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Explosion, Fire Cause Data Meltdown in Calgary

The Shaw building in Calgary lets off a little steam. (Image: mdaines/Flickr)

Downtown Calgary, Alberta, is going into its second day without complete use of government services, after some sort of explosion knocked out internet service provider Shaw Communications and a host of other nearby businesses.

The explosion kicked off a fire on the 13th floor of Shaw’s office building. A spokesman for the Calgary fire department says that it took firefighters some time to gain access to the floor, considering the amount of electrical equipment that had been engulfed by the flames. In addition, Wednesday was a hot day in Calgary, so crews were constantly relieving one another for water breaks.

“A flash fire triggered sprinklers and a power shutdown. Recovery restoration under the command of the city fire dept is under way,” read a Shaw tweet during the disaster.

The fire department spokesman could not comment on specifics of what exactly was effected in the fire — and Shaw did not respond to a request for comment — but considering the description and level of outages, the fire was likely located in crucial data transfer and telecommunication areas. Even Shaw’s public website was down as of Friday afternoon, except a simple homepage with updates on restoring service.

The effects spread across the city. The Calgary Herald reports that nearby hospitals lost power and that IBM Canada, which leases three floors in the Shaw building, keeps a data center which provides outsourced services for clients like Service Alberta. IBM did not return calls seeking comment.

The CBC reports that the fire not only knocked out IBM’s offices, but left up to 30,000 landline telephone customers unable to call 911. Exasperating the problem, the city also lost us of its 3-11 informational service which left many customers completely in the dark about when they’d get communication back.

The CBC says the Shaw building was designed with backup networks, but the explosion damaged those as well.

The crews finally finished fighting late Wednesday evening. The exact causes of the fire are still under investigation. No one was hurt.

“We expect to be fully functional by mid-day,” Shaw said Friday.

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Apple Does About-Face on Green EPEAT Ratings

The inside of a MacBook Pro with Retina display. Photo: iFixit

Just two days after dropping out of the green EPEAT ratings system for electronics manufacturers, Apple has decided it’s not so bad after all.

Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield said Friday that the company was reversing its position. This comes after Apple was hit with an eco-backlash over the decision. “We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system,” Mansfield wrote on Apple’s website. “I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”

The EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) system measures the greenness of computers, monitors, and laptops. It gives consumers and businesses a shorthand rating — an easy way to know whether they’re buying electronics that are recyclable and built in an environmentally friendly way.

But on Wednesday Apple dropped EPEAT certification for 39 products, saying, essentially, that it felt that its gear was already green enough. “Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials,” the company said at the time.

Skeptics took this as a sign that Apple was planning to do more of the kind of glued-together and hard-to-recycle design that caused iFixit’s Kyle Wiens to brand Apple’s new Macbook Pro with Retina display “Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable.”

Dumping EPEAT didn’t go over so well with some environmental customers. The City of San Francisco quickly decided stop buying Apple products as a result of the decision, and other organizations that required EPEAT certification started reviewing their upcoming Apple purchases, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That pressure, may have been enough for Apple to reconsider things. The company is sensitive to criticism from environmental groups. Earlier this year, for example, made new commitments to greener energy for its data centers, bowing to pressure from Greenpeace.

But Apple may also have some wiggle room as the EPEAT rating system evolves. “Our relationship with EPEAT has become stronger as a result of this experience,” Mansfield wrote, “and we look forward to working with EPEAT as their rating system and the underlying IEEE 1680.1 standard evolve.”

“We look forward to Apple’s strong and creative thoughts on ongoing standards development,” wrote EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee in a note posted to the organization’s website.

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HP’s Operation ‘Kona’ Private Eyes Get 3 Years Probation

Former private investigators Joseph DePante, left, and his son Mathew DePante were sentenced to three years of probation on Thursday for their role in HP’s 2005 efforts to uncover a leak in its boardroom. Photo: AP

Two private investigators who impersonated reporters, Hewlett Packard board members, and their families have been sentenced to three years probation and six months electronic monitoring in the case.

Joseph DePante and his son Mathew DePante were sentenced Thursday in a San Jose, California, federal court. They had pleaded guilty to the charges in February.

