The Emergency Internet Bunkers

Barence writes "Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict. If it could, then a handful of datacenters dotted around the world would likely be all that remains of the multi-billion-dollar hosting industry. These secretive, high-security sites, tunneled out of mountains or housed behind the blast-proof doors of one-time NATO bunkers, are home to the planet's most secure hosting providers. This article profiles the emergency internet bunkers."

Comments

Mars

[mfh]

We should ship humanity's data to Mars for safe-keeping and just in case Mars was ever destroyed, we could backup in a randomly attuned dimension.

Uh, what?

[ChinggisK]

FTA:

In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and they pushed the clock to 23:57. A year later, the US did the same – so the clock ticked on to 23:58.

Uh, I thought the US tested their first atomic bomb in 1945?

Re:Uh, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple wikipedia lookup of the doomsday clock:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

shows how inaccurate that statement is. It wasn't a year later. It was 4 years later. And it wasn't the US testing an atomic bomb, it was the US and the Soviets testing thermonuclear devices.

When an article begins with such obvious errors I have little inclination to continue reading.

Re:Would it matter?

[mikael_j]

You're assuming no one will be left alive and have a will to rebuild.

It is very likely that even a large-scale nuclear war will leave hundreds of millions alive which would imply there might still be enough remnants of various organizations left to pick up the pieces. In fact, if your company, non-profit organization or random government agency came out of a nuclear war slightly less destroyed than the competition, wouldn't you want to be able to hit the ground running? Fetch your important data, get your organization up and running like before? Or would you just throw your hands in the air and decide to whither away and die a slow agonizing death from starvation because obviously nuclear war means even the survivors are 100% sure the be screwed?

I'd rather try surviving, seems I'm not the only one.

(Not to mention that a lot of these datacenters are also very useful for more limited disaster scenarios).

Isn't this bad?

[peragrin]

if the data centers are in secured bunkers, then skynet will have safe havens to hide in when it launches the judgement day.

We should post the locations of these bunkers so we can make sure they are sabotaged so Skynet won't have any place to hide.

The internet already *is* breaking

[h00manist]

Indeed, a more realistic and urgent problem to plan for is the current one - DOS, censorship, monitoring and espionage use by various parties for various reasons. Arab countries, China, ACTA, etc come to mind.

Not really nuclear war proof

[mickwd]

The reason places like this are now used for data centres is probably because they were originally built to survive the force of a fission bomb, but not a hydrogen bomb.

Thus making them not safe as "nuclear" shelters. Which is probably why they were sold off in the first place. The fact that there isn't really all that much they are suitable for, except for something like a data centre, which can then be *marketed* as being "nuclear-war-proof".

Re:Not really nuclear war proof

[mickwd]

Not if they took out twitter.

Doomsday can't match the hype

[khallow]

I see a lot of nonsensical doomsday posts out there. Even if we have the full blown thing with everyone cutting loose with all the nukes they have and a couple of bad years due to fallout and nuclear winter, there's still be a lot of survivors, including the very countries that were involved in the nuclear war. It makes sense to talk about data surviving such things, because humanity and some sort of society would survive.

Second, one doesn't need to have a full blown nuclear war in order for this data to be valuable. Maybe a widespread computer worm wipes out a lot of companys' data and backups. Maybe someone EMPed North America. There are a number of scenarios far short of the end of humanity where most electronics could end up being useless or destroyed.

Re:Doomsday can't match the hype

[khallow]

Even a full nuclear strike wouldn't produce enough EMP to do that, it'd probably be easier to get an asteroid out of orbit and do a dino-killer than to produce a continent-wide EMP blast.

A large nuke several hundred kilometers up would do the trick.

Re:Doomsday can't match the hype

[khallow]

No it wouldn't the EMP of nuclear warheads isn't much greater than the blast area.

That is incorrect. The US conducted a large high altitude detonation, Starfish Prime a 1.4 megaton blast which caused notable electrical problems 1500 km away in Hawaii.

The relatively small magnitude of the Starfish Prime EMP in Hawaii (about 5600 volts/metre) and the relatively small amount of damage done (for example, only 1 to 3 percent of streetlights extinguished)[10] led some scientists to believe, in the early days of EMP research, that the problem might not be as significant as was later realized. Newer calculations[9] showed that if the Starfish Prime warhead had been detonated over the northern continental United States, the magnitude of the EMP would have been much larger (22 to 30 kilovolts/metre) because of the greater strength of the Earth's magnetic field over the United States, as well as the different orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at high latitudes. These new calculations, combined with the accelerating reliance on EMP-sensitive microelectronics, heightened awareness that the EMP threat could be a very significant problem.

Perhaps not surprisingly

[arcite]

an entire decommissioned iron mine in an undisclosed location in northern Canada is devoted to MILF porn.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

[Dynamoo]

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.