OnPoint: BTW, the NZ Police can use PRISM against you now
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
[NSA’s] new data centre in Utah is estimated by William Binney (ex-NSA operative turned whistleblower) to store 5 zettabytes
A figure which is now believed to be over-blown by many orders of magnitude. People who actually know servers and infrastructure are saying the figure is exabytes, definitely, but certainly not zettabytes.
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Colin Fleming, in reply to
Interesting, I hadn't seen that, thanks. I think that it's likely that the NSA has a much higher data density than private organisations - Google, for example, has much more efficient data centres than most private organisations because they design everything themselves, and it's reasonable to assume that the NSA does the same, but you're right, you wouldn't get four to six orders of magnitude there. Reading around a bit it seems like the yottabyte figure which was bandied around at the beginning was probably total signal data to be processed, not stored.
It's still pretty clearly their end objective though, even if technically they can't do it right now. The operational life of a centre like this is probably 30 years, and it's reasonable to assume that 64TB drives will be commonplace in, say, 10 years. The amount of information they're interested in storing (human to human communication, basically) is also probably a pretty small percentage of all internet traffic.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I think that it’s likely that the NSA has a much higher data density than private organisations – Google, for example, has much more efficient data centres than most private organisations because they design everything themselves, and it’s reasonable to assume that the NSA does the same, but you’re right, you wouldn’t get four to six orders of magnitude there. Reading around a bit it seems like the yottabyte figure which was bandied around at the beginning was probably total signal data to be processed, not stored.
The NSA is still bound by basic laws of physics around heat production and cooling capability, no matter what they do, so reasonable deductions can be made by looking at how much cooling capacity they're providing. They're not known for producing breakthroughs in storage tech, either, so civilian knowledge remains applicable to their environment.
A yottabyte is 1,000 zettabytes, so a ludicrously large volume. The entirety of internet history is only estimated to be a zettabyte, and the annual internet data flow is still easily measured in exabytes. There's no way the Utah DC is being constructed to process something like six orders of magnitude more electronic data than is currently produced by the online world. -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Pulsing, pulsing, electwrongs...
There’s no way the Utah DC is being constructed to process something like six orders of magnitude more electronic data than is currently produced by the online world.
Chokers!
No sense of ambition, obviously!
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Chokers!
No sense of ambition, obviously!Oh, I have no doubt they're that ambitious, there are just minor physical laws which come into play.
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BenWilson, in reply to
The NSA is still bound by basic laws of physics around heat production and cooling capability, no matter what they do, so reasonable deductions can be made by looking at how much cooling capacity they’re providing.
Do we know this figure? Also, I'm not sure you can deduce storage capacity from energy usage. Energy is needed for processing, not storage. A disk sitting idle, full of data, is using no energy. The limit is dictated by cost and space, rather than energy availability.
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To clarify what I'm saying there, estimates of how much energy is needed would require us to know how frequently the data is accessed, and how fast the access would need to be. So it really depends how it is used, and the NSA may be using it completely differently to Google. You could quite feasibly do clever processing that indexes the data as it is stored so that 99.9% of it sits in a powered down state almost all the time, and is only pulled out when some algorithm's triggers decide to look deeper. Considering that they are storing stuff for the purposes of code cracking most of the time, this strikes me as being a likely usage - the data is of no use, it's just stored for completeness for cracking at a later date. It can't be searched, because it's encrypted.
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However, all that said, even in the most compact storage form we can currently get, a yottabyte of data takes as much volume as the Pyramid of Cheops. It's staggeringly large and strikes me as unlikely too.
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Another constraint is the annual worldwide harddrive production. It’s roughly 500 million units. Give them each 1TB, that’s only half a zettabyte total.
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Just to be clear, a yottabyte was only bandied around at the very beginning of the reporting on all this, Binney's estimate was 5 zettabytes (2-3 orders of magnitude less). 5 zettabytes still doesn't seem to be practical at the moment but may be within, say, a decade or two.
