XfavataX
Roko's ObeliskThey're threatening us with a good time again
Steven Reed
Fugue State Machine@srtcd424 @pikesley “[D]rone attacks on multinational cloud infrastructure are indeed new and the sort of thing that is almost certainly going to become more common, particularly as domestic tech industries and militaries continue to fuse together into terrifying killing blobs.”
Love this for them. Sow::Reap
LevkaShahid's secret sauce is they're cheap and easy to produce. Production can be widely dispersed.
The R&D phase is over. All that's left for their creative types to do is improvise tactics. It's not like drone warfare itself is anything new. It's Tesla era tech. Tesla himself invented it.
Shahids look like they'd be ab easy-peasy build for any competent model airplane enthusiast. They're just big model airplanes that have been weaponized, thats all. The design is adaptable to small scale DIY workshops.
That's scary.
Once the expertise gets around we'll start seeing non-state actors using them. Then we'll see that mercenaries are advertising drone "services" online and taking their payoffs in crypto.
Drone war is already out of hand. Think it can't get worse? Think again. Imagine these things in the hands of grassroots neo-Nazi paramilitaries. Skills, like knowledge itself, are hard to contain. It'll spread, by "each one teach one" if nothing else, but the internet is quicker. Ideas spread like wildfire here.
Sooner or later, drone war will be beyond control. Already there are ghost guns. How long before there are ghost drones with 3D printed avionics to guide them? How long before we see them fly where we live? What will we do then? What can we be doing right now to impede the impending rogue drone timeline from playing out to its full potential?
(1.) It isn't "always". Don't put words in my mouth. It's rude. It's dishonest. It's very bad form.
(2.) “Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.” -- Rebecca Solnit, *A Field Guide to Getting Lost*
(3.) I already explained my personal beef with the Nazis:
https://kolektiva.social/@cmdrmoto@hachyderm.io/116192389856430814
(. . .)
Why should I personally worry? Among other things, I'm what Nazis call a "race traitor". My wife of 41 years is a Jew. At least 3,459 self-professed neo-Nazis live and vote within an hour's drive of where the two of us live. 841 of them live within walking distance. They say they want to kill us both. They have a track record. To feel even remotely safe we keep a scatter gun next to the bed. I can reach it from my desk chair, too. And that's just the scatter gun. We have some other surprises in wait for them, too, several of them. No way we will disarm ourselves. Ever. It's not going to happen. Save your breath.
In a recent GOP primary, neo-Nazi Patrick Little, campaigning on a platform of Holocaust denial and ethnic cleansing, got 1,369 votes in Alameda County, 841 in SF and 1,249 in Contra Costa. That's a lot of neo-Nazis in what most of the country considers a hotbed of leftism. And that's just the ones who voted.
It's safe to assume that each of them owns at least one firearm. No fascist is unarmed. This is a lot like having a fascist army camped over the next hill. In a very real sense, it *is* having a fascist army camped over the next hill.
As avid history buffs my wife and I know exactly what happens when a fascist army is within striking distance and nobody does anything about it. For the historically ignorant folks out there who are reading this, let's just say it's not pretty. You can look up the details if you want. They're not hard to find.
Start here:
https://
kolektiva.social/@LevZadov/110626253199684709
It only takes one racist fanatic to shoot up a synagogue, a mosque, a grocery store, a shopping mall, or anywhere really. Or anyone. It happens sometimes, and not just in so-called "America". It happens again and again. Once was too many. Neither my wife nor I intend to let it happen to us, not without a fight. If you have a problem with us staying alive, please be polite and keep it to yourselves.
The last thing that we, or any sane people, want is a shooting war here. Yeah, it might bring down tyranny but only by creating something far, far worse.
But there's no need for violence to bring down tyranny. Instead, we need a #GeneralStrike.
"If the workers are organized, all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped." -- Big Bill Haywood
(. . .)
Walrus 🏴
sͧb̴ͫƸ̴gͬᵉ@pikesley We're getting the kinetic strikes on cyberspace we were promised in Islands In The Net (Sterling -88) and Hardwired (Williams -86). Neat.
Beldarak
MxFraud@pikesley do you have the source material or a link to it to share?
edit: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8TV6Y
(is first link, but this reply didn't pull on my server)
Purple 
Honestly inappropriate joke considering how reliant a functional society is on internet connectivity.
Maybe think before you post, the war stresses people out enough already, worrying that they can't reach their loved ones anymore is not a "good time"
@Purple thanks for your humourless input, random internet stranger
Kid Mania@Purple @pikesley
So...governments around the world are installing fascism to continue to do capitalism on a boiling planet, many are using AI tech in warfare (with devastating and horrifying consequences) and these wars are being started by the worst people on the planet...
But sure, let's blame the OP for posting a bit of dark humor.
🤦♂️ ffs
Hi! I know it might be difficult to understand what a datacenter actually hosts, but this is not just AI, they've been existing much longer!
Odds are, almost anything you do on the internet nowadays (yes really) requires something that's in a datacenter somewhere. No datacenters, no internet, that sucks!
War sucks in general, joking about loss of telecommunications or other war related casualties sucks
@Purple @clintruin thanks for explaining this, I've only been a professional sysadmin for 25 years
ItsDoctorNotMrs 🇨🇦Yeah, having no Internet is not a threat.
@northernlights @Purple @clintruin @pikesley
We could always go back to dial-up BBSes and FIDONET.
AmbientDreadI question whether a functional society would elect the leaders we have today.
