Instagram is all grown up. Not just because it now has a big, publicly-traded parent company. Nor am I referring to its unprecedentedly rapid user growth or new Web-based user profiles. In just the last few weeks, something significant has happened. Instagram became a mainstream social network, checked by everyday users during major news events and embraced by media outlets who previously weren't sure what to make of it. 

If there was a watershed moment in Instagram's rise to mainstream legitimacy, it was the arrival of Hurricane Sandy last week. As the superstorm wreaked havoc upon New York and New Jersey, Instagram saw a record-breaking ten photos posted every second. Before long, more than 800,000 images were tagged #sandy, leading to what CEO Kevin Systrom called "the single largest event taking place that was captured on Instagram.” 

Instagram's Twitter Moment

It wasn't just the sheer volume of Sandy photos that made this significant. For the first time, the mobile photo-sharing service was being used and talked about during a major news event - the same way Twitter has been for years. Twitter and Facebook remained every bit as chatty as they've tended to be during events like this. But the uniquely visual nature of Instagram lent itself perfectly to a news event that was all about images - from flooded city streets and ransacked store shelves to the eerily dark Manhattan skyline. 

For the most part, these image were authentic, even if some were mis-tagged and off-topic. Perhaps because it's so closely tied to the functionality of actual cameras, Instagram was less of a breeding ground for deceitfully Photoshopped images than social networks that exist on the desktop first. It was still entirely possible to get fake photos onto Instagram, but not as effortlessly as they could be posted to Twitter or Facebook.

Instagramming The Election

Election day was another watershed moment for Instagram. As Americans headed to the polls to get their free "I Voted" stickers, many were whipping out their smartphones and documenting everything from long lines to their own ballot (which may or may not be legal). 

The last time we had a presidential election in the United States, the iPhone was a year old, Android was brand new and there was no such thing as an iPad. Instagram was still two years away from being launched. How things have changed in four years. 

For its Instagramming the Election feature The New York Times is using the Storify interface to display hand-curated, user-generated images tagged with #NYTelection. That the nation's 161-year-old newspaper of record is utilizing a 2-year-old social network to solicit reader-submitted photography is a testament not just to Instagram's explosive growth, but to its rapid rise to legitimacy. When the app first landed in the App Store, it was something many professional photographers frowned upon. 

That began to change only within the last year or so. At the Online News Association (ONA) conference in September, educator and popular Instagrammer Richard Koci Hernandez led a panel about how media organizations can use Instagram, trying his best to explode the myth that doing so was somehow "cheating." His audience was mostly receptive, but not everybody at ONA was sold on Instagram as a tool for news publishers.

Across the industry, it's still something media outlets are figuring out what to do with, and the payoff is not immediately clear. Still, with more than 100 million users and its prominence in two recent historic events, Instagram is now officially impossible to ignore.  

For the first time in history, nearly every citizen of a U.S. state will be given access to participate in their general election today via email and faxing. But this special event is overshadowed by serious doubts as to security of all types of electronic voting, much less relying on email.

The New Jersey Experiment

New Jersey's Christie administration made the announcement for the emergency policy change on November 3, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The idea is to permit registered voters in the Garden State to vote electronically using a system that Military and Overseas voters already use under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). Actually, Jersey's emergency plan is even less restrictive than the state's existing procedure, which usually requires absentee voters under UOCAVA to mail in a signed affidavit.

According to the Governor's office, "displaced voters may submit a mail-in ballot application either by email or fax to their county clerk. Once an application is approved, the clerk will electronically send a ballot to the voter by either fax or email in accordance to the voter's preference. Voters must return their electronic ballot – by fax or email – no later than November 6, 2012, at 8 p.m."

New Jersey voters can also vote by provisional ballot in counties other than their original residence if they prefer.

The Garden State's extraordinary efforts come in direct response to Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall in New Jersey a little over a week ago and caused widespread damage to polling places and residents' homes in a critical moment on the electoral calendar.

If such a storm had hit at any other time of the year, or even in an off-election year, it is not clear New Jersey would have taken these dramatic steps. For election watchers, though, New Jersey's move is a grand experiment, a chance to find out how well the process works and what, if any, flaws crop up.

Hacking The Electronic Vote

This is a big deal. Online voting is not something that happens with any regularity in the U.S. Currently, only 28 U.S. states allow email and fax voting - even for for UOCAVA-eligible voters. Another five states allow fax-only ballots for the same demographic. Of these 33 states that have electronic absentee voting in place for Military and Overseas voters, only one - Arizona - also provides a Web portal for qualified voters to use.

In fact, despite promises of convenience, fast tabulation of votes and improved ease-of-use, there are big issues with all kinds of electronic voting (online or at the polling place). The biggest issue: security. 

According to Verified Voting, a non-partisan watchdog site, the best election processes are those that include some sort of paper record of voting activity that can be audited if there is ever a question of fraudulent activity. But most electronic voting options don't leave a paper trail.

