“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”
― Andrew S. Tannenbaum
Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#42Anyone know of a existing automated way of processing untrusted USB to the extract known and expected encrypted volumes? _____ * Core issue I have never been able to workout is how to know given the potential for firmware hack how to make sure only the known trusted data makes it out of the isolated processing system to the trusted system; open looking at anything though as long as it open source, doesn’t have to sol…
Worse than malware, eventually you'll get people dropping ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer)s for the lulz.
FYI your link got corrupted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer
And interesting, always knew high voltage was a threat, but never thought of capacitor being used, since it wouldn’t require an independent power source.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#43That'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?
No, or very niche, and there's no guarantee that those few that do have write protect enforce it in hardware. For cases when you absolutely most not allow the flash content to be modified there are USB devices called write blockers. They're used mainly in forensics, where the data might be used as evidence in court and there needs to be clear chain of custody and an audit trail to say the bits analysed are the same as the bits when the device was first seized.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#44Being 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…
If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#45Curios, 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...
A safer alternative would be something like a piratebox (https://piratebox.cc/) instead of a USB dead drop, since a piratebox would have no physical connection to your computer.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#46That'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…
Pretty sure Apple at the very least injects a hidden file that easy to see if you plug the drive into an Apple device then into a non-Apple device; no idea why they are adding it, though 99% sure it is for file operation administration. Edit: Appears at least one of the files added is called “ “.DS_Store” and is still around: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-user...
It's the equivalent of desktop.ini on windows, so yeah finder customisation etc..
Expect Mac software does fuck all to prevent it "leaking", so pretty much every zip from a Mac user contains one of these in each folder. Only case we had desktop.ini do the same was with Dropbox.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#47NNCP has similarity to a block chain. This is really cool!
> NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult
The difficulty created by NAT and IPv4 is drastically overstated. Even if users' devices generally had public IPs, users still wouldn't want to install server software nor leave their computer on. There is no money to be made pushing solutions that cut out the middlemen, so no advertising continually telling people "Try FooTransfer", and thus no network effects. Instead, one user goes "I can send you this using FooTransfer" and the second user goes "that sounds scary and hard".
And doesn't Dropbox work for the given example? That's the mass-market productized/paid/marketed/surveilled solution.
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult
I also opt for P2P whenever I can, but it does have drawbacks as well, besides NAT. First, both have to be online at the same time. Second, seems many connections are still not symmetric, so sending files are limited by the upload speed of the sender, and together with the first problem, makes the downloaders experience suffer because of the uploader.
With that said, better infrastructure (IPv6 + better connections) can make P2P very feasible in the future, hopefully. Or software that defaults to local connections if it's possible (so if we can find the device via a private IP, use that connection instead).
Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet
#50It’s cool and sounds like reinventing UUCP. Which has the advantage of serving as a transparent transport for ordinary email.
http://www.nncpgo.org/Comparison.html
This is really amazing stuff. Years ago, I was heavily interested in scuttlebutt [1]. I'm interested in grid down and "occasionally connected" communications. I particularly liked the island to island sailing analogy.
SSB has a few downsides - mainly that your client needs to download full logs. You can't just request the last 30 days. They call this out as well that your first sync could take over an hour and consume several gigs of data.
I'm just today learning about NNCP, but I've used FidoNet and UUCP in the past, so the concept is pretty familiar to me. In my mental model, I would be less interested in sneakernet than standalone wifi hotspots that one could connect to and exchange data, possibly combined with an AREDN style mesh[2].
[1]: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html [2]: https://arednmesh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/arednGettingStart...