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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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:
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 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.
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.
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
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
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].
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.
>> 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.
[+] [-] non-nil|3 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] liotier|3 years ago|reply
And of course a lot of time spent copying - that second floppy drive made my life so much easier !
[+] [-] kzrdude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] treeman79|3 years ago|reply
I proceeded to walk a floppy over to his house 2 miles away.
[+] [-] sascha_sl|3 years ago|reply
I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] O__________O|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] boastful_inaba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greyface-|3 years ago|reply
I wish it were built-in.
[+] [-] pmontra|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] O__________O|3 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] giomasce|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RunSet|3 years ago|reply
http://www.nncpgo.org/
[+] [-] _int3_|3 years ago|reply
I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.
[+] [-] zwirbl|3 years ago|reply
Good times
[+] [-] giomasce|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Firmwarrior|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trasz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ytjohn|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] MatthiasPortzel|3 years ago|reply
=> https://www.complete.org/nncp/
[+] [-] brudgers|3 years ago|reply
― Andrew S. Tannenbaum
[+] [-] sitkack|3 years ago|reply
> NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!
[+] [-] O__________O|3 years ago|reply
_____
* 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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] O__________O|3 years ago|reply
Besides Filespooler, any other options?
[+] [-] javier_e06|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] santimoller66|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]