Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10421-dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet

by pabs3 • 4 years ago

107 82 4 years ago

changelog.complete.org

_int3_• 4 years ago

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.

zwirbl• 4 years ago

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 access, who in turn would copy the stuff to USB HDDs to carry it to school. There it got copied to our classmates storage and from there it got distributed throughout the region, reaching I don't know how many people. My team, doing mostly series and games, had about 10-16MBits, all teams together reached an unheard of (for consumer internet in that region) bandwidth. We just couldn't have done it alone

Good times

withinboredom• 4 years ago

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-identical files with the same meta or anything it didn’t understand.

giomasce2• 4 years ago

I did the same, going to my dad's workplace. I had no USB drives, but pushed CD-RWs and multisession CDs to their limits. Cool times!

Firmwarrior• 4 years ago

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

non-nil• 4 years ago

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, instead of incomprehensible amounts of data carelessly shoved down wider and wider tubes.

For my own sneakernet-like uses, I turn to git-annex. See use case “The Nomad” here: https://git-annex.branchable.com/

sascha_sl• 4 years ago

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.

cesarb2• 4 years ago

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/).

liotier• 4 years ago

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 !

BLKNSLVR• 4 years ago

High speed dubbing for the win

unsupp0rted• 4 years ago

It’s always the second-last floppy in a series of dozens that is corrupted.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

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 (ahem, skype) actually open those links when you send them... who knows, they might even save the files there. Also, do you really wan't personal videos in the cloud? HTTP/(S)FTP servers too much of a pain to set up for a one time need. We atleast had DCC on irc, now not even that.

So a USB flash drive it is... and a car ride.

Tarq0n• 4 years ago

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.

freeAgent2• 4 years ago

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.

0xbadcafebee3• 4 years ago

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 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.

reidjs• 4 years ago

Google drive or Dropbox link shared to their email address isn’t secure enough for a video of your nieces birthday party??

qbasic_forever2• 4 years ago

https://webwormhole.io/

IAmLiterallyAB• 4 years ago

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

jandrese• 4 years ago

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.

cookiengineer• 4 years ago

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

megaperplex• 4 years ago

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

treeman79• 4 years ago

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.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

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.

bitwize• 4 years ago

I feel you. In the 90s I came into possession of a strange floppy disk with this on the label:

    Dear Friend,

    Please tell my story.

    Sincerely,
    Dave Koresh

After doing a thorough virus scan, I examined the contents of the disk. It contained a bunch of stories and essays by various authors in text-file format, nothing dealing directly with David Koresh or the Branch Davidians.

But the FBI raid of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 caused... unrest in certain pockets of the American politisphere, primarily on the right but groups like the ACLU also got involved, and Janet Reno was mocked on SNL for her role in the incident. Nobody liked the Branch Davidians, they were a weird-ass cult preparing for an apocalypse that never came except maybe in a parrot sense[0], but there were concerns that the FBI (and potentially the ATF before) acted too aggressively, overstepping legitimate law-enforcement bounds and violating the Davidians' rights, and that caused a lot of political introspection: on our status as a freedom-respecting republic, the competence of our federal law-enforcement apparatus, what is the threshold beyond which the government legitimately could or should take action against weird-ass prepper cults. So there was a lot of philosophy and politics stuff in there, often in the form of USENET postings and other 90s internet copypasta, that dealt tangentially with those issues.

It felt... kind of weird and awesome to have and to read that stuff. Cyberpunk. Here were thoughts that people felt not quite safe transmitting or discussing openly, so they were copied and distributed as floppy-disk samizdat. It was a mysterious object, alarming at sight because it suggested that Koresh might still be alive somewhere (and the shortening of "David" to "Dave" made him seem... humbled?), whose contents held even deeper and more thought-provoking mysteries.

[0] "I heard tell once of a Jefferson City lawyer who had a parrot that would wake him each morning crying out 'today's the day the world shall end as scripture has foretold'. And one day, the lawyer shot him for the sake of peace and quiet I presume, thus fulfilling, for the bird at least, his prophecy." -- Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln in Lincoln (2012).

