
German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers - throwaway_yy2Di
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/11/cloud_heat_is_putting_servers_in_homes_and_offices_and_the_heat_from_them.html
======
hrnnnnnn
Excerpts from the contract:

"We install The Device in your house, free of charge. You receive heat. Do not
ask about the function of The Device."

"You may hear a human voice coming from inside The Device. Ignore it."

"Some customers report having recurring dreams about The Device, this is
normal."

"The Device comes in one colour: Impenetrable Blackness."

"Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the
dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it."

~~~
S_A_P
Who says Germans have no sense of humor????

~~~
to3m
Who says they do...

------
ntaso
Munich - In the night of Saturday to Sunday, a special unit of the police
raided the home of retired gardener Heinz S. to seize several cloud computers.
Heinz S. allegedly participated as a volunteer to hide Piratecloud servers in
Germany.

"I just wanted some heat from the thing, I don’t even know what it really is",
is the unlikely claim of Heinz S., who turned 76 this year.

On Tuesday, he has to state his case in court, together with 22 other people
who surprisingly tell a very similar story.

~~~
bengali3
virtual drug mules

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yc1010
What about the noise? Servers can be extremely noisy, in a home environment
they would drive the occupier insane (well unless they are deaf)

~~~
adam12
My furnace is pretty loud. I find it to be comforting.

~~~
yc1010
I regularly construct/test/burnin Supermicro servers here in home office
before sending them off for collocation

The noise is something else from just one server with the fans being
especially annoying

In a datacenter environment a single rack makes a mighty annoying noise and
vibrations.

I would not want to be living anywhere near a rack lol

------
sauere
> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in
> anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of
> its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that
> everyone’s information is safe.

Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about
encryption would stop making these insane claims.

~~~
Xylakant
There's a lot of data where that kind of security is acceptable, for example
all the video content on youtube. You don't want random people to tampler with
it, but it's not high security.

I wouldn't want my bank to store my account data on one of those, but I
wouldn't mind if website assets were served from there.

~~~
nacs
> for example all the video content on youtube

Well not _all_ video content as Youtube allows for private (and unlisted)
videos.

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mikkom
Doesn't sound very secure to be but if it's just public web sites that are
mirrored on multiple locations it might sound reasonable..

------
drivingmenuts
"So, you'd like a CloudenHeatenDevicenGlaven in your haus, ja?"

"Yep."

"That ... does not sound German to me."

"Yeah, well, ... "

"I think you are a spy. Looking to take advantage of our generosity, ja? Und
maybe in ze middle of the nacht you installen the spying thing on our box, mit
your little NSA spying thing?"

"Haha! Those don't exist. The NSA? That actually stands for No Such Agency,
dude. I mean, freund ... fraud ... you know, ich bin ein jelly donut and all
that."

"You are sure you are not this spy?"

"Yep, er ... ja."

------
api
I could see actually this working at a larger scale -- e.g. put a server room
in the basement of a low-income housing project in a place with cold winters
like Chicago or Toronto and heat the building with waste heat during the
chilly months. It'd also be worth it at that scale to wire the building for
multi-homed fiber.

Can't see it being practical at small house scale, and there's also some big
security issues.

------
kriro
They only mention that the company pays for the internet service but I'd
assume traffic/speed from a home could also be an issue. I mean the average
home network connections aren't exactly amazing so what can be hosted on these
servers (I doubt it's cost efficient to provide new infrastructure for every
home)?

~~~
johnbaum1968
> A prerequisite for the use of Cloud&Heat is [...] an Internet connection of
> at least 50 Mbit/s

[https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html#heat-
three](https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html#heat-three)

~~~
iancarroll
Which is contradicted by the last FAQ:

> Cloud&Heat sets up a separate Internet connection for server operation and
> bears all costs of this as well as liability for any damage.

~~~
mikeash
Maybe they mean the ability to obtain a 50Mbps connection?

