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German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

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Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#41

Post by sesqu »

aaron695 wrote: post #11
_stephan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the technical difficulty of actually using the excess heat for reliably and consistently heating a building, it's hard to believe that the economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly located all over the landscape could work out.

> that the economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly located all over the landscape I kinda thought the same. But assuming it can be properly encrypted (hard) what's the difference to swapping in a new server compared to swapping in a new gas bottle? User pays for the initial infrastructure. Pull the old one out, pop the new one in, 60 seconds, any blue collar worker can do it, if it's setup prop…

They say they do a maintenance check once a year, and replace the server every 3-5 years. Half an hour or so, at the company's expense.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#43

Post by Xylakant »

valarauca1 wrote: post #38
justinsb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than cracking the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, I think they're probably cracked the problem of deleting the keys when the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.

This doesn't solve the problem. Unless the cabinet is air tight, and uses a pressure sensor to detect itself being opened. It's "Is the cabinet open?" subroutine can be defeated by simply opening the cabinet where a sensor isn't located. Basically cut the sucker open on the side. :.:.: Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you…

A possible approach would be: keep the data encrypted, just decrypt it at the endpoint. Tarsnap for example does that. Or keep the keys on servers that are acting as proxies and decrypt the data. Or actually loose all data on door opening. Just drop it and use a replication like backblaze and S3 use. A harddrive lost? Allocate a shard somewhere else. A unit looses enough harddrives to require service? Just pull it, trash it, plug in a new one.

Given that the units are spread out further than servers in a datacenter, you probably want that anyways. Your service teams don't want coordinate access to the device, drive there and the homeowner does not show up for something as mundane as an HDD swap.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#44

Post by justinsb »

valarauca1 wrote: post #38
justinsb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than cracking the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, I think they're probably cracked the problem of deleting the keys when the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.

This doesn't solve the problem. Unless the cabinet is air tight, and uses a pressure sensor to detect itself being opened. It's "Is the cabinet open?" subroutine can be defeated by simply opening the cabinet where a sensor isn't located. Basically cut the sucker open on the side. :.:.: Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you…

I think your suggestion of using a pressure sensor is a great mechanism. Then, as you say, you need to be able to restore the keys (stored offsite) so you can do maintenance.

This is an engineering problem: how secure do you want to be; how many mechanisms do you need to achieve that; does this come in under the cost budget. Your pressure-sensor solution alone is probably good enough for a large number of applications already.

But this is not a research problem: we don't have to solve homomorphic encryption!

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#45

Post by Xylakant »

justinsb wrote: post #32

I think distributed backup (of encrypted files) could be a great use case. But (like the CDN case mentioned elsewhere) this is also more demanding of bandwidth than CPU, which isn't really what you want here if your goal is to produce heat. Distributed rendering of video content could maybe be a good use case - moderate bandwidth requirements, heavy CPU/GPU utilization, data not overly sensitive.

Distributed backup is actually a good case. It's usually bandwith taxing in terms of upload speed and most internet connections in Germany are asymmetric in favor of download speed (which would be the right direction if the server is in your home). My connection has 50MBit/sec download and only 8 Mbit/sec upload.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#46

Post by cfstras »

Tepix wrote: post #23

You need to pay 12,000€ up front for 15 years of heating. Unless they go bankrupt of course...

The question would be what the safeties are you get for the 12K. If the cabinet is, you wouldn't have to fear a lot of damages from a bankrupt.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#47

Post by nhaehnle »

reduce wrote: post #27
k__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not possible here in germany. Even if they want to "raid" my flat-mate, they can't go to my rooms while doing it.

Very interesting. I bet that will be a big selling point for people considering this hosting service. Seems that it will be harder to put pressure on hundreds of individual residents, than it is to do so to a big centralized datacenter provider company.

Realistically speaking, I suspect that if this does take off (and it is a very cool idea), they won't actually install those things in living rooms due to noise concerns. Those racks are going to be in the basement where the other heating equipment typically is.

So police are going to get a warrant that is limited to the basement room containing the racks. the home owners will be slightly annoyed and inconvenienced, but they aren't going to put up a fight against the warrant. They'll be more than happy to cooperate with the police.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#48

Post by ntaso »

Munich - In the night of Saturday to Sunday, a special unit of the police raided the home of retired gardener Heinz S. to seize several cloud computers. Heinz S. allegedly participated as a volunteer to hide Piratecloud servers in Germany.

"I just wanted some heat from the thing, I don’t even know what it really is", is the unlikely claim of Heinz S., who turned 76 this year.

On Tuesday, he has to state his case in court, together with 22 other people who surprisingly tell a very similar story.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#49

Post by DanBC »

smoyer wrote: post #18
DanBC wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the servers do heavy data processing when no one needs the heat, the system stores hot water in a “buffering tank.” And the Cloud&Heat cabinets can also vent outside in the spring and summer.

There's a limit to that buffering ... and if they can vent outside in the Spring and Summer, wouldn't that be even more efficient in the Winter?

I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful.

This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or dumps it.

Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a version of that.

I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.

Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

#50

Post by owenmarshall »

Xylakant wrote: post #40
vertex-four wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd need to immediately shut down their server as well (as in immediately , as in crash), and even that's not necessarily enough to remove data from RAM before attackers can get to it.

The threat scenario is a bit far fetched. First you'd need to find out where an individual, interesting piece of data is stored. Then you have to break into this building, break open the cabinet and freeze the RAM fast enough to preserve the memory content. That's obviously something that can be done, but it requires a lot of dedication to pull of, so that's something you'd only do in case where you know the data is…

Or freeze the entire cabinet in situ and pick through the RAM at your leisure.

But yeah, you're right - this isn't gonna happen. I'd worry more about a home below floodplain taking on water.

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