Sahana was apparently born out of the Indonesia tsunami as a free and collaborative (open source) solution:

It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

A concern would be whether the code is reviewed often and carefully enough to catch backdoors and other gaps. Motives and threats can be very sticky to pin down in disaster recovery, especially in destabilized nations with contentious leadership. Seems like a lot of the success of the system depends on the information reported from various sources,and so I wonder if they’ve considered using a ranking system based on validity of past reports to shore up the integrity. I noticed they mention biometrics but I can’t tell how widely it’s used — perhaps only to authenticate aid workers entering names into the database, rather than to provide signatures for reported information.

Slappingturtle has updated their info on iAlertU; a product meant to help protect Macintosh laptops from casual theft (by tying an alarm feature to its motion-detection capability and video camera).

It might just work as well as car-alarms at reducing theft. Or perhaps worse if Mac users are allowed to assign any old sound file to the alarm. Am I being too sarcastic?

Also seems like a great thing for playing practical jokes on someone.

The British Medical Journal has published a report related to the dangers of using a cell-phone during a lightning storm:

We report the case of a 15 year old girl who was witnessed being struck by lightning while using her mobile phone in a large park in London during stormy weather. The girl has no recollection of events because she had an asystolic cardiac arrest.

She was successfully resuscitated, but one year later she was a wheelchair user with complex physical, cognitive, and emotional problems, as well as a persistent perforation of the left [eardrum] with associated conductive hearing loss on the side she was holding the mobile phone.

Ouch. According to the article a cell-phone conducts the energy of lightning in such a way that it bypasses the human skin’s natural resistance and leads to greater/internal injuries.

Anyone else curious about the surrounding terrain and how many other cell-phone users there were at the time of the strike? I mean, did her particular phone increase the likelihood of being struck, or does it just increase the damage during a strike? So many cell-phones, so few struck by lightning…

I find it very odd that all the reports and news about this seem to confuse the likelihood of being struck by lightning with the increased likelihood of damage during a strike. Very different risks, which invite different user-awareness programs, let alone technical counter-measures.

I hate to say it but this seems like a good segue to making lightning-safe bluetooth headsets for people who have to work on the phone in stormy conditions (like rescue or utility teams). The opposite of lightning rods? WWBFD (What would Ben Franklin do)?

After all, once the proper risk has been highlighted (whether that be damage during a strike or causing a strike, or both) the cost of avoidance can be factored more easily. Some might be willing to pay a bit more for a lightning proof headset in order to be able to bypass the newly associated/reported risks.