Given that many state legislatures seem so concerned about voter fraud that they are enacting voter ID laws, it seems odd that the same groups seem more than happy to use voting systems that could be potentially hacked on a much larger scale - with no way to gather evidence to prove whether it happened or not.

On Monday, Roger Johnston, head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory, posted an article on Popular Science outlining how simple it would be to grab some equipment from an electronics store and execute a man-in-the-middle attack on a touchscreen voting machine - for as little as $10 and a Saturday afternoon.

"The attacks require physical access. This is easy for insiders, who program the machines for an election or install them. And we would argue it's typically not that hard for outsiders," Johnston wrote. "A lot of voting machines are sitting around in the church basement, the elementary school gymnasium or hallway, unattended for a week or two before the election."

Decentralization Limits The Damage

Elections in the U.S. are typically handled at the county level, with individual Clerk's offices managing voter registration and the election process in the various counties and parishes. The good news is that would require hackers to break into a multitude of different machine types - a one-attack-fits-all strategy would not work.

The bad news - as mentioned above - is that with the exception of optical scan devices and electronic voting machines capable of printing a record of a voter's choices, there's no paper trail to audit. If these machines were tampered with, there is very little chance for such tampering to be immediately detected, unless the hacker is dumb enough to over-weigh the tampered votes of one candidate over another. Given the relative ease in which Johnston and his team created hacks for voting machines, this kind of tampering is very much a real danger.

A Really Big Target

This, more than any reason, is why the U.S. electorate has not attempted a "pure" online election. With electronic voting machines, at least there's still a physical device you have to hack, which does not scale very well from the attackers' viewpoint. But a truly online election, hitting one central server? That might be too tempting a target for hackers to resist. And a successful hack could change millions of votes.

Take the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethic's rather daring public challenge in 2010: After setting up an Internet voting pilot to enable overseas voters to cast their ballots, the District invited all comers to try to break into the system and compromise its results.

In just a few hours, a team from The University of Michigan found a vulnerability and had inserted fictitious characters into the mock election's ballot, even gaining control of the cameras watching the election servers to make sure their activity wasn't visually spotted. The winner of the election? Futurama robot Bender.

"Our experience with the D.C. pilot system demonstrates one of the key dangers in many Internet voting designs: one small mistake in the configuration or implementation of the central voting servers or their surrounding network infrastructure can easily undermine the legitimacy of the entire election," concluded the academic paper outlining the attack.

Today's New Jersey experiment is a last-minute attempt to cope by a state battered by Hurricane Sandy. Given the very real security concerns surrounding electronic elections, don't expect it to be the norm anytime soon. Hopefully, at least, it won't be another object lesson in what can go wrong with electronic voting.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

As the recovery from Hurricane Sandy moves into its next phases, companies and organizations that depend on the Internet are beginning to ask the hard questions about the effects of the superstorm. Outfits directly affected are wondering how to keep from getting hammered again, while others around the world are looking to make sure they're not vulnerable to these kinds of disasters.

The obvious answer is a cloud-based deployment for websites and services that takes full advantage of the cloud's elasticity and redundancies. But that's been true for a while. So what's the hold up?

The Problem Is Clear

The images and stories that came out of Lower Manhattan put the problem in sharp relief, to paraphrase New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Locating so many Internet service providers in one geographic area put a lot of Internet resources in serious risk. It was a gamble that didn't pay off for many data center operators and their online customers, thanks to flooding that knocked out power - sometimes along with the backup generators and fuel supply pumps.

By Saturday, things were getting back to normal, as larger Internet providers like Equinix and Internap were operating either on utility power or stable generator power. But this wasn't a uniform recovery - Datagram, which hosts prominent websites like Huffington Post, Gawker and BuzzFeed, lost the basement generators at its 33 Whitehall Street facility and did not receive a new backup generator until 2pm Friday.

The full impact of the storm is still being measured, as recovery operations continue. But to give an idea of how may sites were dropped off the Internet after Sandy made landfall, take a look at the chart below of IP addresses from the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. Immediately after Sandy's landfall a week ago, the number of announced systems dropped by 400, which cut off more than 2,000 separate sites on the Internet using unique IP addresses.

APNIC Chart of IPv4 Addresses.

The efforts to keep or restore those data centers' connectivity to the Internet are tales of can-do, sleeve-rolling, American hard work and ingenuity - and they should be applauded for making the best of a bad situation.

At the same time, as the tech community gawks at pictures of bucket brigades of petrochemicals and sea-water flooded basement, its obvious that this is not the best solution. The time for excuses justifying these kinds of heroic, yet ultimately unnecessary last-minute saves is over.

When The Train Comes, Move

The Herculean efforts of the data centers whacked by the storm bring to mind another mythical character, King Sisyphus, the rather wicked soul condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down just before it reaches the top. And while the affected ISPs, websites and their customers may not be wicked, they are still facing a Sisyphean situation if they go back to the way things were.

