The Emergency Internet Bunkers 96
Barence writes "Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict. If it could, then a handful of datacenters dotted around the world would likely be all that remains of the multi-billion-dollar hosting industry. These secretive, high-security sites, tunneled out of mountains or housed behind the blast-proof doors of one-time NATO bunkers, are home to the planet's most secure hosting providers. This article profiles the emergency internet bunkers."
Mars (Score:2)
We should ship humanity's data to Mars for safe-keeping and just in case Mars was ever destroyed, we could backup in a randomly attuned dimension.
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Yes, but only in the sense of "a ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea."
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Q: So the problem is fat cats infatuated with expensive, unnecessary products?
A: Exactly. Only now it's cropping up in Asia, too.
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Just broadcast your data, suitably encrypted and duplicated, into space in one direction [not towards any of the planets or solar systems in our area].
Then, if you REALLY REALLY want that data, you just need to invent and FTL drive, then travel to a point just in front of that data beam and retrieve your data.
Cosmic Cloud Backup (Score:1)
You just need to invent and FTL drive, then travel to a point just in front of that data beam and retrieve your data.
Brilliant!
Re: (Score:2)
Naa, "Delay line memory" is far too open to interference.
I would suggest using Iron crystals; a small one would be a thousand miles across. They take a little while to manufacture but once they've cooled off they make a very stable storage medium. Just be sure to remove the outer layers of slag, especially any organic residue that may be infecting it.
One of these will give you a few zettabytes of storage. BTW: You can put a lot more in if you reduce the ECC requirements but we're talking long term stor
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You could embed or suspend these crystals on a vast platter design, and then just mark any that had organic contaminants as bad sectors in your organising system and ignore them.
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That way while the zombies are feasting on the rest of humanities' brains, I can finally level up some toons.
The internet already *is* breaking (Score:4, Insightful)
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..or at the least no way to get to them since your ISP is toast.
How about they worry about protecting something that is actually important to survival, like our food and water supply instead?
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Yay, there are servers... but no people
No people? Then who's going to buy all the "apocalypse clearance sale" stuff on my client's websites??
Where are the emergency routers and cables? (Score:2)
n/t
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Right over there near the emergency Triple Play packages and emergency transfer caps.
--oh, that thing in front? That's the emergency packet shaper that EmergencyAdServer(TM) gave us.
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Re:Would it matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
You're assuming no one will be left alive and have a will to rebuild.
It is very likely that even a large-scale nuclear war will leave hundreds of millions alive which would imply there might still be enough remnants of various organizations left to pick up the pieces. In fact, if your company, non-profit organization or random government agency came out of a nuclear war slightly less destroyed than the competition, wouldn't you want to be able to hit the ground running? Fetch your important data, get your organization up and running like before? Or would you just throw your hands in the air and decide to whither away and die a slow agonizing death from starvation because obviously nuclear war means even the survivors are 100% sure the be screwed?
I'd rather try surviving, seems I'm not the only one.
(Not to mention that a lot of these datacenters are also very useful for more limited disaster scenarios).
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Let's try to get out of the 1960's FUD.
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The demand for engineers will rise. People who can assemble and repair simple (relatively) electronics and get power, heating, filtration and essentials working will be important.
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People would still be able to do both ad-hoc networks, wireless meshes, and sneakernet, and many locations would still have enough infrastructure left to provide lots of hosting for survivors.
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Uh, what? (Score:5, Informative)
In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and they pushed the clock to 23:57. A year later, the US did the same – so the clock ticked on to 23:58.
Uh, I thought the US tested their first atomic bomb in 1945? [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Uh, what? (Score:4, Informative)
A simple wikipedia lookup of the doomsday clock:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
shows how inaccurate that statement is. It wasn't a year later. It was 4 years later. And it wasn't the US testing an atomic bomb, it was the US and the Soviets testing thermonuclear devices.
When an article begins with such obvious errors I have little inclination to continue reading.
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FTA:
In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and they pushed the clock to 23:57. A year later, the US did the same – so the clock ticked on to 23:58.
Uh, I thought the US tested their first atomic bomb in 1945? [wikipedia.org]
When you RTFA, try READING it: "Since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has used the face of this fictional clock to plot our race towards destruction. In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and they pushed the clock to 23:57. Four years later, the US and Soviets both tested thermonuclear weapons and so the clock ticked on to 23:58." Hint: the keyword is "thermonuclear", *NOT* "atomic".
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Regardless, the editor of the article has since admitted the mistake and corrected it (see the comment
And... (Score:2)
Can we have one? (Score:1)
To protect us from the government and the entertainment industry?
