I wish I could sign up for this. I still use dial up. Is that going to be a problem?
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
#32I 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.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#33You need to pay 12,000€ up front for 15 years of heating. Unless they go bankrupt of course...
Well that's a non-starter.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#34Earlier 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.
Maybe they're hoping that their biggest customers will be office buildings that have space to spare. Each building could house a fair number of servers.
That could make sense, especially if those office buildings have backup generators. As it is, I've lived in a nice neighborhood that every winter had at least one or two power outages lasting at least a day or two.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#35They only mention that the company pays for the internet service but I'd assume traffic/speed from a home could also be an issue. I mean the average home network connections aren't exactly amazing so what can be hosted on these servers (I doubt it's cost efficient to provide new infrastructure for every home)?
> A prerequisite for the use of Cloud&Heat is [...] an Internet connection of at least 50 Mbit/s https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html#heat-three
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Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#36> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about encryption would stop making these insane claims.
Care to elaborate about that? I don't see the security concern if the data is encrypted on disk and both ways over the network. I doubt they would just leave the private keys to hang out on the server for anyone to take.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#37> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about encryption would stop making these insane claims.
What is the attack you're envisaging? Presumably they detect unauthorized case-intrusion and immediately delete the keys. This isn't foolproof, but it's probably good enough to stop anyone except the people that are going to get the data no matter what you do.
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.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#38> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Unless they've cracked the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, that data is still going to be unencrypted at some point in those units and vulnerab…
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 can open the cabinet, and "close" the cabinet from the sensors perspective while leaving it opened.
:.:.:
Further more data loss doesn't occur on door opening, thus the keys are still recoverable, because without it would be impossible to service.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#39> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about encryption would stop making these insane claims.
There's a lot of data where that kind of security is acceptable, for example all the video content on youtube. You don't want random people to tampler with it, but it's not high security.
I wouldn't want my bank to store my account data on one of those, but I wouldn't mind if website assets were served from there.
Re: German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the attack you're envisaging? Presumably they detect unauthorized case-intrusion and immediately delete the keys. This isn't foolproof, but it's probably good enough to stop anyone except the people that are going to get the data no matter what you do.
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 valuable. It's probably easier to just get an inside job done, but you could get that at any other datacenter or even at AWS.
For a lot of data, the payoff is not worth the effort and risk, so I'd be unconcerned. Obviously, don't store bank accounts or medical data there, don't use it for the next NSA datacenter etc.