The fact is, if this storm didn't wake companies up to the importance of using off-site public clouds as at least a backup for their online presence, then one has to wonder if what it would take to jog the IT staff into taking action. Tthat's true for companies in Lower Manhattan - and everywhere else. Your company may be located in an area prone to hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes - or you could be victimized by human error or a malicious hack or even physical attack. The plain truth is that no company is truly safe from the possibility of disaster - so you have to be prepared to get the hell out of the way when trouble comes, and to have a way to get back on your feet if you do get knocked down.

The key to doing that quickly and efficiently is to remember that your website is on a network - it does not have to be tied down to one vulnerable server in one vulnerable building.

Cloud Costs Coming Down

It's one thing to say "just get your site on the cloud" and quite another to make that happen. Sites have to be architected in such a way they can be migrated reasonably. Regulatory compliance may also play a big factor for certain industries. Plus there's the cost of replicating data across multiple locations.

But that cost is not as much of issue as it used to be, according to Robert Offley, CEO of managed service provider CentriLogic. Five years ago, the cost of replicating a site was "six to eight times higher than now," Offley explained. Today site replication is a far more cost-effective option.

Simple site replication is just one way to take advantage of the cloud. There's a full spectrum of cloud-based solutions, anything from backing up your sites' database in an off-site facility to full-on multisite cloud architecture for a website that can adjust smoothly from server to server, based on regional network and data center outages. There's a whole host of options out there that aren't that expensive - not when compared to the loss of traffic and revenue that will hit your business when things do go wrong.

What Are You Waiting For?

Amazingly, it's still a lesson that needs to be taught. As the events after Sandy show, there are a whole lot of businesses, including tech-savvy organizations who should really know better, that haven't taken the time and effort to put active backups in place - much less to move everything into the cloud.

If your business is a storefront, you can't just pick up and move when disaster strikes. But if your business is on the Internet, you most certainly can move your bits when the time comes - or better yet right now.

Not taking advantage of the very thing that makes cloud so valuable, the capability to keep your site up and running no matter what happens in any single location, is a waste of the available technology and very short-sighted… to the point of stupidity.

Objections will be raised to this argument, of course, chiefly that clouds aren't perfect solutions, either. First off, cloud facilities can be whacked like any other data center, as Amazon and its customers have found out quite a bit this year. Nor do clouds offer duplication and high-availability services out of the box, as it were. Customers, namely Web admins and developers, have to build their sites to take full advantage of the cloud, or otherwise it's just another server sitting in the building somewhere waiting to get knocked offline.

But when Web teams plan for success in the cloud, elastic services offer a better 21st Century method to avoid or respond to disasters. Certainly a lot better than waiting for a bucket brigade.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Of the many things that were hard about watching Hurricane Sandy from the West Coast, the worst for me was how easy it would have been to stop watching. But I couldn’t make myself turn off the Internet. I watched with my eyes wide open. And I’m glad I did, because I found ways to help.

Twitter is such a visceral force during an emergency like this. You can feel the fear swelling and the storm rushing in. It’s distracting. It’s stressful. But if it’s too much, you can lock your phone and go for a walk, and it’s 68 degrees and sunny out. And ahh, doesn’t it feel good to be off the grid, back in real life?

Hurricane Awesome Weather has made landfall in San Francisco. Category 5. Extreme sunshine and joy warning. Evacuate your homes immediately.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) October 28, 2012

The Internet had a dark side during the hurricane, and it was easy to get sucked in. So many fake photos went viral that pros had to work hard to sort them out. Stupid trolls tweeted false information in a time of crisis, tricking journalists and social media managers into sharing it. It was gross.

The real news was bad enough. It was gut-wrenching to watch. I saw strangers and dear friends in trouble, and it was hard to concentrate on my airy Bay Area responsibilities. But I’m no good at disconnecting when something major is happening.

Appreciating The Simple Things

As the storm churned on, I started to see a new thread emerge from people in New York and other storm-stricken places. I realize it’s not representative of everybody, and I know that the very ability to tweet something like this means that the tweeter got very lucky compared to people in Staten Island or Red Hook whose neighborhoods were destroyed. But more and more people in my streams started expressing their appreciation for the forced disconnection from the media madness.

My family—w/o power since Sunday—now wants to start going without power for a night/month. Wonder if Sandy will have other psychic benefits.

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) November 1, 2012

It'd be interesting to commemorate this past week every year, having people work from home, slowing things down, appreciating the basics.

— justindurazzo (@justindurazzo) November 3, 2012

Then we began to organize. The Twitter channel @OccupySandy began to appear in my timeline. Occupy, that wayward, ground-up movement to fix our society, suddenly had a bright and worthy cause. I watched as the East Coast people in my life found help and found ways to help.

