Recently, Network World’s authors have reviewed gadgets that give your users the ability to quickly and cheaply put gobs of information onto the Internet and into other people’s hands.
Recently, Network World’s authors have reviewed gadgets that give your users the ability to quickly and cheaply put gobs of information onto the Internet and into other people’s hands.
Pogoplug is a small device that allows you to turn an external disk drive into network-attached storage. You plug an Ethernet cable into one end and the drive into the other via USB.
What makes it more interesting – and as columnist Mark Gibbs points out, more dangerous – is that you can access the storage connected to the Pogoplug from anywhere on the Internet. The contents of the drive are available through a Web address. You could send folks an e-mail message pointing to the link, or post links to the content on Twitter or Facebook, or even set up an RSS feed linking to the content.
Gibbs points out that the folks installing these devices could be doing so from inside corporate networks, creating a massive security headache. The product does assume that the network that the device is on will allow UDP communication with the Pogoplug site on port 4365.
Keith Shaw included a similar product in his favorite picks in our annual gift guide. The Seagate FreeAgent DockStar does the NAS portion out of the box, but you can add software from Pogoplug to get the same capabilities as the Pogoplug device. Shaw has more details in his full review.
By the way, if you haven’t seen this year’s gift guide, you should check it out. Shaw has already gone through the list to get the cream of the crop, as well as some of the wackiest ideas we came across this year. Plus, this is year 10 of our Cool Yule Tools, so take a look back with us at the gadgets of Christmas past.
