This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
It’s because he was never one of them, the KGB; he was naive and thought he could send a message and show mercy by stopping his advance in exchange for concessions. He should’ve known that above all else, above money or image or power, trust or diplomacy, the one thing that the leader of the siloviki can’t do is to appear weak when challenged directly.
>I still don't understand how Prigozhin felt safe after surrendering, so much that he flew his jet near Moscow.
It all feels so farcical to the extent that it feels like it was either staged somehow, or they took enough of his family hostage to leave him no other choice.
Because you can't be that stupid and live to be that high and that old in Putin's regime.
I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.
It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.
Just this week Trump was threatening to cut off intelligence if Ukraine continued targeting Russian oil refineries. This implies they are still receiving intelligence.
Exactly and also Europe still buys products from Russia. Maybe having high diesel prices is a bigger problem than Russian companies getting a few extra rubbles. It’s a tough situation - what else should be done? You can say Iran but they have to be taken care of too or prices would be even higher.
One of the reasons we need to better relate social media companies, is so we can get at this data. Twitter was incredibly open, pre-Musk. If you're running a platform like that, you're a publisher, and should be required to provide API access for accountability and transparency purposes.
With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
No, I know. That doesn't necessarily mean these Yandex data centers being hit affected that yesterday and today, though. For a variety of different possible reasons.
All I can say is that vile comments usually there on certain pages dealing with the war in Ukraine have almost all disappeared under some of the FB feeds I read.
Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
I always assumed that all of those people were correct, everyone they were arguing with is a bot. What I think they overlooked is that everyone they agreeing with is a bot too.
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.
I'm not denying that Russia spreads disinformation and propaganda. They definitely do. I'm just skeptical knocking out these data centers is necessarily creating the effect people are anecdotally claiming to observe.
German here. I wish. AfD polls highest out of all parties, based on several independent polling organizations. [1] It's not plausible that online support evaporates over night.
I hope at least fellow IT people can recognize that "social media bots" are not running on Yandex datacenters neither they have IP adresses from Russia.
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browser from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
Why on earth would they host orchestrating applications in Russia? AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcesn work just fine.
In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.
Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.
Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.
The business case reason Russia would have a central orchestrator in a Russian data center is that they want centralized control. They are unlikely to delegate control of the information sphere to another, or allow a huge random mass of uncoordinated individuals just “post positive stuff about Russia”.
Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.
This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.
Latency is irrelevant for social media posting, Western providers might identify and suspend such an operation overnight, and no, hosting in Russia is actually a lot cheaper.
Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.
Previously we can point to data and see things like Scotland Independence accounts all go quite on mass when Iran goes offline, or the OSRS player base go down and the gold price spike when Venezuela has a blackout.
I've seen no analysis connecting Yandex's sabotage to a drop in hate speech on the English speaking internet.
You will not see any such analyses, as it is now impossible to make them.
We genuinely have nothing but vibes now, as we have like 4 social media sites that have collectively decided to severely limit their APIs or straight up kill research-focused tools (like Facebook's own CrowdTangle) around 2023-2024.
When xitter made the geolocation visibility change, one could point to a handful of accounts that pretended to be in a certain part of the world and actually where in some other. It is not statistical, but it is at least some anecdotal evidence.
Now one could just present a handful of consistently-vocal accounts that went completely silent in the last days.
Since this submission is kind of on the topic of trolling, I miss good old fashioned forum troll comments like this. non political, not immediately obvious, cortisol provoking (7/10)
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
It is a very hard time to do this sort of study with APIs and scraping not being available to the labs that would actually want to study this.
My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984. That being said, you still need datacenter compute for organizing even manual operations like this.
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index (no indexing means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their 'bots' that visit sites to index them. Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
Looking at the destruction of Yandex data centers, these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Are kamikaze drones a method of exploding on a target after image learning?
They are nearly useless. Lasers work with the direct line-of-sight, and the most recent iteration drones can fly just a few _meters_ over the terrain. And they can approach from any direction.
So lasers or turrets can work if you want to defend a military base in the middle of a desert, but not something that can be deployed in cities.
Apparently, the most efficient method so far is interceptor drones.
> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
They aren't fundamentally different from a bunch of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Looking at what most of their targets have in common, I'd say that there's an easy answer to that - don't start wars.
1. Countries who start wars rarely do so from a position of weakness, and rarely have more will to fight than whomever they are invading.
2. Drones are more effective in an asymmetric fight. The stronger , more developed side gets hit harder. Which is why Russia and the US is having such a bad time with them. They are both starting shit with countries that have far less to lose, and have far more resolve to fight.
99% seems like a stretch, especially given that elephant in the room: The United States. Seems like isolating both might be required. If you only isolate Russia you save the undersea fiber optic cables, but fishermen in the pacific still get bombed.
Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially with the prevalence of CGNAT.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
As the other commenter said, not helpful. If you go with cf countries, Germany is one of the worst offenders. But only because it has Frankfurt as a big traffic node and lots of hosting providers.
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Does it not bother you it's entirely fact-free? No source, no info what exactly is on Y-Axis and provided data ends in the future at the time of the posting?
You made an account 4 minutes ago just to post this? Of course, it is obvious what they meant. The AfD voters are real voters, but they can still be driven by hate stirred up by (among other things) Russian bots.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
They could be dead you know. I wouldn't joke around, we're all in the same business after all. I'm sure the SRE's didn't decide who rented space in their DC.
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