This is what mutual aid looks like pt ii. #sandyvolunteer rockaways, food, clothing, care. @occupysandy @occupywallst twitter.com/StrikeDebt/sta…

— StrikeDebt (@StrikeDebt) November 3, 2012

And then then off-of-the-Internet, into-the-streets spirit started to spread westward. Leah Reich announced a Red Cross blood drive in San Francisco that she, Heathar Champ, and Amber Costley are working to turn into a grand campaign with its own website. Now, thanks to their initiative, I can do more to help than retweet and blog. I can give actual blood from my body.

I have my reservations about being too wired in to virtual worlds, but all in all, after the too-real devastation of Hurricane Sandy, I’d say the Internet did a pretty good job.

Lead image via @OccupySandy

Another week, another influential troll publicly shamed.

This week’s most famous troll is Twitter user @ComfortablySmug, the “villainous” spreader of fake news during the height of Hurricane Sandy.

Unlike the unmasking of Violentacrez, which exposed a man anyone would guess was an Internet troll anyway, the big reveal of 29-year-old Shashank Tripathi as a digital prankster was downright unsettling.

Take note: Even hedge fund analysts and former political consultants for GOP candidates troll. And even non-digital outlets now write about trolling. If it's this popular, as they say in the IFC hit show Portlandia, trolling is now “over.”

Tripathi is currently being “pilloried on the Internet,” all because his tweet about the floor of the NYSE being flooded was picked up by Reuters, along with other journalists who didn’t bother fact-checking the false tidbit before broadcasting it on national television.

New York City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. was so upset by Tripathi’s bad and inappropriate jokes during the height of Hurricane Sandy that the politican publicly threatened the troll with prosecution. Tripathi, perhaps learning damage mitigation tactics from Violentacrez, publicly apologized via Twitter almost immediately and resigned from his GOP consulting position before he could be fired.

Tripathi’s trolling has been described as the digital equivalent of screaming “fire!” in a crowded movie theater, an offense that in the real world is against the law. Critics make this comparison by writing “Con Ed, the MTA, and Wall Street sources had to take time out of the crisis situation to refute” Tripanthi’s false claims.

But was Tripanthi really diverting resources during a natural disaster or leading people to their deaths with false information?

Heidi Moore over at The Guardian doesn’t think so, mainly because social media managers of Twitter accounts are there precisely to debunk rumors. Said social media managers are not trained or paid to “spend their time pulling bodies out of the wreckage.” (She also doubts if people left their homes in a panic due to Tripathi’s tweets.)

Rather, if anyone should be blamed, Moore writes, it’s journalists for being bad at the Internet: A simple Google search reveals immediately that the account is a well known troll. Even reading additional tweets on @ComfortablySmug's stream reveal he is not to be taken seriously.

The mainstream media being bad at the Internet isn’t a new thing, but its sudden interest in unmasking trolls is. The days when trolling referred to an online activity exclusive to 4chan, Reddit and Anonymous are long gone. Academics are now studying this form of digital hazing and writing dissertations on it.

What's the point in being a troll if everyone is doing it, or at least writing about it?

I hereby declare the digital shenanigans known as “Trolling” officially over.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

There is nothing like a disaster to bring people together. In a rare show of decency, AT&T and T-Mobile have teamed up to provide their networks to people affected by Superstorm Sandy this last week. How long will the partnership last and what does it mean for the future of cellular collaboration - during natural disasters and otherwise?

AT&T and T-Mobile will combine networks to offer non-roaming calls and data on whichever network happens to be available in a given area of the Sandy-ravaged East Coast. Consumers will not notice the difference as the service will be managed by AT&T and T-Mobile on the back end. All consumers of T-Mobile and AT&T need to do is dial out, and the carriers will take care of the rest. 

AT&T and T-Mobile can achieve this temporary integration because the carriers share a common standard for their 2G/3G cellular services. Both are built on the ubiquitous GSM/UMTS standard and their networks are very similar from a tower and spectrum standpoint. Those similarities are one of the reasons that AT&T bid $39 billion to take over T-Mobile in 2011 before the Department of Justice and Federal Communication Commission expressed reservations and AT&T withdrew its offer. 

Something Needed To Be Done

According to the FCC, a quarter of cell towers in 10 Mid-Atlantic to North Eastern states from Virginia to Massachusetts were knocked out due to Sandy. Some were damaged by wind, while others, such as several from Verizon in New York City, were affected by flood waters. For its part, Verizon has deployed four Wireless Emergency Communication Centers in New York (on Staten Island) and New Jersey. Verizon also has several mobile “stores on wheels” in the area. The company is offering device charging and free domestic phone calls to local residents. Verizon said that as of this afternoon that 96% of its service sites in the area of Sandy are operational.

The collaboration between AT&T and T-Mobile could present a blueprint for how mobile carriers handle future natural disasters. Verizon and Sprint also share a common cellular standard and could team up when needed to strengthen network coverage during emergencies. 

