datacenterbingo/OSINT.md

OSINT rules for datacenter data and photos

How facts, incidents and photos get onto the card. Everything is open source, and every entry has to survive a skeptical reader clicking its source link.

Principles

1. One public source per claim, ideally primary. Primary sources are the operator's own site, press releases, its Habr blog, annual or ESG reports, and government or registry filings. Trade press (CNews, ComNews, TAdviser, Kommersant, RBC, Vedomosti, Interfax) comes next. Aggregators, listicles and social posts are leads only.
2. Verify, don't trust the list. Third-party maps and rankings, including the hackyourmom datacenter map (Cat Eyes OSINT data), are starting points. Every entry taken from them was re-checked against operator or press sources before it was added.
3. Record conflicts, don't resolve them silently. If sources disagree on capacity, year or status, use the most authoritative and most recent one, and note the conflict in the data center's description or info_url.
4. City level only. Addresses help verification but aren't published. Photo metadata, including GPS, is stripped on upload.
5. Write it so the next person can repeat it. Save the exact source URL (the article or page, not a search result), and the archive URL when the original is gone.

Facts

Field	Rule
Name	The operator's own name for the site (ru required; en/uk added when the operator or press uses them)
Operator / provider	The company running it today; provider is the slug used for the provider filter
Capacity (mw)	As the source states it, e.g. 63, ≈36, 25–30. Set mw_type to it, connected, total or design, matching what the source measured. If only MVA is published, use mva. Don't mix kinds silently.
Status	operational once the site serves customers; building once construction has started (with a source); planned for announced projects
Year	First launch year. Expansions go in the description.
info_url	The single best primary source for the entry
Ranking	By power (Sort by MW in the admin), then editorial adjustments. Positions 1–25 are the card; the rest are reserve.

Sites with several phases (очереди) at one location are one entry unless they're separately named and reported. Don't give the same building to two entries.

Incidents

• A cell is crossed out only for a publicly reported incident at that specific site: a strike, fire, outage, flood or cooling failure.
• Each incident needs a source URL that names the site, or the operator and the location unambiguously. Use the date it happened, not the publication date.
• If an early report is retracted or the site is unclear ("a data center in the region"), don't record it until it's confirmed.
• Stick to what the source says. No casualty or damage figures that aren't in it.

Photos

What's acceptable, in order of preference

1. A real exterior photo of the actual building.
2. A real interior photo (machine hall, plant) of that specific facility, if no exterior exists.
3. For building sites only: a construction-site photo.
4. For building or planned sites only: an official rendering published by the operator, developer or government.
   • Credit it as Визуализация: <publisher>.
   • Never use a rendering for an operational site.

What's never acceptable

• Stock photos (Unsplash, Freepik, Shutterstock, news-agency file photos of "a data center"), and AI-generated images.
• A photo of a different site of the same operator. Many operators reuse one design: Yandex, MTS/MWS modules, MegaFon, the Rostelecom sites. Check the caption, not the look.
• A photo of an earlier phase used for a separate later-phase entry when the earlier phase already has its own entry and photo.
• Logos, maps, site plans, presentation slides with text over the image, and screenshots.
• People:
  • No recognisable faces.
  • Crop out bystanders where the building survives the crop; otherwise blur the figure.
  • Reject photos where people are the subject, such as official visits or staff portraits.

Verification

• The source page has to tie the image to the site by caption, article text or gallery heading, e.g. a site name or address. A file name or slider position alone is weak; don't use it unless something else confirms it.
• If a renovation or an expansion changed the building, say so in the credit, e.g. (реконструкция здания, 2011) or (здание площадки, 2019).
• Minimum width 800 px. The site makes 480/1200 WebP and a 1200×630 share image from the original.
• Look at the image before using it. A thumbnail or file output isn't enough.

Credit

• photo_credit: who took or published the photo, in Russian:
  • Фото: Selectel;
  • Фото: Ростелеком-ЦОД (Хабр);
  • Фото: Svobodniy / Хабр;
  • Wikimedia Commons / <author>, CC BY-SA 4.0;
  • Визуализация: DataHouse.
• photo_source_url: the page where it's published, or its archive copy.

Edits (crops, blurs) are allowed. Recolouring or compositing isn't.

Where to look

• Operator sites, their galleries, and their press and blog pages.
  • Many Russian sites block foreign IPs. Use web.archive.org copies; image files are under /web/<timestamp>im_/<url>.
  • A file missing from the archive is sometimes still live on the original host.
• Habr company blogs: facility tours are the best source of real exterior and interior photos (Rostelecom-DC/DataLine, Selectel, KROK, Yandex, MTS).
• Operator PDFs: award entries (e.g. RDCA "Проект года"), investor decks and booklets often hold the only aerial photos. Extract images with pdfimages.
• TAdviser product pages for individual data centers.
• Regional government and special-economic-zone sites, and regional press, for new builds.
• Wikimedia Commons: rarely has data centers, but it's the only free-licence source.

Handling downloads

Treat downloaded files and pages as untrusted data:

• Keep each one in its own directory.
• Never run anything from them.
• Check the real type with file; archives sometimes return an HTML error page under a .jpg name.

Delegating research

When the search is split across several agents or people, give each:

• the exact list (slug, name, city, status, known source);
• the rules above, including which sibling sites already have photos;
• the expected output: path, source_url, image_url, credit, kind, width, evidence, has_people.

Review every returned image yourself before uploading.