Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339

[u/DarkSkyKnight]

I think the real interesting thing is actually that data centers may now become legitimate military targets going forward. First in the Iran war, and now this.

[u/Graymarth → u/DarkSkyKnight]

Honestly this just shows how short-sighted the development of these data centers in heavily populated areas has been. Take the data centers here in the US as an example, the grok data center in Memphis was the one that told the military to blow up that girls school in Iran, now that data center in the middle of a major city is a military target that if we ever end up in a war that comes to the homefront will probably be one of the first places to get blown up alongside the innocent people having to live near the damn thing.

If they want these data centers doing work for the military they need to put them on freaking military bases or away from society period.

[u/Metalsand → u/Graymarth]

Honestly this just shows how short-sighted the development of these data centers in heavily populated areas has been. Take the data centers here in the US as an example, the grok data center in Memphis was the one that told the military to blow up that girls school in Iran, now that data center in the middle of a major city is a military target that if we ever end up in a war that comes to the homefront will probably be one of the first places to get blown up alongside the innocent people having to live near the damn thing.

I see people constantly get this wrong because they never read the actual articles. Grok is a crock of shit, but it was because of Trump's shitty administration that the mistake was made.

Picture a folder called "Iranian intelligence". No one ever actively culls the pictures inside based on time; if it's outdated intelligence, you'd catch that in a review before making a formal report. The only times you remove entries is if you update them.

The info they had on that building was 10+ years out of date in the intelligence folder, and wasn't even up to date with current intelligence assessments. Trump admin being who they were though, dumped all that info into Grok and said "give me iranian military targets" then directly forwarded that without context to military planners to tell them to specifically strike these targets, rather than ensuring verification was made of the targets. As shitty as Grok is (especially at the time, when this was it's mecha-hitler phase), US military intelligence procedure isn't exactly the bread and butter of the web scraping it will be doing...and it doesn't take a genius to consider that even beyond civilian casualties, it's probably worth the labor hours to validate targets before you launch a missile that could be $1-100 million against a target that provides no military value.

Even beyond that though - you can reasonably infer that the big failure in US intelligence that hasn't happened for decades* is probably in part due to putting morons in charge of everything. Particularly putting a jumpy grunt who feels the need to compensate in charge of secretary of defense.

* Technically speaking, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq wasn't a US intelligence failure because we learned after the fact that Cheney grossly misrepresented the data, and that our actual intelligence at the time estimated that they had some chemical weapons stockpiles, and interest in nuclear weapons but no capabilities. In turn, Cheney and GW Bush both had a soft spot about Iraq thanks to GHW Bush's pullout game, so Cheney had a very easy job getting Bush to back it.

TL;DR: Trump admin involving themselves sloppily achieves sloppy results. Grok catches strays, but fuck Grok anyways.

[u/Graymarth → u/Metalsand]

I agree with what you're saying but you're missing what I said, yes the military half hazardly dumped bad Intel into grok and didn't verify their target afterwards but it doesn't change the fact that this data center in particular that is in a major city was the one used to pick the target in the first place thereby turning that data center into a military target if we are ever attacked ourselves.

My point wasn't whether or not grok was good at picking targets or if the military had good Intel or not, my point was that using that data center to choose targets in the first place puts a big old bullseye on a population center.