It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.
I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.
It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.
I just assumed it was all the VPSs and it only would be 1 day before they fixed the routing. Those DC were only being used as infrastructure for routing traffic out of Russia.
It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.
I doubt the story of the bots disappearing, but Yandex a) has specifically given control to Russian government, by providing a super-share that doesn’t pay dividends but gives the deciding vote, to Sberbank (this kind of share shenanigans are possible under Netherlands’ law, where Yandex is incorporated for this very reason); and b) does provide cloud-hosting services the same way as Amazon does. Yandex is generally considered to basically be a government corporation by now, it’s one of like three candidates whenever the government decides to introduce some ‘sovereign’ service like Russian analogue of YouTube.
Arkady Volozh, the surviving cofounder of Yandex, has left Russia over disagreements about the war and the government’s control, taking for himself some side business that Yandex was doing abroad, either drones or self-driving cars or something like that. And relocated some 1000 Yandex employees that decided to leave with him.
It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.
I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.
It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.
Zuck brags that 80% of your friend list will be AI and you think Meta is trying to keep out the bots?
I would expect they are passing that traffic through a shifting of pwned computers around the world.
Why would Meta or Twitter block them?
Well if the c&c or individual VPS of the people are down, the bots will run out of tasks eventually no matter where they are hosted from.
I just assumed it was all the VPSs and it only would be 1 day before they fixed the routing. Those DC were only being used as infrastructure for routing traffic out of Russia.
It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.
I doubt the story of the bots disappearing, but Yandex a) has specifically given control to Russian government, by providing a super-share that doesn’t pay dividends but gives the deciding vote, to Sberbank (this kind of share shenanigans are possible under Netherlands’ law, where Yandex is incorporated for this very reason); and b) does provide cloud-hosting services the same way as Amazon does. Yandex is generally considered to basically be a government corporation by now, it’s one of like three candidates whenever the government decides to introduce some ‘sovereign’ service like Russian analogue of YouTube.
Arkady Volozh, the surviving cofounder of Yandex, has left Russia over disagreements about the war and the government’s control, taking for himself some side business that Yandex was doing abroad, either drones or self-driving cars or something like that. And relocated some 1000 Yandex employees that decided to leave with him.
https://www.nextgov.com/modernization/2024/09/nsas-secret-amazon-developed-cloud-environment-progressing-very-well/399611/
The NSA is using AWS?
Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.
Right, but they can host the infrastructure these people use to do their jobs, like in the article?