25 petabytes bringing storage firm, court case to the brink of collapse | Hacker News Reader

25 petabytes bringing storage firm, court case to the brink of collapse

aceds.org

49 pointsanigbrowl35 comments

> Federal prosecutors say they should not have to sort through the files at taxpayer expense, but have objected to their erasure.

Umm, what? The prosecutors don't think they should be responsible for obtaining and examining the evidence to build their case? Who the hell else should be? It's _exactly_ what they are being paid to do!

I fully agree that they shouldn't be wasting taxpayer money on it, but only because they shouldn't be wasting it on this case in the first place. If it were a case that actually merited attention, though (say, 25 PB of child porn or snuff video), "we shouldn't have to pay to store and handle this much evidence" would be an unacceptable response. I can only hope that it's motivated by a desire to somewhat gracefully rid themselves of a toxic case.

> The prosecutors don't think they should be responsible for obtaining and examining the evidence to build their case?

Unless the whole shebang was done for political reasons just to bring Megaupload down. Then they don't actually want to look at the evidence, expect the case to lose, but the end goal of would be achieved, nevertheless.

Does a defendent have any recourse at all in such cases? If the government succeeds in shutting down a company without any finding of guilt, what's to stop them from continuing to use that strategy?

Or put another way, is the government liable to pay for the damages caused to infrastructure and reputation of Megaupload, not to mention the psychological pressure experienced by it's founder and his family? Considering all of this, we must be talking extreme amounts.

Federal prosecutors say they should not have to sort through the files at taxpayer expense, but have objected to their erasure. MegaUpload attorneys suggested hiring an e-discovery vendor to recreate samples of the data as “read-only” files, but those efforts have been rejected.

If federal prosecutors don't like the US's discoverability rules, then maybe federal prosecutors should think about trying to get the US's discoverability rules changed. There's no shame in admitting that the standard is unnecessarily broad and is part of the reason why it's so ridiculously expensive to pursue a case in the USA.

For now, though, they helped make this bed and they should have to sleep in it just like the rest of us. If not, well then I wish Carpathia the greatest of luck in pursuing their hopefully forthcoming and definitely non-frivolous lawsuit against the federal government.

Holy shit! I thought when the feds seize something... they actually take it... you know... like evidence. They just left it with the hosting company to store for them... and aren't paying them for it? What a bunch of asshats. Whether MU is guilty or not, the hosting company should not be on the hook to store the evidence. Hell, you'd think that would be enough to get the case tossed since it doesn't sound like they have a very solid chain of custody there.

And it is mystifying how they can justify not giving the data back to MegaUpload. If it is evidence for the case, it must be available to the defence right? And if it isn't evidence, then why can't they have it back?

Well, there's a distinction made between making it available to the defence, and giving it back to the defendant.

Apparently the data they have gotten around to collecting has been shared with the defence. But presumably MegaUpload is not allowed to start serving that data again.

Surely the only sensible cost of the data is the lost business (assuming they would be using all the storage for other purposes). No one can access the data, so power consumption - the main cost of big data centres - should be zero.

Have I missed something?

The hard drives might be encrypted, since the servers are on, they might be mounted un-encypted. Turning them off would loose access to the decrypted files, and hence make them inaccessible.

> It says it has spent $65,000 to transfer the servers to a climate-controlled center. It is leasing the new facility for $37,000 per month, after its contracts with a prior facility expired.

I would imagine that means they were powered down for the move.

...and powered back up after the move, again consuming power and internal network (if not external), as well as running up the MTBF counter on consumable hardware like HDDs, RAM, controller batteries, power supplies, etc.

The only reason to keep them on 24/7 is "they might encrypt on shutdown", so if they powered them off they wouldn't now need to keep them powered up.

Unless they used backup power during the move, which seems unlikely.

You make a very good point.

Not necessarily. There are setups to keep seized hardware powered up during the move. They have it for laptops so I would guess someone sells that for whole racks as well.

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/HotPlug.php

That's a lot of lost business. Tying up over a million dollars of hardware and $40k a month worth of space.

The servers aren't running, but keeping dozens of racks in a secure, climate-controlled environment isn't cheap.

Is this me, or the comma in the submission title is in a weird place? I just can't parse it. English is not my first language though.

Replace it with "and"

It's meant to be read as "25 petabytes bringing storage firm _and_ court case to the brink of collapse", I believe.

Its a common practice in American English to use a comma in place of 'and' in newspaper headlines. It is sometimes called 'the Headline Comma', and he justification seems to be to save space.

There's a Metafilter thread about it here: http://ask.metafilter.com/20720/Headline-Question

English is my first language and I find it hard to parse too, but its not commonly used where I live (UK).

EDIT: Clarified that use is normally restricted to headlines

I would emphasize it's only in the headline dialect of English. Non-native speakers should probably just avoid using it altogether. It certainly can't be used to replace any "and" you'd like in a normal essay or anything.

Thanks. I've edited my comment to make the usage clear.

Also, The Onion has put the headline comma to spectacular use.

"Clinton Feels Nation's Pain, Breasts"

Took me a while to comprehend the meaning.

Thank you all for explanations. I learned something new today :).

The article links to an infographic ("25 Petabytes by the numbers"), which claims that 800 years of MP3 audio is equivalent in size to 332 years of HD video.

Sorry, I've never heard of any "HD" video codec which is only 2.4x as large as MP3 audio.

Once Carpathia decides to delete/sell/get rid of the data the case will be dropped. The US government only has to keep this tied up in court until Carpathia (which legally could delete the data) deletes the data. Once the evidence is gone they can easily escape from this horrible mess they have created. "Your honour, I have some bad news. Since Carpathia has deleted the data we no longer have a plausable way to continue with this case."

Megaupload destroyed, goverment doesn't have to pay them anything (after all it was Carpathias fault) etc.

They can't just drop the case because mega upload is an email blast away from being full on running again. Users don't have to resign up, reupload data or anything. That is why the data needs to be destroyed, which I believe is the end goal of the United States Government.

The government could "unfreeze" enough of MU's frozen cash to pay Carpathia for the data storage.

25 million gigabytes

I had to read that a couple of times to remind myself just how big a petabyte is. It's easy to forget the incredible scale of jumping from giga to tera to peta.

It's not very much in terms of hardware anymore.

As a rule of thumb, 1PB = 1 Rack. Depending on your redundancy strategy you can fit more.

Oh, only 25 racks of storage?

They probably have significantly more, considering their deployment has grown over years. Storage density roughly doubles every 2 years.

Would you start a new deployment from scratch today then yes, 25 racks, give or take a few (that's roughly 1.5mio dollars, give or take a few).

What a mess the government has caused. They refuse to allow Carpathia to delete the data, but refuse to compensate them for holding on to junk data. It's outrageous.

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