Technology In Katrina's Wake

We've had many submissions about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It doesn't come easy writes "From 'the end justifies the means department', the BBC is reporting that bogus emails about the current situation in New Orlean contain links to websites that promptly infect the concerned reader's computer. From the article: 'The separate virus and fake donations bogus e-mails have been discovered by computer security firms SophosLabs and Websense Security Labs. They are similar to previous fraudulent e-mails connected to last year's Indian Ocean Tsunami.'" Less cynically, an anonymous reader writes "A Linux developer is organizing volunteers for a public 'web station' project to assist Hurricane Katrina victims. The plan is to create numerous Linux-based public kiosks that boot directly into the Firefox browser and display a special home page with links to various services. In addition to offering disaster relief information and news, the kiosks will provide basic email capabilities via Yahoo!, Gmail, Earthlink, MS Hotmail, and other web-mail services. They're looking for donations of time and money. If you're looking to donate more directly, tech companies across the country are maintaining pages with ties to respected charities. Yahoo is maintaining the Red Cross donation page, and everyone from Microsoft to IBM has a message on their frontpage."

Comments

Re:Why?

[cheezit]

The reason important stuff like that is in the blue states is because the people who need to create and maintain that stuff don't want to live in the red states. Relocate those things to Kansas and you will have a hiring problem. Very few people I know want to live in a place where they put paper over the beer cooler on Sunday and the police chief is the brother-in-law of the town's most popular preacher. I sure as hell don't.

Many folks in the red states think that the almighty's grand plan is behind natural disasters, terrorism, and the like...but those things don't tend to affect Iowa. As Jon Stewart observed, Bush's re-election in reaction to NYC getting hit was the blue staters trying to protect the red staters...apparently from themselves.

That might seem like a troll but I'm semi-serious.