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Comment by a3w

1 day ago

Depends on the thread model, which one is worse.

State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment.

Criminal/3rd party state intelligence service? Could get into both, at a risk or with blackmail, threats, or violence.

Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage.

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a3w

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Aurornis  1 day ago

> State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment.

I don’t think a state actor would actually break in to either in this case, but if they did then breaking into the private apartment would be a dream come true. Breaking into a data center requires coordination and ensuring a lot of people with access and visibility stay quiet. Breaking into someone’s apartment means waiting until they’re away from the premises for a while and then going in.

Getting a warrant for a private residence also would likely give them access to all electronic devices there as no 3rd party is keeping billing records of which hardware is used for the service.

> Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage.

Data centers are built with redundant network connectivity, backup power, and fire suppression. Accidents can happen at both, but that’s not the question. The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior.

  • pbhjpbhj  1 day ago

    >Breaking into a data center requires coordination and ensuring a lot of people with access and visibility stay quiet

    Or just a warrant and a phone call to set up remote access? In the UK under RIPA you might not even need a warrant. In USA you can probably bribe someone to get a National Security Letter issued.

    Depending on the sympathies of the hosting company's management you might be able to get access with promises.

    I dare say F-Droid trust their friends/colleagues more than they trust randos at a hosting company.

    As an F-Droid user, I think I might too? It's a tough call.

  • Calzifer  1 day ago

    > Data centers are built with redundant network connectivity, backup power, and fire suppression. [...] The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior.

    Well, I remember one incident were a 'professional' data center burned down including the backups.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVHcloud#Incidents

    I know no such incident for some basement hosting.

    Doesn't mean much. I'm just a bit surprised so many people are worried because of the server location and no one had mentioned yet the quite outstanding OVH incident.

    • arjie  17 hours ago

      I'm not going to pretend datacenters are magical places immune to damage. I worked at a company where the 630 Third Street datacenter couldn't keep temperatures stable during a San Francisco heatwave and the Okex crypto exchange has experienced downtime because the Alibaba Zone C datacenter their matching engine is on experienced A/C failure. So it's not all magic, but if you didn't encounter home-lab failure it's because you did not sample the population appropriately.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/wvqxs7/my_homelab_...

      I don't have a bone to pick here. If F-Droid wants to free-ball it I think that's fine. You can usually run things for max cheap by just sticking them on a residential Google Fiber line in one of the cheap power states and then just making sure your software can quickly be deployed elsewhere in times of outage. It's not a huge deal unless you need always-on.

      But the arguments being made here are not correct.

  • tcfhgj  1 day ago

    > The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior.

    as a year long f-droid user I can't complain