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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

#51

Post by treeman79 »

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…

Was transferring a 600KB (KiloByte) file to a friend. After 2 hours it failed. Tried again. Failed. Realized both times it ran out of hard drive space. I was 52 Bytes short.

I proceeded to walk a floppy over to his house 2 miles away.

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

#52

Post by myself248 »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #38
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…

https://webwormhole.io/

There seems to be a never-ending stream of these services, each very similar to the last, but none seem to survive more than a few months, a few years at the outside.

I think GP's point is that this churn indicates that it's not a "solved problem". It's clearly solvable, but whoever runs these services doesn't find a revenue stream. It should probably be provided by your ISP just like email and usenet once were, but the cultural expectation isn't there. Maybe they get shut down because people use them for bad things? I don't know.

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

#53

Post by myself248 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #29
liotier wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rar and par files, though!

Shame it arrived so late in the game, because it was really an ideal match for floppies. Five disks of data, two... three... four? disks of parity, use 'em only if you need 'em.

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

#54

Post by jandrese »

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…

The difficulty in sending files isn't a technical problem, it's a political problem. In particular any efficient file transfer system will immediately be used by people to make copies of copywritten materials. This will ultimately get them in trouble with the law and shut down. So we can only have file transfer systems with obnoxious limitations.

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

#55

Post by myself248 »

cesarb wrote: post #45
giomasce wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 trying to unify all of the above into a single interface. Wish me luck.

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

#56

Post by O__________O »

cesarb wrote: post #45
giomasce wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, agree, wireless dead drops are a thing.

That said, unlike cheap and replaceable USB sticks, they’re easy to find using RF analysis. As such, unless it’s physically secured, likely quickly be stolen. Also likely require a power source and weather proofing.

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

#57

Post by myself248 »

WJW wrote: post #24
O__________O wrote: post #12

Anyone 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.

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.

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

#58

Post by digikata »

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…

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.

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

#59

Post by qbasic_forever »

myself248 wrote: post #52
qbasic_forever wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://webwormhole.io/

There seems to be a never-ending stream of these services, each very similar to the last, but none seem to survive more than a few months, a few years at the outside. I think GP's point is that this churn indicates that it's not a "solved problem". It's clearly solvable, but whoever runs these services doesn't find a revenue stream. It should probably be provided by your ISP just like email and usenet once were, but…

This has been around for years. There's 'churn' because there's almost nothing to hosting this service. None of the data is sent or goes through a cloud service, it's all P2P connections. There only needs to exist a central server for brokering initial connections and handshake between clients. Anyone can setup and run a service like this with just a few dollar domain name and a couple bucks a month of VPS hosting.

I think you're really just wanting some big name or trustworthy player like Dropbox to come out with a similar service. It's not going to happen--like I said by design wormhole and similar tech doesn't send or store data on any central service. There's no value for some big company to give people this service, they're literaly just burning bandwidth to shuttle invisible (to them) bits and data. They can't extract anything like advertising targeting, revenue, etc. from the service. It will always exist as some weird self-hosted thing.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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