Russia used to be quite advanced in information technology. At one point they prided themselves on being one of only four nations with Internet-scale search engines IIRC. Their little military operation already cost them lots of talent. And now they are actively losing infra too. Nice.

If you want to help Ukraine, here is a list of the largest volunteer funds you can donate to:

Come Back Alive - delivered the first deep-strike drones https://savelife.in.ua/en/

Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation - bought the famous spy satellite https://prytulafoundation.org/en

KOLO Charity Foundation - run by the Ukrainian tech community https://www.koloua.com/en/

Razom - US-based foundation https://www.razomforukraine.org/donate/

Canada-Ukraine Foundation - Canadian NGO, organizes winter aid for civilians https://www.cufoundation.ca/

Ukrainian World Congress https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/

Exen - Polish volunteer who delivers used vehicles to the front https://pomagam.pl/4x4dlaukrainy

United24 - the government fund https://u24.gov.ua/

Blue/Yellow - Lithuanian NGO supplying the Ukrainian military https://blue-yellow.lt/en/

Stopify - Latvian initiative, donations collected via Ziedot.lv https://stopify.org.ua/

Weapons to Ukraine - Czech initiative https://weaponstoukraine.com/en

Help99 - from Estonia's LIFT99 startup hub, convoys refitted trucks and drones to the front https://www.help99.co/donate

Aktion Deutschland Hilft - German humanitarian aid https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/

Thanks to everyone who suggested additions. Please keep adding foundations from your country in the comments.

Great! More news like this

Maybe this would remind ordinary russians that killing innocent civilians every day in Kyiv is not good

Data centers are becoming higher priority targets in wars recently, and with humans delegating more to AI, I suspect their priority will increase even further.

Makes me wonder how much compute is already being built in bunkers under mountains.

BBC story linked to this chart which is pretty interesting:

>Internet Connectivity for AS200350 (YandexCloud)

https://ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/asn/200350?from=1791331...

From a purely engineering perspective, this and the destroyed AWS datacenters in the Middle East show an interesting trend. How will it affect the way future datacenters and services hosted in them are built? Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?

Should likely share https://status.yandex.cloud/en/timeline as well, though it only shows two of them being hit, not three.

Nice! Keep it up boys!

3rd cloud data center so far.

Yandex is pretty good search engine. It has zero censorship. Just the raw internet. Sometimes it more than I've bargained for but as a user I'm happy the option exists.

The severity of the attacks on Russian borders have I believe still a limited effect on the course of the war, but I suppose it certainly won't hurt Ukraine's chances to in some form survive this war.

Is https://habr.com normally down?

Everything in Russia depends on Yandex. The impact on both businesses and daily life is massive. You can’t order a taxi or food delivery in most parts of Russia now. Retail chains POS systems in stores and payment systems are down too. Russians on threads and Twitter are complaining they can’t even buy things in stores. Of course, Putin himself doesn’t understand the impact because he barely knows how to use a computer and never uses the Internet.

data centers are civilian targets and globally very poorly defended. if this starts to escalate.. you think ram is expensive now..

That's great!

Is Kagi search still (partially?) relying on Yandex?

They should start putting data centers underground like deep under central park

Looks like Yandex is going to be taken over by the state for not investing in air defences. (There is a new law in russia that specifically allows confiscation of businesses that do not invest in air defenses.)

tough luck

Nice.

Massive data/compute centers should be replace to lot of mini data/compute centers in our homes.

How many major DCs are there in Russia?

What's an alternative way to find torrents if Yandex goes down?

I am still not sure if Russia attacking Ukraine was the best or the worst thing for Europe.

Meaning, if they went around Ukraine for any other country it probably would have folded way earlier.

But this way with Ukraine defending itself, the EU(rope) is somehow keeping head in the sand much much longer.

The communication from Yandex regarding these incidents seems very refreshing compared to what we usually see from big tech. They seem very realistic about what customers should expect and what measures they should take. I wish this were more common these days.

Scaleway built one of their Paris AZs in a nuclear fallout shelter: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/meet-fr-par-3/

Datacenters are full of valuable computers and related equipment, but building the equivalent space under a mountain will cost a crazy amount.

Not worth paying 100x for the bunker to save 1x worth of computer stuff.

They will probably start building DCs in Siberia. Cheap cooling!

Power and data has to come from somewhere for those bunkers. Every fiber hut and power substation becomes a target. Can they all be protected? No.

This is a... mischaracterization.

The reason why Ukraine, Russia and Iran are targeting data-centers is because they are easy targets with a lot of expensive equipment, but they don't really impact the military operation. So, they aren't high priority targets. Bomber airplanes, air defenses, launchers for ballistic missiles, command centers, factories manufacturing strategic military equipment, telecommunications, energy infrastructure would be the examples of high priority targets. The data-centers are more of a "we have excess drones, why not use them?"

I find it hard to believe that the military will intentionally use civilian data-centers for its own purposes. At least, not for the core of its operations (for auxiliary functionality: maybe). Military data-centers are likely to be in protected locations, perhaps using different h/w that addresses the cooling problem.

Also, it's a bit myopic to think that AI is having such a universal and large impact on society. Jobs that provide essential goods and services are, by and large, unaffected by AI. Farmers, construction workers, cooks etc. don't really use any of the AI stuff on the day to day basis, if at all.