Time (Score:2)
This service will require an accurate measure of time, I think they should each have one of these.
http://longnow.org/clock/ [longnow.org]
I didn't read the article, but more than three nodes would suffice, along with other measurements of time.
Isn't this bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
if the data centers are in secured bunkers, then skynet will have safe havens to hide in when it launches the judgement day.
We should post the locations of these bunkers so we can make sure they are sabotaged so Skynet won't have any place to hide.
Not really nuclear war proof (Score:3)
The reason places like this are now used for data centres is probably because they were originally built to survive the force of a fission bomb, but not a hydrogen bomb.
Thus making them not safe as "nuclear" shelters. Which is probably why they were sold off in the first place. The fact that there isn't really all that much they are suitable for, except for something like a data centre, which can then be *marketed* as being "nuclear-war-proof".
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I think a lot of these places are quite safe from being in the general vicinity of a nuclear attack, they're just not safe if targeted directly with a high-yield hydrogen bomb, a "city killer" if you will. So the militaries and governments of the world aren't interested in these facilities for their original purposes (command and control and such things) since they are likely to be directly targeted in the event of a nuclear exchange. A private datacenter OTOH is unlikely to be directly targeted and can thu
Directly targeting just incase. (Score:1)
I seem to remember in the last gulf war a lot of civilians were killed when they took shelter in an old command and control bunker that the Iraqi military had vacated because it was no longer considered safe.
Unfortunately for the civilians taking shelter the bunker was still on a targeting list, either in error or just to be sure that it hadn't reverted to military use.
I would think these bunkers are likely to remain on secondary targeting lists for the same reason, but then maybe just the fact that they ar
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The fact that there isn't really all that much they are suitable for, except for something like a data centre, which can then be *marketed* as being "nuclear-war-proof".
And it would be, unless someone directly targets the data center with a nuke. And if they do, they just wasted a nuke.
Re:Not really nuclear war proof (Score:5, Funny)
Not if they took out twitter.
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The fact that there isn't really all that much they are suitable for, except for something like a data centre, which can then be *marketed* as being "nuclear-war-proof".
And it would be, unless someone directly targets the data center with a nuke. And if they do, they just wasted a nuke.
Unless the RIAA get access to nuclear weapons, of course....
Doomsday can't match the hype (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, one doesn't need to have a full blown nuclear war in order for this data to be valuable. Maybe a widespread computer worm wipes out a lot of companys' data and backups. Maybe someone EMPed North America. There are a number of scenarios far short of the end of humanity where most electronics could end up being useless or destroyed.
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Maybe someone EMPed North America.
Even a full nuclear strike wouldn't produce enough EMP to do that, it'd probably be easier to get an asteroid out of orbit and do a dino-killer than to produce a continent-wide EMP blast.
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Even a full nuclear strike wouldn't produce enough EMP to do that, it'd probably be easier to get an asteroid out of orbit and do a dino-killer than to produce a continent-wide EMP blast.
A large nuke several hundred kilometers up would do the trick.
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No it wouldn't the EMP of nuclear warheads isn't much greater than the blast area.
Re:Doomsday can't match the hype (Score:4, Informative)
No it wouldn't the EMP of nuclear warheads isn't much greater than the blast area.
That is incorrect. The US conducted a large high altitude detonation, Starfish Prime [wikipedia.org] a 1.4 megaton blast which caused notable electrical problems 1500 km away in Hawaii.
The relatively small magnitude of the Starfish Prime EMP in Hawaii (about 5600 volts/metre) and the relatively small amount of damage done (for example, only 1 to 3 percent of streetlights extinguished)[10] led some scientists to believe, in the early days of EMP research, that the problem might not be as significant as was later realized. Newer calculations[9] showed that if the Starfish Prime warhead had been detonated over the northern continental United States, the magnitude of the EMP would have been much larger (22 to 30 kilovolts/metre) because of the greater strength of the Earth's magnetic field over the United States, as well as the different orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at high latitudes. These new calculations, combined with the accelerating reliance on EMP-sensitive microelectronics, heightened awareness that the EMP threat could be a very significant problem.
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The majority of US weapons from 1980 to the present are sub-megaton range, small and accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80_(nuclear_warhead) [wikipedia.org]
It ranges from 5 to 150 kiloton yield, depending on application.
W87 - an ICBM warhead is a 300-500 kt yield device
W88 is 100 to 475 kt
W78 is 335-350 kt
W76 is 100 kt
B61 goes from sub kt to 340 kt and the US has about 1200
B83 is the highest yield nuclear weapon the US deploys, its variable yield from sub kt to 1.2 MT, the US has 650
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Huh? This isn't the 1950s, khallow. The "full blown thing" involves ten thousand megaton-level bombs. The northern hemisphere wouldn't have many survivors after even the first few days, let alone long term. Long term survivors are going to be residents of southern hemisphere regions that don't get nuked - parts of Africa, South America, some islands. A powered down data center in the US midwest isn't going to be any use to them for centuries.