All this is mostly a distraction from Keith's original article though, and one thing is pretty clear - the NSA is about to get a truckload of storage, no legal restrictions on recording anything that NZers do online and the GCSB has at least some level of access to the data.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Indeed, even if they're only keeping a few gigabytes of data on me, that's a few gigabytes too many.
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Tor usage doubles!!
This week on the Tor e-mail list, Roger Dingledine, the project leader for the well-known online anonymity tool, pointed out that the “number of Tor clients running appears to have doubled since August 19.”
Wasn't Keith's first post on this, roundabout August 19ish.
Now we have an idea of how many lurkers there are on PAS!
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The Washington Post reports that the NSA "breaks into foreign networks so that they can be put under surreptitious U.S. control." and that they "has placed 'covert implants, sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions.".
My goodness, that sounds just like the sort of thing that the PM claims the GCSB were created to prevent .... I wonder how they are doing ..... or maybe they're quietly helping do it here ....
Maybe the big fuss about Huawei equipment is not that they are Chinese made, but that they are too good and can't be broken in to, and can't be persuaded to add secret back doors, I can see why that might piss off our secret powers that be
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Basically, we need to move to open source based router and infrastructure platforms that can be independently analysed for malware and trapdoors.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Maybe the big fuss about Huawei equipment is not that they are Chinese made, but that they are too good and can’t be broken in to, and can’t be persuaded to add secret back doors, I can see why that might piss off our secret powers that be
Possibly, but let's not forget that it's not only the Americans that are keen on cyber spying. Ghostnet was only uncovered four years ago.
Its command and control infrastructure is based mainly in the People's Republic of China and has infiltrated high-value political, economic and media locations[3] in 103 countries. Computer systems belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, and the Dalai Lama's Tibetan exile centers in India, London and New York City were compromised.
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yeah so we have two choices, hardware with NSA spook backdoors and hardware with Chinese spook backdoors Rich is right we need open source hardware all the way.
Now how do I choose an ISP who publishes their router source? an international fibre provider who does the same?
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If Singapore is "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" according to William Gibson, then NZ risks turning into Rainbow's End with Roving Spheres.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
anything could happen...
...a yottabyte of data takes as much volume as the Pyramid of Cheops. It’s staggeringly large and strikes me as unlikely too.
Who knows, we may be folding information like proteins or tensegrity structures soon... or some kinda dark data dump device...
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Greville Whittle, in reply to
Maybe Napier, with it's art deco buildings, can double for Portmeirion?
Be seeing you... -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Save the Wales...
Maybe Napier, with it’s art deco buildings,
can double for Portmeirion?and maybe it could retain a Welsh connection
by renaming it, er, Jonestown... -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
yeah so we have two choices, hardware
with NSA spook backdoors and hardware
with Chinese spook backdoorsAnd let's not forget the Israeli contributions to the field...
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nzlemming, in reply to
and maybe it could retain a Welsh connection
by renaming it, er, Jonestown…As long as there's no Kool-aid...
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Paul Campbell, in reply to
And let's not forget the Israeli contributions to the field...
err, well yeah - Israeli designed crypto is sitting in your Sky TV box and possibly your household wireless phones too - NDS (now owned by newscorp) has a particularly shady past
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
Unless we can get a lot more clarity on the relationship between the GCSB and the NSA/GCHQ and on the legal restrictions on data obtained from them, John Key’s assertions are basically meaningless. What’s interesting is that, like tax law, purely national laws are becoming increasingly irrelevant as technology advances, and the law is clearly incapable of keeping up with the new surveillance techniques.
That is my take too. When I heard JK waffling on about Norton Anti virus I knew he was talking shit, whether he knew it or not.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Who knows, we may be folding information like proteins or tensegrity structures soon… or some kinda dark data dump device…
:- )Well it'll be half the Cheops pyramid next year, a quarter the following, and in about 40 years I'll have a whole bunch of camera sticks that size that I'll consider totally worthless because I can only store the entire internet from, like, 2020, on it, and the transfer rate of 20 exabytes per second will be too annoying to use. I may have paid off the mortgage on my 1/4 acre and 1970s assortment of sticks and jib, too, which will be worth approximately 50 million dollars.
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