A Painful Case Study

Hurricane Sandy provides an interesting case study in how the cellular infrastructure of the U.S. can withstand disaster situations. The good news is that most of the carriers’ towers and infrastructure survived - providing a semblance of coverage for most people. In addition, the carriers have mobilized quickly to repair service outages. The collaboration between T-Mobile and AT&T shows that, for at least a couple of days, the carriers can put aside their differences for the common good.

The bad news is that the parts of the carrier’s networks that did not go down, quickly became congested with voice and data transmissions. So even many people with serve got  “circuits busy” messages or loss of data connections during and after the storm.

It is hard to imagine a storm much worse than Sandy, stretching out over such as wide and populated area. If there was truly a storm to test the carrier’s capability to provide service during times of distress, Sandy was it. 

Miraculously, my block in northern Philadelphia was spared from Hurricane Sandy's worst. As word of nearby power outages spread on Twitter, I was certain I'd wake up to a dark, powerless house on Tuesday. Fortunately for my mother - a last minute refugee from South Jersey who breathes with the aid of an oxygen machine - that didn't happen. It also allowed us to stay up to date with the latest news, tweets, all of the Instagram photos and video footage of Sandy's wrath. Throughout the experience, not once did I regret not having a cable TV subscription. 

For the 48 hours that my mother and sister were hunkered down with a friend and me in my Philadelphia row house, we used my iPad and other mobile devices to stay in touch with the outside world. Combined with the Apple TV and its AirPlay feature, it completely eliminated the need for cable or even a broadcast antenna. As cord cutters, we felt totally plugged in. 

Philadelphia's local ABC affiliate streams news broadcasts for free through its iPad app, which allowed us to tune into the kinds of dispatches that only a local broadcast news team can deliver during a natural disaster. Still, it is 2012 and that format very much has its limits. While local newscasters diligently surveyed storm damage at the Jersey shore, other news was breaking live on Twitter, much of it accompanied by photos and video footage. Flooded Manhattan streets. The Con-Ed plant explosion. New York's pitch-black skyline. All of it was unfolding on Twitter in real-time, as news now does.

Hashtags like #hurricanesandy and #sandyinphilly made it easy to break the firehose down into geographic chunks. And it was all displayed on my 46-inch HDTV for everyone to see. Of course, we had to be careful about trusting unverified sources and read tweets with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

Searching For Crucial Details Online 

During severe weather, our information needs often extend beyond the scope of what local broadcast news or even free-flowing social media can meet. Sometimes, we need to know very specific things that newscasters may or may not get around to talking about. Is the Garden State Parkway closed? Are the roads leading to my mother's apartment complex flooded? 

With emergency hotlines jammed, the best source for details like that is often the Internet. Some counties publish up-to-date information on their own websites. More often, they rely on social networks to get the word out. In far too many cases, the only place to get updates from local government is through reports published by newspapers, whose websites can vary wildly in terms quality and how frequently they're updated. Hunting for those granular details can seem like a wild goose chase, but searching the Web on a big screen - with other people - is more effective and more satisfyingthan sitting, staring and waiting for a news anchor to tell you the specific thing you need to know. 

Connecting With Family Over FaceTime And Skype

For people holed up indoors during a storm, video chat offers a new and comforting way to connect with loved ones in other areas. And using FaceTime on the iPad and beaming it to a television via AirPlay makes it easier for groups of people to do this without crowding around somebody's laptop. The same is true of Skype or whatever your video chat app of choice happens to be.

My brother and his family live in a part of Massachusetts that was affected by the storm, albeit not as seriously as New Jersey. Using FaceTime, I called his iPhone from my iPad and propped the tablet up in front of the TV, to which the video chat screen was being AirPlayed. This allowed us all to sit on the couch and have a conversation with my brother and his wife while our adorable three-year-old niece played hide-and-go-seek with herself in the background. Yes, we could have easily called them on the phone the old-fashioned way, but video chat allowed us to see their faces and interact with them - difference that's all the more meaningful when you're locked inside and stressing about possible storm damage. 

Tablet-Based Entertainment Without Cable

When the call was over, it took about five seconds and a few gestures to switch back to whatever streaming video we felt like watching. It wasn't just breaking news and social media feeds, either. When my family needed a break from pictures of devastation, Hulu Plus, Netflix and a host of other video content apps were at the ready with virtually unlimited hours of mindless entertainment, including recent episodes of current TV shows. No cable bill required. 

I happened to be using Apple products to do all of this, but the same could be done with various combinations of tablets, smartphones and platforms like Google TV, Roku or Boxee. In my case, Apple's famed ease-of-use came in handy, since I had plenty of work to do upstairs and had to hand off the iPad to less tech-savvy members of my family. The iOS interface can actually end up being easier to understand and use than many TV remote controls. 

We lucked out and the power stayed on. If it had gone out, at least some of the highest-priority communication and information-seeking tasks we needed to do still could have been accomplished from our smartphones. For as long as the batteries - and cellular networks - lasted.   

