What would you do if an earthquake wrecked your hard drive? If you were Michael Stadler, you’d write an open-source program to make a peer-to-peer network of drives into a crude distributed earthquake monitoring system. The software has (unsurprisingly) proved very popular in Asia, and although the system doesn’t have the precise resolution of proper seismographs (and has missed or under-rated a few recent quakes) I imagine that, in the continuing absence of a working ‘official’ system, the inhabitants of Asia are working on the theory that anything is better than nothing.