The sentencing closes a final chapter in a corporate spying scandal that dates back to the spring of 2005, when HP’s management decided to clamp down on embarrassing boardroom leaks. HP hired a Boston security company called Security Outsourcing Solutions, which in turn hired the DePantes’ Melbourne, Florida, investigation company — Action Research Group — to identify the leakers.

The DePantes then oversaw a pretexting operation, where employees and contractors called up telephone companies and pretended to be the people they were investigating. They built files that included the names, phone numbers, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and phone call logs of 33 targets, including reporters at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, and CNET. In some cases, investigators tailed journalists and board members to their homes.

Former HP Board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn dubbed the investigation “Kona.” She also faced criminal charges in the affair, but those charges were dismissed in 2007. Dunn died last year.

The scandal led to civil lawsuits brought by the reporters, a $14 million settlement with the California Attorney General, and a Congressional investigation, where Joe DePante declined to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment right protecting him from self-incrimination.

All legal action against HP has now been settled, HP said on Thursday. The company declined to comment on the DePantes’ sentencing.

The Kona investigation was killed a few months after it started. It never did uncover the source of the leaks.

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Greenpeace Boosts Apple’s Grades From F’s and D’s to … D’s and C’s

Greenpeace wants Apple to explain exactly how it will quit coal smoking. Image: vxla/Flickr

Greenpeace used to give Apple F’s and D’s on its data center design. But the environmentally minded not-for-profit has now revised its opinion of the massive computing facilities that run online services like iTunes and iCloud. Greenpeace now gives Apple D’s and C’s.

In a report released on Thursday, Greenpeace says it’s pleased that Apple has promised to move its data centers to renewable power sources, such as solar, wind power, and hydro-electric dams. But it still wants to know how Apple intends to do this.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in the past, it has said that its computing facilities will be powered entirely by renewable sources by early next year. The rub is that its $1bn data center in Maiden, North Carolina is currently plugged into the Duke Energy power grid, whose power sources are not exactly 100 percent clean.

Yes, Apple is already building a 100-acre solar array and a biogas energy plant on in Maiden, but it does not appear that these can power the entire facility.

“[The move to renewable sources] all sounds great, and we’re super pumped about that,” says Greenpeace spokesman David Pomerantz. “But when you get into the analysis and actually look at it, there are some big holes in what they’re doing and how they’re going to get there that they haven’t revealed yet. Without that, there are some pretty big issues that they’re going to have to resolve, and we’re wondering how they’re going to do that.”

As companies like Apple and Google and Amazon have expanded the infrastructure underpinning the proverbial cloud, Greenpeace has kept a close watch on how the world’s data centers are powered and how these facilities generally affect the environment. Earlier this year, Google topped the Greenpeace “Cool IT Leaderboard,” which ranks the performance of the big IT players in this area.

But in addition to publishing such lists, Greenpeace will occasionally go on the offensive. In April, it dropped protest banners on the corporate offices of Amazon and Microsoft, and then, in a separate stunt, it sicced its professional activists on Apple’s flagship retail store in San Francisco and the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

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Your Uncle Wants Tech Support? Give Him This USB Stick

Next time your uncle asks you for tech support, hand him one of these. Photo: Jumpshot

Some people who are very good with computers like to keep that information on the down-low.

You know what we’re talking about. If word gets out that you can configure a network card, you can suddenly become your friendly neighborhood source for free tech support. If that’s you, maybe you can breathe a little easier now. Two former Hewlett-Packard geeks have dreamed up a way to offload all that tech support work to a $35 USB stick that’s loaded with a lightweight version of Linux and some nifty disk-clean-up tools.

The idea came to Pedram Amini and David Endler after they both left Hewlett-Packard a few years ago. After about a decade in the high-tech industry, they were both pretty darned good with computers, and they were used to being tapped for free tech support. “The basic idea came out of frustration,” Amini says. “When you’re a technical person, you’re constantly being asked to help people out with computer problems.”

For Amini and Endler, that could mean a few hours of tedious research, installing patches, configuring network connections, that kind of stuff. “All these things that we typically do, we wanted to put it on a stick and automate it,” he said.

They call their product Jumpshot, and they’re looking to get some Kickstarter funding to turn it into a business.

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