I don't think Yandex DCs are used directly for military purposes much. It's more about harming Russian economy in general, including its highly prided digital infrastructure

Let's not forget about the orbital data center idea.

Perhaps an economic justification can be found for placing something so far up the gravity well that its adversaries can no longer physically approach it. Distributing the resource across many satellites would further confound any attack.

Increasing the cost of effect on a single target from $1,000 to $1,000,000,000 makes a difference. Especially when that 2nd option is likely to trigger additional multilateral strategic responses. If the only way to delete your adversaries data centers is with things like nuclear weapons, lasers and multi-stage rocketry, your adversary may have already won the game.

> Will we see a rise in decentralized systems and much larger networks of smaller DCs?

Or will we see civilian datacenters with their own defensive drone swarms, and a couple of phalanx-style point defence systems for good measure?

This should have a material impact on SpaceX stock. Wouldn't it be much easier to harden datacenters against attack under ground than in space?

No, just more underground construction

It will mean data-centers move to space and then Musk will use his space prowess to bring weapons into space, in collaboration with the US military, and deny/strong-arm/corrupt governments around the world to protect his treasure, including the US government. He'll have a robot army to back it up.

He is on his way to become the first ($100 trillion) supervillain. Until 2 years ago, he stood at the center of most of the good news, then he got a few calls from Putin and he became unhinged from our (obscured) point of view. Nowadays he's a dark pattern.

Capitalism culminates in him, and he has to decide what to make of the world. He is our de-facto king, while on a personal level he has to decide what to do with his fortune. Put it into smart contracts for an AI to use and rule the world? Giving it to his kids would be underwhelming, not what he lived for.

People joked that mankind existed to bring forth the machines and would then become superfluous. The irony of it. Well, it seems irony has mr Musk. He sees the petty online bickering and he sees himself as alone, as the only adult in the room, who has to decide the fate of humanity, and his power in many domains puts him to the task.

He has his fiduciary responsibility that puts the interests of his share-holders first. He sees that as a healthy check on his power. At the end of all his calculations he has responsibilities akin to the Star Wars Emperor. Just like many white men, who come spend the remainder of their days in function and in defense of their property. Not in defense of life.

So Musk needs his antagonist to arrive on the scene, so he can repurpose his empire for the good the antagonist brings, as he represents a complete overhaul of the way life is lived. So the jury is out on mr Musk, and may he always remember his status as an American is just a hustle gone wild. Similar to the dynamic of how a liar has to keep extending his web of lies. He will make it into a machine that will carry his burden going forward. And then what? When, if ever, will he remember he is an African, and a friend of his own antagonist? His final words may sound like: Luke, I am your Father!

> And of course not a word about the people in Russia killed by Ukranians (Kursk region and daily killings by drones, of civilians, which the west is "not aware of").

Russia could stop this invasion any time and not a single Russian would be hurt. Pure Kreml propaganda on HN, how sad.

1) The invasion started at least in 2014 (you could argue before that)

2) The UN estimate is considered on the low end because it looks into confirmed deaths while many civilians were killed in cities that became occupied and we have no numbers from there.

The highest, by far, death numbers come from Mariupol. It's a city close to the Russian border that was attacked very early in the war, but didn't surrender quickly like most other cities in the South. The estimates are somewhere close to 25K dead in this city alone. Civilians were unable to evacuate, and it was the time when Russia had plenty of resources, especially artillery munitions to expend and their tactics were to do massive artillery bombardment (often with rocket artillery) before massive motorized assault. So, lack of precision, or as some jokingly call it "accuracy through saturation".

Since Mariupol fell to Russia, they never counted the dead. There are horror stories of the bodies not being buried for month after surrender, and in some cases, Russians simply pawed over the places with many dead (a prominent example is the theater in the city center, but there were more).

The numbers you are quoting are the "counted" ones. Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, Kherson, saw a lot of deaths that were never counted.

Sorry to bring another conflict into the picture, but it's useful to illustrate the point. In Gaza, the "health ministry" used a different "technique" to count the dead. Normally, to establish that someone died, there has to be a qualified medical professional at the scene, they also have to get a hold of identifying documents (or else, they will be counted as "John/Jane Doe", but in the morgue, much later). In some "special" cases a non-medical professional may record a death (they are usually defined using the language like "the head is more than 50 cm away from the rest of the body" etc.) But they switched to "incorporating reports from the news sources" (i.e. if some newspaper reported X people killed in some event, they just added X to the tally).

After the front line stabilized in Ukraine, they had no reason (or excuse) to count their civilian casualties in the way Gaza administration did, so, they never incorporated those who were never properly reported. And that's why we have a relatively "low" numbers. If Ukraine is ever able to regain control of the territory captured after 2022, these numbers are bound to go much, much higher, as they will have to deal with eg. property ownership and would have to either declare the previous owners as deceased, or actually find them.

It's likely much higher considering the completely destroyed cities and towns. E.g. Mariupol had a population of 450 000 before the war.

[–] | on: 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

Why is my comment downvoted? (Rhetorical question, of course, I know what you are.) It is the reality that Russian civilians are killed daily by the Ukranian drones, guided also by your starlink satellites.

You may not like to hear this, but this is how things are.