While I don’t always agree 100% with everything Bruce Schneier (author of “Beyond Fear”) writes, I have a lot of respect for him and nobody I know gets it right more often than he does when it comes to security issues. Much of what he does also touches on other issues we deal with [...]

Too often the lessons we learn come as a result of tragedy or mistakes. Here’s a story where everything was done right and the result stands an example that others could learn from. Not that I expect many will, this happened to “the other guy.” For too many, it always happens to [...]

Satellite phone company GlobalStar has finally admitted what many of us have suspected for some time, namely that their system has problems and is not reliable. It seems that in their latest SEC filing GlobalStar has essentially told its users that things are bad and getting worse, as this article in Barron’s [...]

Yesterday, NBC’s Today Show ran a piece on winter survival that was better than most, though not without its errors and critical omissions. The written article on MSNBC’s site is pretty good for what it is, Charles Horton’s survival story. The video from the Today Show can also be viewed on the same [...]

The Kim family’s survival story and the tragedy of the loss of the father has captured the attention of the nation this past week. Even at the funeral for an old and dear friend, it crept into the conversation and I was asked questions about it. I take no joy in having correctly predicted the [...]

Equipped To Survive coverage of SHOT Show, with our focus on the latest Knives, Flashlights and interesting new Gear, has been one of our most popular efforts (see last year’s report), generates a lot of traffic for ETS and we often scoop everyone else with our timely coverage. This year SHOT Show is in [...]

I often have the opportunity to interview survivors, but usually that’s the end of it. Every once in a while, however, I do hear from one of them and it’s always interesting. Back in 2002 at the Rotor & Wing Emergency Response Conference I interviewed a 55-year old grandmother, Sharon Zambrzycki, who had [...]

Just opened up the latest Sporty’s catalog to see them selling a hollow handled “Bush Pilot’s Survival Knife” (October 2006, page 58). I know a lot of pilots think highly of Sporty’s and thus might be tempted to purchase simply because it is in the Sporty’s catalog, so I thought it best [...]

The U.S. Coast Guard has always gotten short shrift in the movies, but The Guardian, starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher in the lead roles, makes up for that big time. The Guardian opened nationally last night and we had a small Guardian party. We had a personal interest in the movie, not only [...]

This latest round of terror alerts and the resulting over-reaction by authorities is just the latest example of how politics and stupidity combine to give the terrorists exactly what they want.  Perhaps the best analysis that I’ve seen has been written by Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s leading security experts and the author of the [...]