Cebit is the world's largest computer expo, it happens now in Hanover and then, sonner or later, we're gonna talk about it.

This year, German researchers have (finally!) developed a peer-to-peer network that vehicles could use to pass along information concerning road conditions.

Cars would be fitted with more and more sensors: GPS, TPEG, proximity,... Starting from there, detected information concerning traffic jam or an object on the road would travel from a car to another behind them and be displayed on a dashboard screen, a mobile device or played over headphones. If a car knew its tires were slipping, it could alert the vehicles around it to the presence of a slippery substance on a digital map.

Source: BBC News, saturday.
For those who do not know:
- CeBIT (Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik; German for "Centre of Office and Information technology") is held each spring on the fairground in Hanover, Germany, and is a barometer of the state of the art in information technology. With an exhibition area of roughly 450,000 m² and up to 700,000 visitors, it had more than 6,200 exhibitors from around 70 countries all over the world. The 2007 expo dates are 15 March to 21 March.
- A peer-to-peer system is a distributed system whose component nodes participate in similar roles, and are therefore peers to each other. Peer-to-peer can be viewed as decentralized network architecture. In contrast, a client-server architecture implies a sharp distinction between the clients which request and consume services, and servers which provide services. aEven though the nodes have similar roles, there may still be some structure to the peer-to-peer system, and it usually possesses some degree of self-organization where each node finds its peers and helps maintain the system structure. This makes a peer-to-peer network node more complex than a client in client-server system. The main benefits of peer-to-peer system are scalability, fault-tolerance, and the lack of resource bottlenecks in servers. Recently, the concept has achieved recognition in the general public in the context of peer-to-peer file sharing which is one application of peer-to-peer networks.