In the age of cloud computing, it's an archaic thought: The livelihood of some popular websites currently rests on bucket brigades carrying diesel fuel up multiple flights of stairs just to keep generators running. But that's the reality as Lower Manhattan struggles with massive power outages and flooded understructures in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

It's a decidedly 17th-century solution to a 21st-century problem. But it's the only way to get fuel to generators that are located in powerless high-rises when elevators are out of service and basement fuel pumps are incapacitated due to flooding.

For site admins at Fog Creek Software in New York, the solution is clear, albeit arduous: When diesel is delivered to their building at 75 Broad Street, the fuel is hand-delivered to the generators on the 17th floor via bucket brigade, giving the online service provider more hours of uptime while basement flooding is cleared and the building awaits power restoration from ConEd. Meanwhile, users of services like Trello, FogBugz and Copilot are basically in a holding pattern, knowing that one missed fuel delivery or downed generator is all that stands between uptime and downtime right now.

[Disclosure: ReadWrite is a Trello user.]

A Too-Common Tale Of Woe

Fog Creek is not alone in its situation. ISPs Peer1 and Internap both maintain facilities in the same building. Fog Creek and fellow ISP tenant Squarespace are working with Peer1 on the bucket brigade to keep servers going. Internap is reporting that since their fuel pumps were swamped, the facility was shut down after the generators' fuel ran out.

The story is being repeated across the New York Metro area, as data centers switch to back-up power on diesel generators as expected. But what no one counted on was the massive flooding that would compromise fuel systems and generators across the area hit by Sandy.

ISP Datagram was shoved off the grid Monday night when its 33 Whitehall facility had its basement flooded. This shut down high-volume sites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Buzzfeed. Gawker and Gizmodo are still running "emergency" pared-down sites, but Buzzfeed managed to get itself back up on its feet as early as Tuesday.

Clouds Can Help, Too

How was this done? Probably by the one method that every single Web customer in Lower Manhattan should be thinking about just as soon as the lights come on: BuzzFeed got its website on the cloud.

"In a nut, our engineering team moved everything over to Amazon Web Services, with one developer working overnight despite a tree falling through his roof," wrote BuzzFeed's Matt Buchanan.

Granted, it's not easy to just up and replicate your site to a cloud-based system. BuzzFeed's team was aided by the fact that much of the site's content was already replicated on Amazon, so they were halfway there.

"You might wonder why, of course, BuzzFeed, Gawker, and others aren't already all aboard the cloud train, ready to switch to different servers at the drop of a hat," Buchanan concluded. "The fact is, Amazon cloud service and other services like it weren't around when BuzzFeed and sites like Gawker and Huffington Post were architected years ago. If the site was built today, the architecture might look a bit more cloud-like than having a huge data center based in downtown Manhattan."

Hindsight has the benefit of being 20/20, it's true. But after the waters from Sandy recede, look for a lot more websites to gain a renewed focus on the cloud.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Although Sandy continues to be primarily a flooding event, High, sustained winds and some large fires are complicating life on and off the Internet.

Service issues for YouTube were widely reported Monday at 7:30 p.m. EDT, and were intermittent throughout the rest of the night, until they ended around 6 a.m. today. Tumblr's problems started at about the same time, with intermittent outages through the night.

Tumblr is based in Manhattan, bit it is likely that the social network's systems are co-located elsewhere. Other New York-based firms, like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Gawker likely have suffered Sandy's wrath. BuzzFeed was down last night through 8:30 a.m. today, HuffPost is in station-keeping mode due to a power outage at its offices, and Gawker is down.

The infrastructure of the Internet is solid so far, although edge-of-network problems continue to plague the East Coast, sending ripples  across the continent. According to the Internet Traffic Report (ITR), North American traffic was rated 67 out of 100 at 8:45 a.m. EDT today, with several Internet routers across the country reporting 100% packet loss. While many of the affected routers are on the Eastern Seaboard, several are not, which could mean there are systemic issues other than Sandy affecting traffic.

According to the ITR, traffic speed on the Internet dropped sharply from a rating of 69 just after 4:50 p.m. EDT Monday, just as winds from Sandy grew dangerous on the coast. Because of the size of the storm, high winds range as far west as Chicago, with scattered power and telecommunication outages reported throughout the immense affected area.

Sometime around 3:30 a.m., packet loss spiked briefly, indicating a significant disruption of Internet service, the cause of which was not clear.

Data centers in the affected region seemed to fare well.

Outage Analyzer indicated a few scattered outages, including a suspected outage at pro-market.net that affected 174 domains, and an earlier outage at ad provider ContextWeb. KDDI's Northeast U.S. servers also went down for two hours at 9:12 p.m., potentially impacting 675 domains. All of these servers were located in northern New Jersey, and as of post time, the problems were resolved.

