The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense claims that pro-Ukrainian hacktivists breached the Russian Center for Space Hydrometeorology, aka “planeta” (планета), and wiped 2 petabytes of data.
If ukraine hacks and deletes nasa’s servers would you still defend ukraine or label people calling out the perpetrators as nationalists? Replace russia with america and your perspective changes dramatically.
Let me guess, would you approve ukraine burning libraries in russia? It is a hostile country where every single russian is hostile, after all. Libraries are a source of knowledge and knowledge can be used for war. Even educational institutions need to be shut down as they aid in research for war related purposes.
If they set up a military installation inside a library with the purpose of harming Ukraine, then yes. Aside from that, this is a ridiculous comparison.
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.
I’m sorry, are you saying that genocide (which is what Russia literally is doing in Ukraine)is bad? Because again, that is literally what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
This is a target because it’s information can be (fuck that, IS) important and be used in the Russian invasion efforts. It’s a legit target
Are you saying that just because Russia is doing a genocide, doing a genocide to Russia would be justified?
Ever heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”?
Are you saying that just because Russia is doing a genocide, doing a genocide to Russia would be justified? Ever heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”?
They can put that phrase on Ukrainian tombstones. /s
I’m not talking about this case and this data. I’m talking about the take of people above on how things should be handled.
Derpgon said “russia can be fucked” regardless of whether it’s a military or civilian target.
Maness300 pointed out that collective punishment can easily turn into discrimination. That is, there’s a big difference between “XYZ is bad, because it’s aiding Russian military” and “XYZ is bad, because it’s Russian”
Phoenixz points out that Russia is committing genocide, as if it’s a counter argument to the previous statement, somehow.
I point out that just because Russia is committing genocide, it doesn’t make it right to slip into “XYZ is bad, because it’s Russian” and use that as justification to do anything you want to the country and its people.
Maness300 is right: targeting entities of any country for the action of said country, regardless of whether the entities in question are responsible, or even capable of influencing the actions, is not a good idea. It will lead to more problems.
I, for example, don’t support the US selling weapons to Israel. Should go and set the closest 7-eleven on fire? It’s an American company, so, clearly, it’s a valid target, right?
This has got to be the most peculiar downvoted comment I’ve seen on lemmy so far. A principled disagreement with collective punishment? Weird.
Edit: what am I missing? Or have I stumbled into a part of lemmy that is totally fine with stuff Nazi Germany did, and present day Israel and Russia are doing?
I agree but this seems to be an attack on a military contractor, similar to if Russia attacked Lockheed martin. Sure Lockheed does civilian stuff but they actively help the military. I am not sure what the UN says about it, and it certainly isn’t the same as Israel collectively punishing Gaza.
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.
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.
That kind of targetting is what I expect of Russia, but if Ukranians are doing it to, then it means they’re losing their ability to discern who the proper targets are, vs who the not proper targets are, and are assaulting more indiscriminately.
They’re authoritarian war mongers using chemical warfare to assassinate people on foreign soil. They are illegally occupying a country, and this target was supplying the war effort with information. Fuck anything Russia at this point.
It was actually military R&D that helped develop meteorology to the point it is today since predicting the weather even inaccurately can be a decent boon in warfare.
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.
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…
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.
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
Would they maintain their own private off-site backup or would they be in a cluster with other government agencies or renting out from a commercial operation?
The cost would be massive for you or I to utilise such services, less so for an agency, and it certainly isn’t difficult.
I understand science is generally always under funded and there’s probably some oligarch skimming off of their budget, but I still don’t see this being the win they think it is in any form. I can only hope the climate data is not lost to all time.
Would they maintain their own private off-site backup or would they be in a cluster with other government agencies or renting out from a commercial operation?
nobody said they would. I’m just pointing out that the difficulty of backing up 45TB+ of computational meteorological data is a greater consideration than a bulk purchase of magnetic tape.
and, really, the carelessness with which you regard research and knowledge is pretty disgusting. don’t think you’re some hero for that. that’s hundreds of millions - possibly billions - of dollars of research and work let and hundreds of thousands of man-hours just gone. and, again, the data, the analysis, and the knowledge. just gone.
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.
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…
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).
striking a vulnerable Russian target was political.
Nothing like “science progresses us” more like “this data hurts people”
these are not the same. and, these Ukrainian hackers probably were more badass techies than trains on discriminate strategic targeting, so they hit whatever had the weakest security. like, I get it, but if someone sat them aside for five minutes and explained that this data is valuable to humanity, and should, at least, be preserved, they would have thought twice before deleting it without preserving it— or, at least making sure the Russians had backups. (maybe they do?)
also, as I mentioned, this action is only sorta embarrassing, not statically useful. it’s not military or strategic/spy data they deleted. this cyberattack doesn’t damage any infrastructure or anything related to war-making. it was an indiscriminate attack based, certainly, on opportunity, not static planning.
given Ukraines recent… budget issues, I think that their innovation in drone attacks in one front they should continue to invest in both because its cheap, but also minimizes casualties. the other they should now explore is cyberwarfare. And cyberattacks should be strategic in nature. They should disable, immobilize, and/or destroy a target. Destroying priceless knowledge is just wrong and benefits nobody.
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.
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.
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