Google was apparently so eager to build its new data center infrastructure in Finland that it began bulldozing large swaths of forest before the required environmental review...
  • Godric@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 days

    300 hectares

    And they say americans use incomprehensible measurements, SMH my head

  • ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.caEnglish
    4 days

    Question: what is ultimately the purpose of all those data centers? To store information on every single tiny aspect of our lives? Up to and including how we hold utensils and the distance and typing speed on keyboards and phones up to a micro second accuracy? I do not know… But surely if they are looking for blackmail type material they would need less storage space? Or are they looking for such an absolute birth to death information on everyone they can that they ultimately want every second of our lives in 8K video (while obviously leaving their own in a blackhole, and able to purge their own lives from storage whenever they want allowing for potential new comers who entered the elite to cover up the murders and fuckery they did to get there). What? Just fucking what are they all there for?

    I mean so so so so many have cropped up that most cannot be even close to full capacity. Or can they?

    • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      20 hours

      Tracking and surveillance for the unavoidable global climate collapse. The rich know that there will be unrest around the globe, this is how they control us.

      Probably .01% of the surveillance centers power are used for summarizing Karen’s email. The rest is for data points on every single thing they can get on you. Same reason they want flock. People and car tracking, impossible to evade.

      We are actively living in a surveillance state like north Korea but somehow totally ignoring it.

      Would anyone dare go on their social media profile and post that a certain political leader needs to be dissapeared? I won’t even say things like that in a phone call! Theyre always listening and tracking you. How do they take people down? Generate images of csam using grok (thats why it was trained with it) and somehow it appears on your device or any of your cloud services along with a website history of all the bad stuff you definitely did. No one will bat an eye and youll be in prison for life.

      Or also very easy, fake medical records of depression and medication, and say they offed themselves off a bridge or with a shotgun to the back of the head “such a shame, I had no idea they were depressed”.

      Its rediculously easy to get rid of anyone who doesnt lick dear leaders boots. I’d be willing to bet this is all happening right now and we have no idea. Theyve certainly been imprisoning completely legal immigrants in detention centers with 0 repurcussions.

    • Natanael@infosec.pubEnglish
      4 days

      They don’t even know. Literally. They’re just betting demand will appear

      • ArmchairAce1944@lemmy.caEnglish
        4 days

        So the reason why is entirely due to someone saying ‘I want to deny personal computing to everyone and destroy the environment and waste unbelievable amounts of tax payer money and cost lots of lives in the process’ ultimately boils down to ‘we just had a hunch’?

        This is how civilizations fall in the stupidest ways imaginable.

        • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          20 hours

          People underestimate the pure evil of techbros and billionaires. They are the most vile things in the universe. Theyre absolutely not doing this for “a bet”.

    • supersquirrel@lemmy.caEnglish
      4 days

      One way to understand this process in a reductive but not altogether that off the mark way is to frame fascism as a weaponization of measurement, artificial metrics, beaucracy, dissection and surveillance. Without paperwork and endless obsessive attempts to draw distinctions between things that do not exist it really isn’t true fascism.

      In this sense Microsoft’s use of Azure to enable the surveillance, targetting, and atomization of Palestinian society for Israel’s Genocide and all of the pointless data centers meant to hoard information about people being built in areas without enough water already for humans are two sides of the same irrational coin.

    • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5 days

      I don’t know about Finland as well as I know about Sweden, but here in Sweden, we don’t really do outright bribes.

      They are far too messy…

      Instead, what happens is that a government official approves Company A for a large contract even though Company B had a batter and cheaper option. The reason is stated as somethibg nebulous and hard to disprove.

      Then, a year or two later, the same government official resigns from office, and Company A quickly hires them as a coordination consultant between the company and the government.

      And since the person has highly specific knowledge about not only the government, but the contract as well as contacts in the government, the company has a reason to offer a very high compenstation for the consultancy without it looking suspicious.

      The person is retained by the company untill the “debt” is paid and the person leaves the company.

      No bribe is paid, just a fair compensation to a consultant with highly relevant skills.

      • MolochHorridus@piefed.socialEnglish
        4 days

        Pretty much the same here in Finland, and that’s why we are one of the least corrupted countries around. We just keep it a bit more quiet and are 2nd of the list, not the 6th like the Sweden. Huzzah!

        Google “Orpo Garden Helsinki” though if you’d like to read about recent amateurish attempt of our prime minister at high level corruption.

        https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/finland

    • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3 days

      Yeah no, it does not work directly like that, around here. If they thought they can just buy their way quickly out of this… Now that they got caught, Google just brought upon itself a good round of the Nordic bureaucracy hell. And if they managed to piss of the locals, the complaints alone can delay the whole thing easily for years, lmao.

        • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          3 days

          Oh they will get through it, that is not the question. But they will have to jump through all the hoops, especially now, since the whole country is watching.

          • Zensate@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 days

            I mean Finns are prickly people, so they actually may resist for awhile.

            But in my country the politicians are celebrating the bribes and dancing to their tunes.

            • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              3 days

              Yeah, our money-worshipper-party and racist-party politicians are definitely dancing to their tunes as well. But we are very much into following the procedures, so you cannot really buy yourself through the system quickly. Google may have gotten some form of a fast track, had they just waited for a bit, since the politicians supporting would find the ways for it. But now that they broke the law, people are upset, and the spotlight is on the case, meaning it is going to be combed through. Which can take time, and they might really end up with some repercussions as well… And if they did piss off some locals, those formal complaints have postponed even huge projects for years, since they all will be handled through the correct bureaucracy.

  • Fredselfish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4 days

    Please you clear that much forest without your government not knowing. This just to act like they had no idea this was happening when they probably okay it.

    • bampop@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 days

      I’m sure if anyone else builds without the proper permission they have the authority to bring that to a halt. Even if they had no legal basis to stop the construction, they could deny them some other permission, like not giving them a high speed internet connection or limiting water access. No way something like this goes ahead without full cooperation from the government.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    4 days

    When asked for a comment Google’s response was “Well, the Finnish are a real easy people to push over”.

    • Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 days

      I think you don’t know Finland very well. Ask the Russians.

  • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4 days

    Finland has a significant forestry industry; I’m not sure that 300 hectares is all that much in the grander scheme.

    But I hope they hold Google accountable.

    • Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 days

      It is not about the forest it is about Google spitting on Finnish law, acting as it is above the law. That needs to have consequences, preferably criminal charges, rather than just fines. Otherwise they are above the law.

  • Reannlegge@lemmy.caEnglish
    5 days

    I personally only steal youtube, the Google knows what I watch and very little more.

      • Reannlegge@lemmy.caEnglish
        4 days

        I fell down the rabbit hole of self hosting, some stuff had happened at my place so I had nothing to do real fast. I have a bunch of pis running all kinds of things, I am waiting on a hand me down Mac mini, that I will install Debian on and get a third party solution set up. I currently use adblock plus in Librewolf to block youtube ads on a pi 5 hooked up to my TV. I self host my blog, because hey why not? I self host vaultwarden, I do not want someone other than myself to accidentally leave the doors open to my passwords (which is why I have hardened it so much)! I selfhost my calendars and contacts, why pay someone else to sync those across devices? I have the arr suite with Transmission and Jellyfin running, I used to get emails from my ISP saying stop or else law office of who the fuck will spend $10 000’s to sue you for the $100’s you can be sued for in Canada (they used to email me but I have my ISP email send a auto reply saying I do not use this email anymore because it is hosted using exchange) but now they are paper mail. Slowly climming the walls out of Apple’s ecosystem I started using Home Assistant to be less seen by big tech. I self host other things to but I think you get the picture.

        Being one with your LAN is great but when you need to leave the sweat embrace of your LAN and travel out into the scary WAN you realize how much you miss those services so you start self hosting Wireguard (or whatever FOSS VPN) to feel the sweet embrace again. I was going to say I self host my email but I had orignally thought it would be a weekend/week long project, when I got into it I just said FUCK no and settled with my new domain server who has the wildcard option my previous provider did not offer (easyDNS I would recommend over HostHero any day of the week they are less expensive and offer so much more). So I agree with you that third party apps are the way to go I unfortunately do not easily have access to third party VPN stuff with my IP needing to be static so that my personal VPN can be accessed, I am sure I could do some firewall and router kung fu to get a VPN to work on the proper vLANs and all that but instead of that I use pihole + unbound to block incoming ads and trackers as I have been for years already. Now that I am using a vanilla install of openWRT on a Flint2 switch instead of just using Apple’s walls, uFw on my pi’s, and a hope and a prayer with my IoT stuff I can proudly say it is all properly vLANed and if there are ever trackers that do manage to get their way into my LAN will have a hard time getting out.

        Years ago when I was learning about pihole I made the boo boo of opening port 22 on my ISPs router, and that was a very expensive mistake! So now all but one of my things use a different ssh port, why does one thing still use 22? I have a pi 0 2 that runs crowdsec. Sorry I get excited to talk about the ways I am saying FUCK off to big tech, but I have every intention of using a third party app for my TV I currently use unwatched on my iOS devices but that still uses my google account.

        • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          20 hours

          Damn I wish i could do all that! It sounds very time consuming. I spend enough time just getting my nas to work right and its not connected to the internet. Too scary.

          • Reannlegge@lemmy.caEnglish
            14 hours

            If you really want to do something little to say fuck you to the google start using searXNG, Bing seems to be OK with you using their results Google not so much. There are other smaller search engines that work as well, but you definitely should use Bing.

            Another thing to do to give a bigger FuCk you to Google is set up pihole or adguard home. I personally am a fan of pihole but that is because it was the first I used, had I known about adguard home first or at the same time I do not know where I would be on the fence. I have spent lots of time currating my pihole adlists and block lists over the years. There are TLDs that are blocked like the .zip and the other idiotic ones that exist.

            But one thing I need you to do is tell me you have not attached your TV to the internet! Use any set top box, that is not Google, please for the love of Glob please tell me that much.