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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"
I like the science.
I like helping people.
I don't like Windows only java clients which include dll files (they say on the front page its java based, but then on download page you see Mac OS X and Linux version in preparation. I think the DLL is going to pretty much stop all that.
I don't like running random programs accessing none standard data from my harddrive without knowing exactly what its looking at and what happens to my drive if its not got the required capabilities.
There is no technical information about this program or what it actually examines on a harddrive, coupled with the crypto java code buried inside the package (look in bcprov-jdk14.jar\org\bouncycastle\crypto) makes me nervous.
Negating all that it looks cool and if the technical aspects are cleared up I will try it.
I wonder if this functionality could be used to give any standard laptop a similar alarm feature as on the latest macbooks?
liqbase
This should end the need for wasting countless millions on professional seismic research stations. Once again, free software triumphs.
If everybody in China jumped off of a 1 foot step ladder at the same time, would there be a sudden drop in P2P data that might indicate the event?
(of course I didn't RTFA, I'm just trying to avoid work this afternoon by wandering around making incoherent posts)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I like the idea of disaster prevention through reading hard disk vibration and all, but isn't this the sort of thing that professionals should be responsible for?
*** DISK ERROR ***
[A]bort, [R]etry, [F]lee to high ground? : _
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
I tried this out on my Macbook.
http://www.suitable.com/tools/seismac.html
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.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I'm running this thing right now, after downloading from here. 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...
This will work well until a few idiots playing with "MacSaber" make me have to flee town due to the forth coming Tsunami!!
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In the absense of further knowledge, I'm somewhat skeptical about the hard drives being sensitive enough, but I mean that in the original meaning of "skeptical", as in, updated pending further evidence, not forever committed to not believing in it. Clearly, this guy thinks they are sensitive enough.
But if that hurdle can be cleared, processed correctly the data will be very useful. Most objections Slashdotters are going to raise will be irrelevant. Local aberrations will be cancelled out at the supernode, because the aberrations will only appear at that one node. Simple interference at constant frequencies is also easy to detect and mask out with "Introduction to Signal Processing"-level signal processing.
Merging the data together is a bit more challenging but should be doable.
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. The other thing is that the system probably won't work very well with a simple "IsEarthquake" signal coming out of the clients; the supernodes really ought to examine all the data from its clients and then decide if there's an earthquake. Otherwise, several correctly-timed local abberations could all look like "earthquakes", even with completely different characteristics, if all that is going to the supernode is "IsEarthquake". Of course, the real system may already have both of these things covered and the article merely oversimplified.
Upshot is, signal processing can do some very surprising things with data that seems to consist almost entirely of noise, if you have enough data coming in.