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Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
    tapes hurtling down the highway.

—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. p. 57.

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In the same vein, a South African carrier pigeon was faster than a popular ADSL solution in 2009. It carried a 4GB memory stick 60 miles in about an hour. It took them another hour to upload the data to their system. The ADSL solution only completed 4% of the transfer, in the same amount of time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

It was an obvious publicity stunt trying to bring attention to the slow connection speeds but it does illustrate this issue well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

It's even an official RFC:

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

Never underestimate the street value either. I wonder if they have an armed escort for this truck -- the hardware must cost on the order of 10-20 million, and the data itself could be worth many multiples of that. Could make a great heist movie.

I wonder if Amazon pays for the re-do if the truck ends up in a spectacular accident.

Can't one simply mirror a Snowmobile to a second Snowmobile prior to transport?

we use RAIT 50 in prod

Redundant Array of Independent Trucks?

I would assume this is where insurance becomes involved in the matter on one side of the other.

The hardware might be expensive but the data (if there's value to it) would likely be encrypted.

I'm sure you're correct, but encryption has never stopped movie villains. Kidnapping and coercion is usually the plot device used

Well, I'd say it's 50/50 kidnapping and coercion vs a hacker spending an hour breaking in to the systems.

An hour and a half if it's double encrypted.

The Snowmobile product page covers this:

"Snowmobile is protected by 24/7 video surveillance and alarm monitoring, GPS tracking and may optionally be escorted by a security vehicle while in transit."

> Could make a great heist movie.

Actually 'in the movie' the plot line comes at the end when you find out that the government is behind the heist in order to get hold of a large amount of end user data that they need for surveillance purposes.

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