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.
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.
Probably a bad idea to buy it online.
How would they even remotely trigger such a device nobody should consider building?
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.
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.
Also, modern cigarettes go out on their own if not consistently puffed.
In school, we used a magnesium fuse in a puddle of glycerin.
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?
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.
I was thinking model rocket engine igniters would do the trick.
Funny those guys seem to have returned to their hedge now that Trump is back in power.
They are to busy with their new ICE jobs to entertain such notions any longer.
Why shoot substation for free when ICE will pay them to shoot minorities and their supporters instead.
I doubt their schedule is so busy they couldn’t do both.
I’m confuse
Yeah … I’m really not sure how you’re supposed to destroy a data center with a single bucket of salt.
But I’m willing to learn.
first you have to put it in the orbit
Salt bad for water cooling components? Idk
They have filtration
salt helps with rusting
That sounds like dealing with despots by waiting for them to die of old age.
Isn’t that what we’re doing with Trump?
I think OP has a $20 bucket of salt and is farming ideas for how to use it to destroy his local datacenter.
Can’t farm much else with a bucket of salt.
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.
No 50 lb salt block for you!
Who would have though one needs to VPN into the US for a site called “tractorsupply.com”…
The trick is replacing the salt in the bucket with plastic explosive.
The real solutions are always in the comments smh
$20 bucket of salt? That’s way too much for salt. Who’s your salt guy?
Sounds about right if you’re buying during a snowstorm though
IDFK how much buckets of salt costs in the US, I just made a random number that does not sound too absurd.
Lol me neither. I used it as an opportunity to semiquote Creed.
This is just like the Romans.
Salting the earth so that data centers cannot grow.
Good thinking.
I’d think the data center would win
For compute? Yes.
For delicious seasoning? Probably not.
That sounds correct to me but I don’t have have enough evidence at present to say for certain
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is what I figured. Gotta do something with lasting consequences like mixing sugar into the cement.
only works if it ain’t finished yet tho
Pour a decent bit of algae into the water supply (freshwater shouldn’t have algae, but enough will get past standard biocides used in cooling)
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.
Unplugging a pipe is easy
Unknowingly having salt water corrode your cooking system over time is a disaster
I don’t think this is at all realistic.
Data centers have an entire staff of people who JUST design and operate the cooling systems. I can promise you, they monitor the condition of the water/coolant.
I spoke with an cooling engineer at great length tho worked in an AWS data center. They know when the water quality is below threshold, they cycle out the old water and replace with fresh on an ongoing basis.
If there were some type of contaminant in the water, it’d probably set off a bunch of alerts pretty fast. Even still, most of the cooling systems are made of copper or aluminum. Neither would be damaged by salt in any meaningful way.
Some acids would corrode copper and aluminum, but it’s not like it would happen fast at anything but extreme concentrations.
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.
Well a data center itself does not exclusively host the computing infrastructure used for ai.
The components that run Lemmy live in a data center. The EFF hosts their content from a data center. Telecommunications that make up the internet host equipment in data centers.
I thought we were talking specifically about recently built data centers for majority use by AI companies
They typically don’t just build 'em for AI. Data centers are general purpose buildings. They provide power, cooling, security, floorspace. What goes into 'em doesn’t change anything. You can stuff computers in there that are used for cancer research, cryptomining, AI, ecommerce, it doesn’t matter.
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.
Are datacenters like slugs or buckets of salt in any way like computers or what am I missing here
Data centers are like slugs in that the heads of them are slimy voracious consumers of every resource around them without regard to the harm they do.
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?
Salt does bad things to concrete but you’d need more than that.
https://www.quora.com/Salt-Concrete-Does-adding-salt-to-concrete-make-it-1-4-x-stronger Imma leave that here.
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
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
If you live somewhere with a winter season, might I suggest getting your salt from one of these? They are often unguarded and contain a TON of salt.
Jk I don’t think salt will work well.
Sand tits!
Carthage moment
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!
50/50 it’s a data center fire suppression. Doubt they use water. Probably co2 or some other inert gas
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.
Convenient that thermite brings its own source of oxygen!
Drones.
Still fucks up operations significantly.
… also works as a neat distraction.
Physical PenTesting can be fun!
Halon.