------
siddarthd2919
So.. who is going to cool these in the summer?

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buro9
Do we get to turn the servers off in the summer when there is a heatwave?

~~~
DanBC
> If the servers do heavy data processing when no one needs the heat, the
> system stores hot water in a “buffering tank.” And the Cloud&Heat cabinets
> can also vent outside in the spring and summer.

~~~
smoyer
There's a limit to that buffering ... and if they can vent outside in the
Spring and Summer, wouldn't that be even more efficient in the Winter?

~~~
DanBC
I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem
but not hot enough to be useful.

This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or
dumps it.

Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a
version of that.

I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.

~~~
chrisseaton
> I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a
> problem but not hot enough to be useful.

I've always wondered the same thing about cooling towers in power stations.
Why are they cooling the water coming out of the plant? The whole point of the
plant is to make it hot and then convert that to electricity - why on earth
are they venting the energy like that?

Apparently it's to do with cooling it fast enough to create a vacuum to draw
through more water.

~~~
rhino369
The turbine works because there is a pressure gradient across it. The hot
steam rushes faster if the other end is colder.

------
thraxil
> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in
> anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of
> its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that
> everyone’s information is safe.

Unless they've cracked the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption,
that data is still going to be unencrypted at some point in those units and
vulnerable if the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.

~~~
justinsb
Rather than cracking the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, I
think they're probably cracked the problem of deleting the keys when the
physical security of the cabinet is compromised.

~~~
valarauca1
This doesn't solve the problem.

Unless the cabinet is air tight, and uses a pressure sensor to detect itself
being opened. It's "Is the cabinet open?" subroutine can be defeated by simply
opening the cabinet where a sensor isn't located.

Basically cut the sucker open on the side.

:.:.:

Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network
based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you can open the
cabinet, and "close" the cabinet from the sensors perspective while leaving it
opened.

:.:.:

Further more data loss doesn't occur on door opening, thus the keys are still
recoverable, because without it would be impossible to service.

~~~
Xylakant
A possible approach would be: keep the data encrypted, just decrypt it at the
endpoint. Tarsnap for example does that. Or keep the keys on servers that are
acting as proxies and decrypt the data. Or actually loose all data on door
opening. Just drop it and use a replication like backblaze and S3 use. A
harddrive lost? Allocate a shard somewhere else. A unit looses enough
harddrives to require service? Just pull it, trash it, plug in a new one.

Given that the units are spread out further than servers in a datacenter, you
probably want that anyways. Your service teams don't want coordinate access to
the device, drive there and the homeowner does not show up for something as
mundane as an HDD swap.

~~~
valarauca1
Likely extreme mirroring + no keys actually kept on the unit. They just store
N byte chunks of data which a master somewhere fetches an decrypts at its
leisure would be the best approach. (with key value pairs stored on that said
machine).

Best approach not necessarily being the one that was put into production.

The fastest approach would be to store your key value pairs encrypted on the
host device, and do your map/reduce functions locally so you only forward
relatively useful data.

------
xwintermutex
Reminds me of a Dutch startup that is doing about the same:
[http://nerdalize.com/](http://nerdalize.com/)

------
justinsb
I think distributed backup (of encrypted files) could be a great use case. But
(like the CDN case mentioned elsewhere) this is also more demanding of
bandwidth than CPU, which isn't really what you want here if your goal is to
produce heat.

Distributed rendering of video content could maybe be a good use case -
moderate bandwidth requirements, heavy CPU/GPU utilization, data not overly
sensitive.

~~~
Xylakant
Distributed backup is actually a good case. It's usually bandwith taxing in
terms of upload speed and most internet connections in Germany are asymmetric
in favor of download speed (which would be the right direction if the server
is in your home). My connection has 50MBit/sec download and only 8 Mbit/sec
upload.

------
kordless
> Still, it's more reassuring to think that your data is stored in a remote
> server farm than in someone’s house.