Downrightnow is reporting some issues with Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Tumblr. While downrightnow is a useful tool, it gathers some of its data from anecdotal complaints on social-media services like Twitter. Given the scattered router problems on the East Coast, it is likely that customers' access to those services are only degraded.

Those who rely on Amazon Web Services will be pleased to note that their services are smoothly running in North America, with no problems reported. Google Apps and Google's App engine cloud service are also showing green lights across the board.

As Sandy moves north, dumping rain and pounding with winds, there is still a chance that some data centers will be affected by the storm. Certainly local and regional Internet service on the edge of the network will be affected, either through power or direct disruptions. For now, major service disruptions seem to have been avoided.

[Updated]

Equinix, one of the maintainers of a New York City-area Internet exchange, has released details on how it is weathering the storm. According to Sam Kapoor, Chief Global Operations Officr, "All sites in New York/New Jersey, and several in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., experienced power outages and customer loads were transferred to generator power.  All of these sites have at least 48 hours of fuel onsite with fuel vendors on standby to deliver more as needed. As of this morning, some of these sites are back on utility power, while some remain on generators.

"NY9 experienced a failed generator that impacted service to several customers. We made repairs and service was returned this morning. The site remains on generator power," Kapoor added. "Sites in New York and Washington, D.C. experienced water leaks. While most were minor and quickly contained, at least one leak at a New York site impacted a customer. We are currently working onsite with the customer to contain the issue."

Equinix clearly isn't taking their responsibilities lightly, either.

"To minimize the storm’s impact and prepare wherever possible, we tested generators, filled fuel tanks and made arrangements for backup fuel, arranged to have full time staff onsite at each facility to maintain operations, secured hotel rooms near the sites, and brought  in cots, MREs, and other emergency supplies, so that our Operations staff could comfortably support customers even in extreme conditions," Kapoor explained.

Image Courtesy of NASA

As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the U.S. East Coast, the high concentration of the country's Internet infrastructure in the path of the Category 1 storm means it is reasonable to expect potential outages of Internet and web sites through the next few days. But which providers and connections are most at risk?

(See Also: Preparing Your Smartphone - And Yourself - For Hurricane Sandy)

Sandy is expected, as midday Monday, to make landfall somewhere near Atlantic City, NJ sometime Monday evening. Though the storm is officially classified as Category 1 (maximum sustained winds from 74-95 mph), there's no escaping the fact that this is one large storm: according to Dr. Jeff Masters at Wunderground.com, "Sandy's tropical storm-force winds span an area of ocean 940 miles in diameter."

Internet Exchanges Threatened

With such a massive footprint, there is very little on the East Coast that won't be touched by Sandy in the next few days. Of particular interest to business and commerce is the status of their websites. Due to the positioning of six Internet exchanges in the vicinity of Sandy, many datacenters and cloud service providers could be potentially knocked out by the effects of the storm.

If you have ever wondered why there are so many cloud service providers in the Washington, DC, area, you can thank the Equinix Exchange in Ashburn, VA, an Internet exchange that ranks the DC area as 11th in the world for traffic, according to TeleGeography.com. The DC Metro area is on the very southern edge of the latest forecast track for Sandy, and even an indirect hit here could affect cloud service providers hosting thousands of websites.

Nearby Reston, VA, for instance, is home to datacenters owned by Iland Cloud Infrastructure, Sevtex, VPS Farm and one you may have heard of: Amazon Web Services, which handles high-profile websites such as Netflix, Pinterest and Heroku.

Ashburn itself is home to one of GoGrid's datacenters, and in Washington, DC lives mega-hosting service SoftLayer CloudLayer.

Farther up the Atlantic coast, the New York metro area (ranked 5th in world Internet traffic) has five Internet exchanges, and cloud providers like Linode, cloud3k, and Atlantic Metro are also based in the area. (See the end of the article for a complete list of cloud servicer providers as gathered from Data Center Map.)

Prep Time Is Critical

Fortunately, given the amount of time that these cloud providers and their customers have had to prepare for the onslaught of the storm, connectivity should be maintained for sites using these service providers. But individual businesses who host on-site in the area will have to rely on their own plans to maintain power and connection.

Based on the path of the storm, the New York and northern New Jersey datacenters would seem to be at the most risk right now, as high winds, local flooding and sustained power problems could eventually overwhelm any uninterrupted-power scenarios a provider could think of. If the Internet exchanges themselves go down, the effect on commercial and personal Internet traffic would be significant, and could cause problems for any emergency services relying on Internet communication to broadcast information to area residents.

With luck, Internet connectivity will be maintained, and online business will carry on. This will be the largest reliability and survivability test telecomm and Internet providers have had to face in a long time, how they prepared will make a big difference in whether they pass or fail.

