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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

#71

Post by megaperplex »

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…

What is your take on this: encrypt your large file and send it over via some common transfer service?

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

#72

Post by freeAgent »

tetris11 wrote: post #66
freeAgent wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I point my own custom domain at it, so that part isn’t free. I have my NAS configured to automatically update the DNS record when/if it changes.

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

#73

Post by crabmusket »

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.

This sounds like Tim Berners-Lee's new project. https://solidproject.org/

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

#74

Post by myself248 »

O__________O wrote: post #68
myself248 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What?

So what do you do if someone puts 120 volts on the data lines?

You very much want to isolate both. Which is precisely the function of the chipsets I mentioned.

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

#75

Post by myself248 »

ytjohn wrote: post #50
trasz wrote: post #6

It’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 s…

Yeah, this use-case fascinates me as well. I've been noodling around with the idea of a 249-gram drone that flies SD cards between locations. BVLOS is still problematic in the US regulatory environment, but perhaps useful elsewhere. And I can always do demo flights indoors.

It would be ultra cool, IMHO, to fly SSB and NNCP traffic between "islands", whatever form those take. For bonus points, do it with pigeons, which have the advantage of operating in a GPS-denied environment.

I don't mind the full sync for SSB, I mind the lack of any progress indicator while it's doing so. But that seems like an easy UI tweak and maybe they've addressed it since I last played with it. What I haven't figured out is whether a brand-new user can sync from another existing user on the same island, or if they need a real internet connection for that first bit.

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

#76

Post by digikata »

crabmusket wrote: post #73
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.

This sounds like Tim Berners-Lee's new project. https://solidproject.org/

Maybe? Skimming the protocol there aspects of the spec I may not be understanding that superficially seem at odds with a storage container with fairly simple interfaces. Though the security aspects seem at about at the complexity they have to be. I'm probably missing the full aims of the protocol though.

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

#77

Post by ctf1er »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #32
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…

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…

YoU'vE g0t mE nOstAlgiC for AOL. I wrote my own chat file servers and apps for downloading(which amounted to opening a span of emails and adding to download manager.) Chat servers I made/used forwarded the uploaded emails, first made with a tool like you're talking about if not included, but then you'd typically unpack it yourself after dl. AOL has a bad rep with tech people, but it was sure nice them hosting all this rather than what you might have elsewhere and a fun platform to play on.

Tasks like this or even punters(html heading tag denial of service through instant message lol) were what got me interested in programming in middle school, no training or education, just hacking around trying to figure things out in a pirated VB3.0. The community was great with private chatrooms full of users testing and helping others, trying out tools. People shared libraries to learn from, use, adapt. Anyone remember the popular old and terribly named genocide.bas? I'd like to get my hands on some of these old proggies and code if they're still out there.. Or even just the cartoon sheep program which would run around the desktop interacting with window borders.

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

#78

Post by Firmwarrior »

_int3_ wrote: post #2

I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back. I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.

I've been having to do that in Silicon Valley because of the data caps on our crappy Quest internet service. I take my MacBook Pro in to work, download new SDKs, customer memory dumps, etc, then hoof it back home to work on them

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

#79

Post by brnt »

IAmLiterallyAB wrote: post #44
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…

If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult

Is P2P awful? I've been using Resilio Sync (neé Bittorrent Sync) for a decade now; if there is a reliable piece of software in my stack, this is it! Sharing files is a matter of passing someone a code. It works so well I really don't think about this as a problem.

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

#80

Post by waste_monk »

crabmusket wrote: post #73
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.

This sounds like Tim Berners-Lee's new project. https://solidproject.org/

In my opinion TBL has lost all credibility after the encrypted media extensions debacle. This pays lip service to privacy but given he has put corporate interests ahead of individuals before I would not trust it. I suspect it is some kind of poisoned chalice.
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