PC hard drive system could warn of tsunamis

This would be fantastic on two levels: first, it could save lives. And secondly, it proves that P2P is not just for stealing music. ;o)

Governments seeking inexpensive technology to warn of tsunamis may be interested in a free application that monitors vibrations in the hard disks of computers in an effort to detect undersea earthquakes that cause tsunamis.
The Tsunami Harddisk Detector is the brainchild of Michael Stadler, who demonstrated the prototype system earlier this week at the Ars Electronica exhibition in Linz, Austria.
As part of their operation, hard disks measure vibrations in order to keep the read-write head of the disk on track. These measurements can be read from some hard disks. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector captures this vibration data and shares it with computers in other locations connected via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to determine whether an earth tremor is occurring.
In the P2P network, several participating computers act as supernodes, which analyze the data received from the other “sensing” nodes. The supernodes are able to ignore vibrations generated by a computer being kicked or shaken by recording how many computers report the same vibrations simultaneously.
If an earthquake that could lead to a tsunami is detected, the supernodes inform the other nodes. Computers that are running the client software and are connected to the P2P network can then warn of such events…. Source: ComputerWorld