The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 1029 points –
techdirt.com

Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…

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Looks like you’re the type the writer talks about at the end:

There’s something to be said for pushing back on needless rules and bureaucracy, but it helps if you actually understand stuff before doing so, rather than doing something like this that had half a dozen ways it could have ended in serious disaster and possible tragedy. The fact that it “only” resulted in Twitter falling over every few weeks for months likely means that Musk and his supporters got the very wrong lesson out of this.

What risks, exactly? Twitter goes down? Proprietary Twitter data gets stolen in some server heist scenario?

Millions of people's personal data gets leaked, Musk's cowboy "pry open the floor and electrical panels with a knife" electrocutes him, or blows the power for the room/floor/building or starts a fire.

Musk’s cowboy “pry open the floor and electrical panels with a knife” electrocutes him

That one is a risk I'm willing to take. I had to stop reading the article for a moment to marvel at just how close we really were.

Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m clearly not a software engineer though lol

The servers were not actually secured in the truck properly, so another scenario would have been the damage and destruction of some or all of them.

Plus, yes, theft. And it's not just proprietary data, it was also personal and financial data for users and advertisers.

I imagine thousands of pounds of unsecured load would be potentially dangerous for the driver and all other drivers on the road too.