That depends entirely on your use cases. Making comments like this without
mentioning the wide range of trust levels with different use cases is short
sighted.

------
Tepix
You need to pay 12,000€ up front for 15 years of heating. Unless they go
bankrupt of course...

~~~
johnbaum1968
That is my major concern. I live in a fairly new average sized house in
Germany with a modern heating system (heating pump) and pay about 1200€/year
for heating. If I knew for sure that they exist in 15 years I would really
consider it.

------
marknadal
This is hilarious and great marketing, despite the fact I hate ads! Well done.

~~~
hollerith
You seem to think that this is a publicity stunt (rather than a sincere offer
of heating services).

I don't think it is.

~~~
_stephan
Ignoring the technical difficulty of actually using the excess heat for
reliably and consistently heating a building, it's hard to believe that the
economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly located all
over the landscape could work out.

~~~
aaron695
> that the economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly
> located all over the landscape

I kinda thought the same.

But assuming it can be properly encrypted (hard) what's the difference to
swapping in a new server compared to swapping in a new gas bottle? User pays
for the initial infrastructure.

Pull the old one out, pop the new one in, 60 seconds, any blue collar worker
can do it, if it's setup properly. It would even be automatically checked
remotely it was done 100% correctly.

Once every 3 years? Probably cost $50 a pop? Not necessarily crazy.

~~~
sesqu
They say they do a maintenance check once a year, and replace the server every
3-5 years. Half an hour or so, at the company's expense.

------
reduce
So now what happens when law enforcement shows up to the hosting company and
tells them they're raiding some servers?

Will this be seen as a way to impede and slow down large scale raids?

~~~
k__
This is not possible here in germany.

Even if they want to "raid" my flat-mate, they can't go to my rooms while
doing it.

~~~
reduce
Very interesting. I bet that will be a big selling point for people
considering this hosting service. Seems that it will be harder to put pressure
on hundreds of individual residents, than it is to do so to a big centralized
datacenter provider company.

~~~
nhaehnle
Realistically speaking, I suspect that if this does take off (and it is a very
cool idea), they won't actually install those things in living rooms due to
noise concerns. Those racks are going to be in the basement where the other
heating equipment typically is.

So police are going to get a warrant that is limited to the basement room
containing the racks. the home owners will be slightly annoyed and
inconvenienced, but they aren't going to put up a fight against the warrant.
They'll be more than happy to cooperate with the police.

------
tadpoleonenter
What about insurance? Fire? Theft?

~~~
sesqu
The initial setup fee covers fireproofing and insurance.

------
jqm
I wish I could sign up for this. I still use dial up. Is that going to be a
problem?

~~~
toxican
Not in '96 it won't be!

------
mappu
No mention of how noisy rack servers can be?

------
return0
i wonder if any big data centers do something similar to heat nearby cities?

~~~
throwaway_yy2Di
I'm sure there's a few -- the technical term you want is "district heating".
I.e.,

[http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024952673_amazonheat...](http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024952673_amazonheatxml.html)

    
    
        "Partnering with other companies, Amazon will use waste heat
        from a data center in a Seattle skyscraper to warm its
        soaring new Denny Triangle campus across the street."
    

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-
data-centre-heat-homes)

    
    
        Helsinki data centre to heat homes
        
        "A mini revolution in eco-friendly computing is taking place
        in the depths of the 19th-century Orthodox Uspenski
        Cathedral in downtown Helsinki."
        
        "The Finnish IT company Academica has installed a new 2MW
        database server centre in an empty second world war bomb
        shelter meant to protect city officials in the event of a
        Russian attack. Water warmed while cooling the servers will
        go on to provide heat for 500 homes or 1,000 flats in a city
        that often suffers winters of -20C. After the heat is
        extracted, the water will be recycled back to cool the
        servers again."

------
comrade1
At least we can now stop sleeping with the livestock.

(I'm purposely not addressing sex with the livestock)

