31–40 of 85 posts
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Forever memories of high school around 1990, passing around backpacks fulls of floppies in front of our uncomprehending classmates... And of course a lot of time spent copying - that second floppy drive made my life so much easier !
It’s always the second-last floppy in a series of dozens that is corrupted.
Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, ins…
I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahe…
We actually made a great solution for this in the 90s: mailservs, inspired by Usenet. We made AOL bots that would take a file, chunk it into 1.5MB sections, and send each via email attachment. Then a client side program would download all the attachments and reassemble them. We downloaded entire movies this way. After download, the mailbox was emptied; if it wasn't, the next transfer would fail.
So people just need mailserv programs to send files, and download their mail regularly.
Curios, anyone know of any active dead drop networks besides ones listed below? This website been around since at least 2010, but number of the drops listed were physically removed, but not delisted from the site: https://www.deaddrops.com/
I like the idea, but I'm not sure I would plug an random USB thing in my computer...
Do think though as a social experiment they’re fun as long as you’re only using throwaway systems/devices.
Beyond that, personally would not suggest damaging property, but instead affixing USB to padlock like this:
All and all, basically same as geocaching [1] — which obviously could be dangerous if someone wanted to be malicious, but never heard of that happening; have heard of malicious USB dead drops though.
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I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahe…
A passworded zip file would probably be my choice, easy enough to open at the other end even for technologically illiterate people, and doesn't take anything fancy to make.
Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, ins…
I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahe…
That's cool. However I don't like the idea of plugging in USB sticks and having them modified by anything. OS X was (and still is) a terrible offender: plug in a USB drive and the OS sneakily inserts stuff outside partitions (so you cannot easily find it but if you "dd" and take the hash of the drive it's different before and after simply plugging it in an OS X computer: to me that is pure madness and it took me a wh…
I have to wonder - are there any USB sticks available that have a read-only toggle like floppies used to have?
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A passworded zip file would probably be my choice, easy enough to open at the other end even for technologically illiterate people, and doesn't take anything fancy to make.
The video is already compressed, a ZIP will not save any significant amount of space in that case.
edit: the way I'd solve the rest is just by using a torrent magnet link. The problem with that is that you might have to teach someone how to open a port for UDP traffic, but after they've done it, sending files of any size to them becomes trivial.
Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, ins…
I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahe…
Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, ins…
git-annex by default will consider your data dead when it can't be checked in real time, but overriding will trust the data will survive offline forever. I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it.
There is "git annex expire" (https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-expire/).
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Back in the day when I went to what you could describe as an engineering high-school we had very limited internet in the dormitory as well as at home. So we organized into teams, where the leader would gather Warez links for his teammates to download during the weekend. On Sunday and Monday, back at the dorm, we would upload all the series, movies and stuff to our data hoarders ftp server, giving many more people acc…
I ran an open CIFS volume (windows share) in our dorm for music and movies. This was just after Napster went down but before Limewire or something. So the only way to share music was to upload everything you had and have access to whatever everyone else uploaded. You just dropped what you had in a writable folder and it would organize it in read only folders, doing any deduping for identical files and flagging non-id…