Cloud Service Providers In Path Of Sandy

Delaware

Wilmington: IPR International

District of Columbia

Washington: SoftLayer CloudLayer

Maryland

Baltimore: OCOSA Cloud

New Jersey

Hudson County: Atlantic Metro vCLOUD

Newark: Linode

North Bergen: Atlantic Metro vCLOUD

Piscataway: cloud3k

Secaucus: infiniCloud logicworks

New York

New York: Atlantic Metro vCLOUD, Inerail, infiniCloud logicworks, Qube Virtual Data Center

Pennsylvania

Bethlehem: dbsi

Breinigsville: dbsi

Philadelphia: dbsi

Reading: IPR International

Virginia

Ashburn: GoGrid

Culpepper: Terremark Worldwide, Inc.

Reston: Amazon EC2, Iland Cloud Infrastructure, Sevtex, VPS Farm LLC

Vienna: Open Hosting

Internet Exchange Centers in Path of Sandy

Ashburn, VA: EQIX-ASH Equinix Exchange Ashburn

New York, NY: Big-APE The Big Apple Peering Exchange, EQIX-NYC (Equinix Exchange New York), NYIIX (New York International Internet eXchange), PAIX-NYC (Peering And Internet eXchange New York), TIE-NYC (Telx Internet Exchange New York)

Image Courtesy of NASA

These days, we rely on our gadgets for everything. Perhaps too much. That is why when we see a mammoth storm bearing down, such as Hurricane Sandy is this week, we think of the basics. Non-perishable food. Lots and lots of water. Batteries. But, our smartphones and tablets can also help us prepare for the brunt of the storm and make sure we stay connected to family, friends and vital information.

Major Problem: Batteries

We live in a world where all of our gadgets run on batteries with a fairly short daily lifespan. An iPhone can remain on “standby” mode for 225 hours, but that is only if you are not really using it. If you are talking on your smartphone or using apps, most only have a daily battery life of eight to 10 hours. If an extended power outage is a significant reality, here are a couple precautions to take:

• Charge your smartphones and tablets to their maximum before you lose power.
• Invest in extra cellphone batteries with rechargeable units.
• If you have an iPhone and cannot replace your battery, invest into a third-party battery pack, like the Morphie Juice Pack. 
• Buy a smartphone charger for your car. If your house loses power for an extended time, you can still draw power from your car battery. 

Now fully charged and ready for an outage: 3 laptops, 2 iPhones, 4 Mophie juice packs, iPad, iPod, mobile hot spot. Bring it on, #Sandy.

— Jim Brady (@jimbradysp) October 29, 2012

Staying Dry

Water is the enemy of your gadgets. There is little you can do if you face major flooding but you can keep your gadgets dry. Investing in watertight pouches that you can throw your laptop/smartphone/tablet could prove very valuable. Such pouches are available at most camping supply stores. In lieu of watertight pouches, sealable plastic baggies can offer a modicum of protection in a pinch.

For your home, it is important to try and keep all of your wires out of water. Move your power supplies, Wi-Fi routers and other electrical supplies off the floor and onto shelves. Insulation foam can cover other wires and wonders can be worked with a mixture of duct tape, staples and nails. On the other hand, if you have water in your house, you are likely facing more significant problems than keeping your gadgets dry.

Staying Connected

If you lose power, there is a good chance you are going to lose your wireline communications capabilities too. That means your home Wi-Fi router is going to be useless, sometimes even if you have an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) device backing up your home computer. The good news is that wireless communication infrastructure is more flexible and less prone to going down during major disasters (flood, fire and wind damage are threats to wireless towers, so they are certainly not infallible). 

The major U.S. cellular carriers are preparing for Sandy by deploying teams towards the projected path of the storm, stocking up on rechargeable batteries and car chargers and working with state and local emergency workers to make sure vital communication remains intact.

The wireless carriers encourage people to use text messaging if the voice networks experience congestion or go down entirely. Investing in a femtocell in your house or office might not be a bad idea either to boost your connection in case your local tower experiences problems. 

Of course, there are other ways to stay connected if you find your smartphone completely useless, either through loss of cellular connection or battery power. After all, people did survive these types of storms for years before the advent of smartphones. Shortwave communications, like walkee-talkees are always a good idea to have around the house. As are battery powered radios.

If you have a UPS device and it keeps your system up and running with Wi-Fi intact, consider opening up that Wi-Fi connection to your neighbors that do not have a connection. Neighbors banding together to share resources is a great way to get through any natural disaster and make sure that people can connect to vital information as well as family and friends.  

Apps For Preparedness & Information

There are a variety of apps that help you prepare. A couple good ones:

• FEMA – The Federal Emergency Management Agency has an app for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. The app has maps with FEMA Disaster Recovery locations and shelters, checklists for planning and other vital information.
• Wunderground – The Weather Underground is an interactive weather map for iOS and Android. Provides real-time updates from hyper-local destinations to get you the information you need for your neighborhood.
• TuneIn – TuneIn has the ability to turn your smartphone into a radio to listen to your local stations. If you lose power but still have a cellular data connection, you can still keep up with your local news and information.