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

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 while to figure out what was going on).

O__________O10• 4 years ago

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...

lynndotpy• 4 years ago

I learned a roommate was snooping around my flash drives because of this. A bunch of .DS_Store folders appeared in a drive that I had never connected to an OSX machine

csydas• 4 years ago

DS_Store just includes basic window configuration information for Macs. Stuff like list vs icons, size of the columns, etc, so you have a consistent UI look when you're accessing your remote drives.

It can be toggled to avoid it on removable devices when they're connected to Macs. It's benign, though I guess annoying to some non-Mac users.

tehbeard• 4 years ago

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.

boastful_inaba• 4 years ago

I have to wonder - are there any USB sticks available that have a read-only toggle like floppies used to have?

fuzzfactor• 4 years ago

The original USB sticks had this, but it was no longer included as the devices became commoditized.

moreati• 4 years ago

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.

hoppyhoppy2• 4 years ago

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

acka• 4 years ago

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.

greyface-• 4 years ago

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.

trasz• 4 years ago

It’s cool and sounds like reinventing UUCP. Which has the advantage of serving as a transparent transport for ordinary email.

MatthiasPortzel• 4 years ago

From the same author, "NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!"

=> https://www.complete.org/nncp/

ytjohn2• 4 years ago

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...

myself2487• 4 years ago

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.

jgoerzen• 4 years ago

You may be interested to note that NNCP integrated Yggdrasil support recently (though you can also run Yggdrasil at the OS level). Yggdrasil is an always-encrypted IPv6-based mesh, and is a perfect fit for something like ad-hoc wifi (since the nodes can discover a route to each other based even on RF paths).

Yggdrasil can also run as an overlay network atop standard Internet (IPv4 or IPv6), or both. It will opportunistically find peers on a local broadcast domain and find routes to other networks over the standard Internet if need be.

Feel free to drop me a note if you like; I had a very similar experience with SSB. NNCP, while it has a bit of a learning curve, Just Works. It processes thousands of packets for me every day (hourly ZFS snapshot backups for every filesystem I have), some of which are huge, and it Just Works.

O__________O10• 4 years ago

> NNCP guarantees the integrity of packets, but not ordering between packets; if you need that, you might look into my Filespooler program. It is designed to work with NNCP and can provide ordered processing.

Besides Filespooler, any other options?

O__________O10• 4 years ago

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 solve that specific issue.

WJW• 4 years ago

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

O__________O10• 4 years ago

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.

myself2487• 4 years ago

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.

pmontra• 4 years ago

I didn't understand if it can handle this use case: a file server with (simple case) a hot swappable SATA3 bay (or any other bus), N disks (N - 1 are offline.) Send files to the server (rsync, scp, anything), remove the disk and replace it with another one, iterate. NNCP should handle this so far. But would it be able to tell me on which disk a file is stored?

If this were handled at file system level, the FS should pretend all disks are online to let me list files and directories. When I want to access an offline file or mkdir or perform any write operation on offline disks, it would raise an error and tell me which disk to load into the server. Then I try again.

If NNCP doesn't do that, is there and Linux file system able to do it? I googled but I didn't find much.

pabs3• 4 years ago

That use-case seems like what git-annex is designed for.

O__________O10• 4 years ago

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/

giomasce2• 4 years ago

I like the idea, but I'm not sure I would plug an random USB thing in my computer...

O__________O10• 4 years ago

Agree. Specifically generally speaking it’s an untrustworthy system and practical might be malicious via the file, usb-firmware, might be connected to high voltage line, etc.

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:

https://ibb.co/7jmNXNR

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching

cesarb2• 4 years ago

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.

javier_e06• 4 years ago

You'll be reliably tackled and body-searched walking around the data center floor with a usb drive in your pocket.

RunSet• 4 years ago

More information on NNCP (including what those four letters mean) here:

http://www.nncpgo.org/

brudgers• 4 years ago

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

― Andrew S. Tannenbaum

sitkack• 4 years ago

NNCP 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!

Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

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