Kapitän ClownfeuerWith respect, your idea of “functional” in the context of what we do with this tech is in dire need of reevaluation.
Patrick Morris Miller
HierarchyBut the money will flow to harden them post haste.
Glen T, heated, not stirred@Hierarchy @pikesley If the cooling is hit then the machines can't run. Underground does not help much.
Zimmie@glent @Hierarchy @pikesley Geothermal wells can sink ridiculous amounts of heat. Space is at a much greater premium. Carving a chunk out of the interior of a mountain is difficult.
Power feeds and network links are probably easier targets.
lafnlab@Hierarchy @pikesley I work for a university in the Midwest US and around 15 years ago it built a datacenter capable of withstanding an F5 tornado. I think it's partly underground. This was back when "cloud computing" was the buzzword of choice.
@Hierarchy @lafnlab @pikesley Not sure about documentaries, but there are plenty of datacenters which are resistant to natural disasters. Fewer which could withstand acts of war.
Iron Mountain famously has a storage facility in an old limestone quarry in Boyers, PA. It’s notably *not* a datacenter, in large part because getting the required power there would be difficult.
@Hierarchy @lafnlab @pikesley You’re thinking the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen. That facility is only 1000 square meters, and it’s in a sandstone mountain. Limited power. It’s underground mostly for cooling reasons.
@Hierarchy @pikesley No documentaries I know of, but some news articles. This one is probably most detailed:
https://www.csemag.com/data-center-epitomizes-mission-critical/
https://www.csemag.com/data-center-epitomizes-mission-critical/
Data center epitomizes ‘mission critical’ - Consulting - Specifying Engineer
The Indiana University Data Center in Bloomington features Tier III, N+1 redundancy, cost-saving flywheel UPS technology, and switchgear with full bypass capability to help ensure power reliability.
funbaker; Je suis Antifa@pikesley Hyper - Spoiler.mp3
Guillotine Jones, Flâneur@pikesley
I, for one, look forward to this future of which you speak, Home.
I, for one, look forward to this future of which you speak, Home.
sleepfreeparent@pikesley "tiny, cheap drones in the sky disabling massive, critical data centers on the ground" uhh... guys... this is inherently asymmetrical warfare - we don't need to leave it to the nation states. The obvious sequel to "How to blow up a pipeline" is now "How to disable an AI datacenter." Especially since they're using all our water for their evaporative cooling on the rooftop - disable the cooling and the whole thing either shuts down or burns up
Neil Moffatt@sleepfreeparent @pikesley If you want to strike for maximum effect then a chip fabrication building would be perfect. -they cost in excess of a billion dollars and the planet depends on chips made by these buildings.
Point here is that insane levels of reliance of ultra complex chips that only a few places and businesses can manufacture is super precarious.
@NicelyManifest @sleepfreeparent that's the next stage, when China siezes Taiwan
@pikesley @sleepfreeparent Trump has ignited a firecracker across many nations. A domino effect is now in place.
@NicelyManifest @pikesley my point was just that the facilities slurping up water from those already suffering water shortage, while also being used to build a fascist surveillance state, are highly vulnerable to community uprising
@sleepfreeparent Very much so. The callous indifference to people needs when feeding the insatiable AI beast is scandalous.
60sRefugee@NicelyManifest @sleepfreeparent @pikesley TOO few, that's the problem: chip manufacture (and even more critically the literally unique facilities for creating the chip manufacturing machines) are essentially a global resource. Destroy them and you take away the capacity of the entire planet to create advanced chips. Something a techno-terrorist neoLuddite might aspire to do, but no partisan cause could benefit by it.
@60sRefugee @sleepfreeparent @pikesley Yup. Deeply precarious. And, so far, very surprising that virtual monopolies in chip manufacture has not sent prices skyrocketing.
Yet.
@NicelyManifest @sleepfreeparent @pikesley Chips could always have been expensive specialty items for niche applications like military or space. But the manufacturers knew that if they could mass produce them economically that they would more than make up on volume. Cheap chips created their own markets.
Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen@sleepfreeparent @pikesley I'm thinking... what's the most compact and low-tech way to generate an EMP?
R Tyler Croy 🦀@pikesley "you promise?"
quangobaud
gunstick
MisterMultiverse@pikesley everyone, it is not that hard to quit using billionaire social and news media. Do it now, sooner than later! Help convince others to be part of the solution too!
Angua 
🎵 E.M.P. Easy as 1,2,3 🎵
mtc_uk
UpLateGeek@pikesley they’ll be doing the world a favour, some of the horrific cabling work I’ve seen over the years.
CM Thiede@pikesley Port Washington's Mayor, here in Wisconsin, isn't worried: “I don’t worry about the safety or security of the city of Port Washington, because Data Centers, they get hit internally (their computers) not externally.“
https://cmthiede.vivaldi.net/2025/12/21/popular-programming/
Zuthal
Viral Obscurity@pikesley I'm unsurprisingly comfortable with the loss of a few data centres in the name of war
I'd accept 1,000 data centre losses over 1 school or hospital any day of the week
cognitively accessible math@pikesley Let's be creative with the bombing, too. Let's find where ... honey or something would do a ton of "harm" in a biodegradable way.
Simon Zerafa (Status: 
😊)I was wondering when someone would start suggesting that data centers have anti missile and anti drone point defence 🙄🤷♂️
Maki 🔻 🌹
Dr. Seltsam 🌎🎶🌳@pikesley I thought exactly this, let them continue with their ai data center shit.