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
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?
https://www.quora.com/Salt-Concrete-Does-adding-salt-to-concrete-make-it-1-4-x-stronger Imma leave that here.
Salt does bad things to concrete but you’d need more than that.
I think the idea is to put salt in their cooling water intake and hope it corrodes something important?
Ah okay but at that point you could do something more destructive. Strange meme
During WW2, guards in the New York City subway system had a standing order to shoot on site anyone who came down a certain elevator holding a bucket of sand.
The subway is powered by DC rather than AC electricity. Today solid-state converters are used. But back then, the only option was direct mechanical conversion. Literally a giant AC motor connected to a DC generator. An AC motor was powered by the grid, and its drive shaft was joined to the shaft of a DC generator, which energized the lines of the subway.
But it represented a single point of failure. This one crucial machine was powering the whole subway system. And all it would take is one person throwing a single bucket of sand into the contraption to cause the whole NYC subway system to grind to a halt. Oh, and NYC was the primary port city for American troops and supplies going back and forth to Europe.
I don’t think it’d even work. I wouldn’t be surprised if their cooling water is distilled in the process, so the salt would just get filtered out.
On boats we literally use sea water to cool things and distill it on the ship. Data centers can surely do the same thing
You underestimate how much billionaires cut costs. Water distillation? That could be 1 more gpu.
There are some exploding rockets that can show you examples.
Not a bad point
Something like capsules of sodium that will only break once in the system would be much more expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
only works if it ain’t finished yet tho
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
In school, we used a magnesium fuse in a puddle of glycerin.
I was thinking model rocket engine igniters would do the trick.
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!
$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
This is just like the Romans.
Salting the earth so that data centers cannot grow.
Good thinking.
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
Then propel it to near light speed and have it impact the data center?
Take it easy, bro. We’re just trying to destroy a datacenter, not wipe out the entire western hemisphere.
By the time we do that to all of the data centers, we’re gonna look like the moon.
Now we just need near infinite energy.
you know what else needs infinite energy? that’s right, datacentres
salt helps with rusting
That sounds like dealing with despots by waiting for them to die of old age.
Salt bad for water cooling components? Idk
The trick is replacing the salt in the bucket with plastic explosive.
The real solutions are always in the comments smh
Carthage moment
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.
They wrote on a phone while browsing a social network…
social networks aren’t nearly as voracious as AI, especially if they’re decentralized like Lemmy
Read my other reply
Is it though?
I know ai is bad and on another level of resource usage. But I can’t help but think it’s a bit one-sided and self protecting to ignore that we as people in this earth have been behaving the same way since the industrialization (and before that, but we didn’t have the capacity to have an impact on the earth).
We consume and consume more because we are used to it and somehow think we are entitled to these resources that are there.
Now it affects the prices for consumer hardware and that is somehow personal. I am convinced if that weren’t the case the ai outrage would be very small and mostly about fringe ethical issues.
Yes we participate in society and yes its basically impossible to avoid data center usage and yes ai data centers are worse. But where is the line of demarcation that separates right from wrong?
There is no right life in the wrong one.
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
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
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!
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.
Halon.
Still fucks up operations significantly.
… also works as a neat distraction.
Physical PenTesting can be fun!
