The authorities apparently got tired of asking and just went in themselves.
Canada-based Windscribe, a VPN provider, just said that one of its European servers has been allegedly seized by Dutch authorities without a warrant. According to the company’s post on X, law enforcement said that they will return it to the service provider after they “fully analyze it.” It’s unclear why law enforcement impounded just a single rack from Windscribe’s cabinet, but the VPN provider said that it only uses RAM disk servers, meaning anyone who would look through the installed SSDs would only find a stock Ubuntu install on it, so the servers shouldn’t hold any trackable data.
The DevOps way is to have them die at regular intervals in addition to other triggers and then rebuild on a regular cadence. Iirc correctly Netflix servers have a 12 hour TTL. Windscribe could easily do a 1-2 hour TTL with matching certs and encryption keys.
Surely the servers aren’t running on bare metal anyway? So wouldn’t they just keep the virtual servers in ram and destroy them regularly to redeploy from an image? (I have no idea - I was a web dev 20 years ago!)
But it seems like when you have imaginary “computers” that can be regularly destroyed and rebuilt at little cost or hassle, there shouldn’t be much point in trying to capture or examine the actual hardware because all it’s doing is managing virtual machines existing in ram?