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Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

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Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#61

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

boastful_inaba wrote: post #30
TacticalCoder wrote: post #5

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?

They exist but they're more expensive. One brand is Kanguru: https://www.kanguru.com/collections/kanguru-usb-drives-with-...

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#62

Post by cookiengineer »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #18
non-nil wrote: post #3

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…

Isn't this the exact use cases of all WebRTC based file sharing tools?

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#63

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

digikata wrote: post #58
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is receiving files, not sending files. You can mail someone an SD card and they will receive it at their house's mailbox. But if their mailbox fills up, the letter will be returned to you. And there is a maximum size for mail that fits in a mailbox. Similarly, people need a digital mailbox you can send files to, but they need to extract their mail from it and empty it out or it will fill up. We actually m…

For a while now I think we have been lacking an enabling shareable storage and auth abstraction to build cloud apps on. From this standpoint email is a little bit of shared storage: owner read, public write (with email specific secure acceptance algos), group chat: account read, account write; note app: owner read, write.

I'm sure you can come up with abstractions, but without first doing a whole system design (FRs & NFRs, mapping dependencies, customer requirements, etc) you'll have to scrap those abstractions when they don't match up with how the system ends up needing to operate. So I would recommend not even thinking about technical abstractions until you have a very large multi-layered system visualization.

For example: what is storage? A router stores packets temporarily; is that storage? A DNS resolver caches records; is that storage? A browser stores cookies; is that storage? A chat or email server & client may both store messages in different states for different purposes. What storage should be shared and shouldn't be, in what specific circumstances? Who is allowed to read and write to which thing at which time in which circumstance? All of that will affect your abstraction.

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#64

Post by acka »

boastful_inaba wrote: post #30
TacticalCoder wrote: post #5

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?

You might want to have a look at USB SD card readers instead of USB sticks. Many (most?) (normal and mini but not micro size) SD cards and adapters have write-protect slider switches. Be careful though, I've found some of these sliders to be rather flimsy, I've had several break off or fall out of SD cards and adapters over the years.

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#65

Post by kzrdude »

non-nil wrote: post #3

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…

Some good times as a student in a big university and student housing system around ~2005 - file sharing was banned with the outside world, but inside the whole student network the p2p networks like direct connect were very much alive. Some of the best file sharing ever, so many good music collections to browse through.

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#66

Post by tetris11 »

freeAgent wrote: post #26
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

I use a personal NAS which solves that problem nicely. The other option that’s much closer to sneaker net would be use of a direct file transfer protocol like Airdrop. There’s also stuff like file.pizza, but that’s not always reliable IME.

NAS with a DynDNS you have to pay for because ipv4 addresses are scarce I take it? I remember when I could fire up a http.server in python to host some local file, and it would be accessible across the world for as long as I wanted it

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#67

Post by O__________O »

myself248 wrote: post #55
cesarb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I keep being annoyed that Piratebox, Internetinabox, Othernet, aren't all the same project. Like of course an IIAB node should include a messageboard. Of course an Othernet node should have support for offline payload bundles and user uploads. Of course a Toosheh bundle on newly-inserted storage media should be automatically extracted and presented in the interface... If I ever grow some more software clue, I'll be t…

(IIAB) being “Internet In A Box”

_____________

Toosheh being a “satellite filecasting technology deployed in Iran and the Middle East that uses common satellite equipment to deliver digital content without relying on access to the Internet” per Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toosheh

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#68

Post by O__________O »

myself248 wrote: post #57
WJW wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than malware, eventually you'll get people dropping ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer)s for the lulz.

Yeah but I can drop an ADUM3160 isolator on the port for a few bucks. If they kill that, I replace that for a few bucks more. In most cases a chain of cheap hubs would work too.

For clarification, all USB ports are 5 volts DC; transformer (or computer) will take care of converting the 120/220 AC current to the necessary 5 volts DC.

Commonly two types of isolation data and power chipsets. For a dead drop, you would want a cheap voltage isolator set to trip/blow a fuse at 5 volts DC — with no data isolator.

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#69

Post by greyface- »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #5

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…

Disk Arbitrator allows you to force OSX to mount new volumes as read-only (or prevent mounting them entirely) to avoid this. https://github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator

I wish it were built-in.

Re: Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

#70

Post by digikata »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #63
digikata wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while now I think we have been lacking an enabling shareable storage and auth abstraction to build cloud apps on. From this standpoint email is a little bit of shared storage: owner read, public write (with email specific secure acceptance algos), group chat: account read, account write; note app: owner read, write.

I'm sure you can come up with abstractions, but without first doing a whole system design (FRs & NFRs, mapping dependencies, customer requirements, etc) you'll have to scrap those abstractions when they don't match up with how the system ends up needing to operate. So I would recommend not even thinking about technical abstractions until you have a very large multi-layered system visualization. For example: what is s…

These are fair suggestions for the low level detail of my comment. I think the core functionality is providing a web friendly storage access api providing for user control and syncing between multiple nodes. It's been done before but not recently with more recent and lighter protocols. Apps like the classic sample todo or note taking apps frequently shown on HN should really just be able to connect to a user owned storage - get authorized for a stoage allocation either fronting local storage or easy to spin up a node on a cloud hosted vm.

It's sort of a shame that so much of the new web3 storage work intrinsically links storage to a blockchain, instead providing a blockchain integration as one of many authentication/provisioning models.

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