The situation you describe held during the 70s when nuclear arsenals were at peak size. It doesn't hold now. Wyatt Earp, who also replied to your post, describes pretty well the current state of the big nuclear arsenals. It's also worth noting that the US and the USSR even after a full blown nuclear exchange in the 70s would continue to be nuclear powers, even if they didn't have any survivors with rank higher than a submarine's captain.
Sure, it's pretty strained to think that there's going to be much th
Yes, Minister (Score:1)
Sir Humphrey: There has to be somewhere to carry on government, even if everything else stops.
Hacker: Why?
Sir Humphrey: Well, government doesn't stop just because the whole country's been destroyed! I mean, annihilation’s bad enough without anarchy to make things even worse!
Hacker: You mean you'd have a lot of rebellious cinders.
When I feel the need to be motivated into activism, I just think of nuclear bunkers.
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I've long applied the same sort of logic to the question of where to put high-grade radioactive waste. The engineering problems of managing the waste can be managed, IF and ONLY IF the politicians have incentive to continue paying an appropriate amount of attention to the problem. The only way that could possibly work is if the high-level "dump" is sited under the Palace of Wes
Are there DNS root servers in those bunkers? (Score:2)
If not how would one recreate the dns? Is it harder with dnssec?
Perhaps not surprisingly (Score:3)
a nuke will take out the data lines / power and on (Score:2)
a nuke will take out the data lines / power and on site fuel will run out.
earth quakes can crunch under ground data centers and cut under ground data lines as well braking on site power systems.
The japan earthquake knocked out the on site back power at the nuke plant.
Nuclear Proof Perhaps... (Score:2)
But is it lawyer proof?
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But is it lawyer proof?
No. Everyone knows the three species most likely to survive an all-out nuclear exchange are cockroaches, rats, and a few humans. Lawyers are covered by the first 2. You and I, on the other hand, get to draw for the short straw.
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (Score:5, Interesting)
1&1 (Score:2)
The article mentions 1&1.
It's a popular host, but that often means bad service.
Anybody have any experience with those guys?
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I use them for 2 websites, one personal and one business. Customer service over the email was good, but never had any reason to call them. So far I've been pleased, but I've had no problems to resolve.
Skynet (Score:2)
So Skynet really was in the bunker all along.
Hopefully Mostly Misinfo (Score:1)
Longevity of hardware (Score:1)
Crisis datacenters (Score:2)
The computers in the datacenters may well survive. But the power necessary to run them and keep them cool, the technicians necessary to fix them, and the tubes necessary to provide external connectivity probably won't.
And even if they all do, the distributed clients of those datacenters would all need that stuff too--hosting a web page doesn't do a lot of good if there is no one able to connect to it because they don't have the power to turn their own computer on.
Nuclear hardening datacenters is pretty us
Misleading Summary, Misleading Posts (Score:2)
I remember some other news about companies using bunkers; the usual reason is not protection against explosions but prices. If a bunker is no longer used in its primary functions, there is little else you can do with it (would you put shops in? offices? housing?). So, someone gets some state that already has tight security, backup electricity and refrigeration and, not surprisingly, he tries to use it as a datacenter.
If you have any doubt, look at the list of customer.... mainly hosting providers. If people
The Winner (Score:2)
Ah, so whoever wins the war wins the internet.
What we call the Internet today.... (Score:2)
One print page... (Score:2)
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/365875/the-emergency-internet-bunkers/print [pcpro.co.uk] (will prompt to print though).
Don't know about doomsday but earthquakes .etc.. (Score:2)
Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict.
I don't know about that but the internet has been awesome in surviving natural disasters. I'm in Japan and when the earthquake hit on Friday the phonelines where almost immediately locked up but thanks to mobile phone emails I was able to confirm the safety of friends near effected areas and thanks to the internet I was able to message my family in Australia. A
It wouldn't be a good thing (Score:1)
TFA says about the US site
it has two wells and a large enough water-storage facility to keep running water for a fortnight in the unlikely event they should both run dry.
lulz. First off, a fortnight is nothing if the w
Humanity's Last Act (Score:2)
What a comfort. In case of an extinction level event, we can be assured that the final act of the last human survivor will be to check Slashdot for updates.
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What a comfort. In case of an extinction level event, we can be assured that the final act of the last human survivor will be to check Slashdot for updates.
They could get the first and last post at the same time!
History (Score:1)
Those who do not remember the Goatse are destined to repeat it.