disaster

Stay prepared with the American Red Cross Axis Safety Hub

I am not the type who's well-prepared (my fridge is almost always empty), nor do I want to scare people into getting things that they don't really need.

However, I ran across the American Red Cross Axis from Eton the other day and thought it was a really handy device to have around the house, or in your car.

It's hard to classify the Eton Axis as one specific type of device because it's many things in one. It's a radio (AM/FM/NOAA Weather), a flashlight, and a cell phone charger. Best of all, … Read more

Questions linger about Amazon outage

Today, April 29, 2011, Amazon Web Services released a "summary" of its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service) disruption in its U.S. East Region. This came approximately one week after what appears to be a classic example of a rolling disaster that occurred after someone incorrectly executed a communications network traffic shift as part of "normal AWS scaling activities." I read human error here--long known as the leading cause of large system failures.

The rolling disaster is a well understood phenomenon in IT and can be hard to foresee with a complex system. The way to discover and fix potential failure points is to test on a regular basis then build around them. But periodic testing can become difficult for a system of this magnitude.

What I find positive about the Amazon summary is a set of disaster recovery recommendations for users and an admission that AWS customer support during the outage was less than stellar. The disaster recovery recommendations should now be required reading for every AWS customer. In fact, I think that all cloud services users should read this statement with an eye to discovering potential holes in their own disaster recovery strategies. … Read more

Assembling the IT emergency kit

Much of the world is consumed watching the coverage of the enormous disaster that recently struck Japan. As if a massive earthquake and subsequent major tsunami didn't cause enough death and destruction, they unleashed a cascade of failures that led to serious nuclear power plant accidents that have yet to be contained, and that threaten lives and indeed the inhabitability of an entire area of Japan. It's simply horrific.

We humans think that we're in control of, well, everything. We have plans and lists and goals and policies and fallback positions. Then something like this comes along … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: Earthquake engineering

Japan will be recovering for years from the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck there a week ago. Arguably, of all the places in the world to get hit by such a disaster, Japan was the best prepared. Yet still there was devastation. Thousands of people died. Towns were literally washed away. Several nuclear reactors were damaged beyond repair. How did this happen? What technologies and engineering were used to mitigate earthquake and tsunami risks in Japan, and how did they fail?

And could it happen here?

Today we're talking about engineering for earthquakes, and how what we know about geology affects how buildings and other structures are designed for various locations.

Our experts today are Andy Thompson, an engineer at Arup and author of the book Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country, and Tom Holzer, research geologist for the Earth Hazards Team of the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif.

Want to help the victims of the Japan earthquake? Donate your old gadgets via the CNET program at Gazelle. All proceeds will go to the Red Cross.

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Some of our discussion points… Read more

Googlers using '20 percent time' to help Japan

Many Googlers are spending time working on technology to help Japan in the aftermath of last week's devastating earthquake, tsunami, and developing nuclear crisis. One of the tools being used in the crisis response is Fusion Tables, according to Riku Inoue, product manager at Google and lead for Google Labs. The application is a service that manages large collections of tabular data in the cloud.

In response to the disaster in Japan, Google has set up a multilingual Crisis Response page with resources on emergency hotlines, relief organizations, shelter information, blackout status, donation channels and maps, as well as … Read more

Japan struggles in quake's aftermath (week in review)

It's been a week since Japan's devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami. Amid the disaster cleanup and relief efforts, new problems continue to evolve, such as the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Anxiety over the damaged facility increased Wednesday as the United States' top nuclear regulator told Congress the situation was worse than reported by the Japanese government and that "extremely high" radiation levels could hamper containment efforts. On Friday, Japan's nuclear safety agency raised the severity of the crisis to level 5, up from 4, on a scale going up to … Read more

How to avoid disaster-related Internet scams

In every disaster scammers see an opportunity, and the crisis in Japan is no exception. Already there have been fake Red Cross e-mails circulating and there will no doubt be more scams coming.

Those e-mails appear to come from the British Red Cross. They provide some news on the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and urge people to donate to a Yahoo e-mail address on a Moneybookers account, a money transfer service that enables recipients to remain anonymous, according to App River, an e-mail hosting and security services provider.

However, real charities have e-mail addresses with their own domain and … Read more

IoSafe pitches Rugged Portable drive

LAS VEGAS--If you're looking for a hard drive that can withstand fire, water submersion, being crushed by a 35,000-pound excavator, and so on, there are none better than IoSafe devices such as the IoSafe SoloPRO, which is based on a regular hard drive, or the Solo SSD, which is based on a solid-state drive.

They all have one problem, however: their physical size. The drives are generally huge and weigh tens of pounds thanks to layers of protection. This means they're not even in the vicinity of portability, which is something most of us want these days.

Well, that's now changed. The company announced today its very first portable drive that offers similar levels of mishap-resistance as the rest of its products, the IoSafe Rugged Portable external hard drive. By the way, this is the product IoSafe has been being mysterious about in the weeks leading up to CES 2011.

The Rugged Portable comes in three flavors, including aluminum HDD, aluminum SSD, and titanium SSD. The HDD version is available in capacities between 250GB and 1TB, while the SSD versions are available in capacities of either 256GB or 512GB. All versions are based on a standard 2.5-inch drive and support USB 3.0 with backward-compatibility to USB 2.0. IoSafe says the drive will support Firewire connectivity by March.

IoSafe claims that the Rugged Portable provides physical security features including:… Read more

ioSafe plays mystery game pre-CES

ioSafe, maker of disaster-proof storage devices such as the ioSafe SoloPro for general consumers, is looking to get people excited about what it's going to unveil at CES 2011.

The company put out a short blog post on its Web site today challenging people to guess, well, what it's going to show off at the world's biggest annual consumer electronic show. The reward for the lucky winner: a sample of the product itself.

Apart from a short clue that reads: "It weighs more than a Cadbury Cream Egg but less than an adult coon hound," the company also posted an ambiguous-looking image of the device, pictured above. To qualify to win, you just have to leave a comment at on the blog post by January 2. Some other restrictions apply, of course.

My guess is as good as yours, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be another superrugged storage product, possibly even bullet-proof, considering the blog teased the users by suggesting a "Napalm-proof NAS."… Read more