Steal This File Sharing Book : What They Won't Tell You About File Sharing

In my TINST 207 class, a group of six people presented on the book Steal This File Sharing Book : What They Won't Tell You About File Sharing by Wallace Wang. The overall summary about the book was it tells you how to go about downloading music, movies, and anything that is software online illegally.

They began by talking about Napster and that is was released in 1999, had over 26 million users in 2001, and had crashed in 2001 due to having a centralized network server, which every users on the software had to go through in order to download content from another user. They also talked about the pros and cons of Burning CDs. A pro is that you pretty much won't get in trouble for doing it because everyone practically does it. They then got into the pros and cons of File Sharing Networks. A pro is that it's easy to use; it takes a click of a button for you to get what you want. A con would be that the download speed on the network varies; so you might have to wait a LONG time before you get the content you want.

Against The Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

So in my TINST 207 class, a group of four Seniors at the UW Tacoma presented on a book called Against The Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob By Lee Siegel. They began by telling a little bit about the author's background. He is known as a person who is pretty much against the Internet and the World Wide Web.

They then continue to introduce summaries on the chapters in the book. One chapter was titled 'Bait & Switch' which talked about profits and idealism. He felt that the Internet was being sold as a convenience and people would neglect outside resources for information. A big point I got from the presentation was that the author 'believed information on the Internet is meaningless because it is constantly updated.' While this may be true in some sense, not every piece of information on the Internet is updated.