. I’ve worked with US government budgets and I know how tight fisted committees can be, and while the USG isn’t Google in terms of writing checks for tech, and while the Russians are probably an order of magnitude or two poorer than our budgets, it’s still be a no brainer in terms of costs. Either they just didn’t think of it (which I’ve seen far more times than I can tell you about) or it got eliminated as a line item by some bureaucrats who don’t understand cost/benefit analysis (which we’ve all also seen), it wasn’t truly a cost thing. Compared to the price associated with sat launches and data analysis, $10-$20k/ month for data retention is nothing.
Also, I sort of suspect that these were dual use systems. When you’re talking about the sensing tech they’re using, there are the very obvious and direct intel applications.
Technically with 45tb they mean "45tb of highly compressible text", actually is 18tb.
And raw images aren't compressible
With a catch like this the genius marketing could call them "100 petabyte tapes" (only if you store zero-filled files)
So it needs more tapes and the drive itself is also very expensive, around $10k, and it's not something that a Russian government entity can access easily today, but needs to be bought from grey market resellers with higher markup.
Then needs a dedicated server for that, a person (or a robotic arm) that changes the tapes every few hours, temperature controlled off-site storage...
1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Terabytes (TB) = 1 Petabyte (PB).
Or: 1024 Tebibytes (TiB) = 1 Pebibyte (PiB)
Or: 1024 Terabytes (TB) = 1.024 Petabytes (PB)
Or: 1024 Terabytes (TB) = 1 Petabyte (TB), 24 Terabytes (TB)
But: 1024 Terabytes (TB) != 1 Petabyte (PB)