P2P Hard Disk System Warns of Tsunamis

An anonymous reader writes to mention an article on NetworkWorld about a free software application that detects Tsunamis by listening for vibrations in the hard drives of computers. The peer-to-peer network uses the technology that allows HDDs to keep read-write heads on track, and passes the information to a network for analysis. From the article: "If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers running the client software and connected to the peer-to-peer network can then warn of such events. The software is able to provide such warnings because the seismic waves produced by earthquakes travel at about 5,000 kilometers per hour, while tsunamis move much slower at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per hour"

mac equivalent nearly

[ElephanTS]

I tried this out on my Macbook.

http://www.suitable.com/tools/seismac.html [suitable.com]

Does a similar thing. Once caveat: you can never touch the mac. So it's useless really but an interesting demo of the motion detectors. They are suprisingly accurate. Footsteps nearby show up for instance.

Needs to give feedback

[FleaPlus]

I'm running this thing right now, after downloading from here [ninsight.at]. It's kind of neat, but it'd be really nice if it gave some sort of feedback to the user to show it was actually operating. I'd like to be able to, say, kick my computer and watch a little seismometer guage move around, just to let me know the thing is working.

Also, to the commenter who was worrying that things like kicks or shifts to a computer would result in false alarms, that's part of why they're using a P2P network. By aggregating the results from many machines, you can toss out false alarms. Of course, if a bunch of people got together on IRC to coordinate times at which they'd all kick their computers, that could probably trigger it... ;)

Re:Interesting

[Percy_Blakeney]

The only thing I don't see is talking about knowing where the machines are in the real world, which would be very helpful, and that may be coming later.

I would be curious to see if they could automatically tell you where you are, using only the vibration data from your hard drive. Given a month or so of data, they might be able to correlate major events in your data set with major events in other data sets from known locations, thus allowing them to derive your geographic location.

Re:false warnings

[grcumb]

Remote villages near the coast could get one of these radios with solar cell recharged bateries, then use their own system localy.

Remote villages usually manage alright with tsunamis (provided there is high ground nearby; if there isn't, a warning system isn't going to do any good anyway), for a couple of reasons:

• Villagers know enough to head for the hills when the ocean recedes[*]. During a recent localised tsunami in Vanuatu, there was only one fatality when a man foolishly went to grab a few stranded fish. When his family screamed at him not to be such a fool, he climbed a coconut tree, which was swept away when the water came in. Everyone I've spoken with about this incident considers this man a bit of an idiot who got what was coming to him.
• It's not too hard to get away when there are only a few people around. The big danger is in urban areas where it's simply not possible to get everyone out of the affected zone in the limited time available.

[*] This phenomenon - that the ocean recedes rapidly before the arrival of a tsunami - is well understood in commonly affected areas. After all, it's a lesson you don't want to learn twice.

Re:What a fantastic idea

[MadMidnightBomber]

Outside of Europe and the US, electricity is expensive, broadband is nonexistent, and dialup internet sessions are metered by the minute.

Sure. Except: The number of households and businesses worldwide with high-speed DSL Internet connections has hit 26 million -- with South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong leading the way. [zdnet.co.uk].

From the same article "The full top 20 looks like this: 1. SOUTH KOREA 2. TAIWAN 3. HONG KONG 4. Belgium 5. Canada 6. Denmark 7. Germany 8. SINGAPORE 9. JAPAN 10. Sweden.... "

Other data [oecd.org] puts NZ, Australia, Japan and S. Korea in the top 20 per head of population.

how does it ...

[White Shade]

Just out of curiousity, how is it supposed to correlate IP address to physical location in the world?

I thought that all the attempts to connect IP to physical locations had pretty much died of non-maintenance, and impossibility of getting all the location information from ISP's in anything remotely resembling realtime?

that seems like an awful big hurdle to the operation of this thing to me...

has something changed?