Just writing about 4chan can make you nervous. You feel obligated to add the caveat “we love 4chan!” That’s nothing more than a plea of “please don’t take down my site”. 4Chan has been active lately as you may have heard. They are on a crusade against anti-file-sharing companies and they are making a statement.
The latest came today, as announced on TorrentFreak, when 4Chan (or Anonymous as the group is sometimes known) took down the UK Intellectual Property Office. As of this writing (9:24pm EST on 10/17/2010) the site is still down. Over the past few weeks they have also taken down the web sites of the MPAA, RIAA, AiPlex, and ACS:Law to name a few.
While we here at GNC don’t advocate piracy, it does make us smile a bit when these stories crop up. After all, nobody really likes or advocates the tactics used by these firms to oppress the average user, while doing little to stop real piracy. After all, suing grandma for downloading three songs (if she even did, which is another story) seems pointless when people in China and Indonesia are cranking out thousands of fake CD’s and DVD’s for sale on street corners.
The question I have is this – is this a worthwhile tactic? Like any protest it’s a matter of making statement. People have been doing that for years, most notably in the 1960′s. But does it accomplish anything in the long run? I suppose it gets the word out, it makes headlines, and gets peoples attention, which is something.
It would seem to me that, while getting the word out accomplishes something, a more worthwhile campaign would be something that really hits the organizations like the MPAA and RIAA in the wallet. Organizing a boycott against their products would be the biggest hit I can think of. If even a small percentage of people could be persuaded to not buy the products then the impact would be felt quickly by these groups.
Overall, I guess the headline grabbing site attacks could serve as the attention-getter for the general public, but there has to be follow-up to make a real difference. So will 4Chan take that extra step or will they stick to the attacks and leave the organization of further action up to someone else to organize? I think it will be the latter. So who will step up to take the protest to the next level? Anyone? If not, this will end right where it is now – an amusing story, a few sites that no one visits anyway will be down for a while and in the end nothing will change.
It’s always fun when technology intersects, and it becomes possible to do something cool that was previously not possible and/or was never thought of.
If today’s smartphones are as powerful as our desktop machines were 5 years ago, the question emerges – why do smartphones have all of these apps written for them, whereas traditional desktop and laptop computers usually have a much smaller number of more generalized, less specialized programs installed?
If you are look for a cool geeky gift for the holiday season, then you might want to check out this 
The drive comes in the usual red coloured Buffalo-style box. Inside, you get the external drive itself, a power supply, a USB3 cable, a quick start guide and a software CD.
The external drive is black and I think it looks good as far as computer peripherals go. The case is a fairly hard plastic and the top surface has a shiny speckled surface which is attractive. The other surfaces have a different matt finish which is plainer but not unattractive. The front panel has a blue LED that lights when reading and writing. There’s a green power LED at the back that perhaps ought to have been blue as well.
If you haven’t seen a USB3 cable or connector, you might be a little surprised. The A connector (that’s the bit that plugs into the PC) looks fairly normal, but the B connector (that’s the external drive end) is a bit different – it’s kind of like two connectors piggy-backed on top of each other.
The CyberLink suite is made up about six different components – one for playing movies, one for working with music, one for video editing, etc. I tried out the movie player (PowerDVD) and the disk burner (Power2Go)
The data module (Power2Go) worked as advertised, allowing files to be dragged from the filesystem before being burned to the disk. Helpfully, it has a thermometer style display showing you how much of your 24GB had been used. If you’ve used any of these type of tools before, you’ll be right at home.
Google has setup the 
Before she retired, my Mom used to be a nurse. She typically would always keep around a few current medical books describing diseases and other books listing prescription drugs and their uses. While these sorts of books can make for rather dry reading, they can also be extremely interesting to thumb through from time to time. They can be particularly useful if you need to look something up.
