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Stash Your Hard Drive In The Attic
RegardsSJ writes "Robert X. Cringley on his PBS website mentions a $479 wireless, fanless 120gb network storage/file server appliance (running linux) in his column. He thinks the killer app for this one is for keeping your porn storage hidden, if you're busted by the cops. I think his concept is weak, given the wireless signal is traceable (security through obscurity?), WEP is breakable, and the fact that you have to have the thing plugged in somewhere... The company selling the device is martian.com. Anybody use one?" Now that it's possible to stream audio and video through various boxes originally serving other purposes (like TiVo and PlayStation2), this looks like a good companion piece, too.
Why not just stuff it under your mattress? They'll never find it there...
I am over here... now I am back over here!
Since when is having porn illegal?
Ummm... I didn't see any child-porn-storage type of usage mentioned on the website. How about the millions of people who could theoretically be shut away for their "illegal" mp3 collection?
:) Also, perhaps better encryption with a smart-card at the PC you could remove and destroy. Then it would be a perfect product for terrorists and pedophiles alike ...and perhaps normal people who don't want anyone seizing their data.
If only it came with a self-destruct mechanism, it might overcome the shortcomings you mentioned
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
would you want to hide your porn collection, unless you're a paedophile?
Hide the porn from the cops? It's more like hide the porn from the wife.
hm... where did I hide my HD from the police again? :-(
would be to store the heat-producing noisy things in a different room than the humans.
(Perhaps this is mentioned in the article. I can't tell because their webserver is on fire.)
Both at home and at work, I'm tired of noisy machines. I work to minimize the noise. I'd love to just say, "fuck it, be as noisy as you want," as I lovingly place all the equipment on the other side of a wall, leaving nothing but a monitor and the input devices in front of me.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Why don't you just put up in your neighbors attic? That's obscurity...I'd put it in the trunk of my car, since that appears to be where I keep half my crap anyways..
Hiding pr0n (or anything) is the killer app for excellent encryption, not for a WEP-accessed drive array. ::obligatory plug:: OS X lets you create read/write/mountable disk image files that are encrypted with AES-128. Very cool stuff to play with.
;)
Just don't put its password in your keychain, or those feds will get a chuckle as they double-click the image file and it unlocks with your autologin.
1) Buy wireless AP 2) Get fast-assed broadband 3) Encourage neigbours to buy wifi cards to access your broadband connection And the rest writes itself!
Just because it's fanless doesn't mean it generates no heat. In fact, free airflow is probably more important than with forced-air cooling. I've seen plenty of complaints about how hot that fanless Apple cube box could get.
Covering the box with insulation and putting it in a 140 degree F attic sounds like a sure-fire way to fry the system. I would be surprised if it's not a fire hazard as well.
If you can wire a plug to a electrical box in the basement, enclose the box beams after mounting this to the floor add an 802.11g interface with an 802.11g access point above it, (and add a bit more storage to the device) you could do set up a wired network with thin clients throughout your house, and never have to worry about anyone taking off with your systems.
Granted you would probably want to use the most recent and strongest varient of WEP, and if possible waveguide your area between the AP and the server to reduce attacks, but if you build it properly, they can set up everything they take from your house, and won't have a bootable system, and you can go to a swap meet or computer recycler and pick up enough hw to go back and wipe your server before they start tearing apart the finish of the house.
That's if you are paranoid.
-Rusty
You never know...
My attic gets very hot in the summer. There's no way a hard drive would survive a month there. The basement is a much better place since it'll stay cooler all year round.
"I would, for one, but my friend David from the UK points out that such a device hidden away from sight would be ideal for storing data you wouldn't want confiscated by the police. Nestle a Martian box under your attic insulation if you have something to hide. "
Who knows what the people at PBS have to hide from the cops.
Yeah, but who would want one of these things? I would, for one, but my friend David from the UK points out that such a device hidden away from sight would be ideal for storing data you wouldn't want confiscated by the police.
The author doesn't mention porn in his article... get your minds out of the gutter
No effect yet traced, but cautious researchers saying not finding something is not the same as proving it doesn't exist, which the worried then take as an assertion it does exist.
Mobiles are limited to ?1 watt?. A torch bulb is several watts, at higher (and conventionally more damaging) . I just don't see any mechanism for damage; and nobody (AFAIK) has followed up any suggestions with valid research.
Sunlight is about 500w/m^2. The top of my head is about about 20 cm round of this, so a sunny day gives 10-20W onto my skull. A mobile at a total of 1W, not all of which is radiated towards me? I am not worrying.
And, to keep on topic, I think WiFi is even less (?1/4 watt?) and you don't hold it close to you.
I would worry far more about exhaust fumes, myself. But those seem less dangerous to ordinary people, because you can "see" them, whereas you can't see this nasty electromagnetic radiation (big bad word there).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Maybe hiding something like this in your attic wouldn't work out if the police turned your house over, but it would almost certainly survive if you got your house burgled - I doubt that many burglars take the time (or even think) to look in the attic.
Police have been known to sieze computers that simply had data that might be used as evidence, even when the owners hadn't done anything wrong. Is there any legal defense against this, like "I have my website, my financial records, and tomorrow's homework on that fileserver... you can't take it away from me!"? Or does this come under the heading of "why you should always have multiple good backups"?
Don't hide one in your house. Instead, find a nice hidden spot with good reception and a power socket in random places - at work, at the local mall, underneath bridges, in parks, etc. Mark the location with a GPS, and use them as random access points/neighborhood file repositories.
The idea is to create a decentralized, accessible, but non-connected freenet centered around a sort of "dead-drop" concept. If you want to distribute something, drive around town uploading to these file repositories, and hopefully leechers that frequent these spots will pass the data on.
Of course, if you wanted to network these units, all you have to do is plop one somewhere, then train a box with a wired connection at them and set up a bridge - so you can use them either way. I like the cloak-and-dagger method myself... it seems cooler 8)
Ok, if you hide your file server in your attic, it will be found with difficulty. Still, if the cops really want to find it, they'll just come with radio tracking equipment! 802.11 transmitters should be easily located.
The best way to keep anything hidden from anybody is to keep them from ever knowing it existed in the first place - if they already know, or suspect, then it's already too late.
Sure, you might have your super-leet miniserver stuck in your heating ducts, powered by a little mini-windmill and linked via 802.11g to your house, with an emergency "shut up for 24 hours" command, and that might keep it from being found in a cursory search. But if the cops really think you have something on a computer in your house that is worth finding, they will find it. They will keep searching until they do, even if it takes days.
So the day after you are hauled downtown, one of the forensics team says "Hey, there's a signal here on 5GHz - get the spec-an in here and let's DF that puppy."
Now, if you used strong encryption, you might keep them from knowing what is on the disk, but find it they will. And they can compel you to provide the key - even here in the US, all they have to do is say "Fine - we won't charge you based on anything we find." That "poofing" sound was your 5th Amendment right becoming irrelevant - you can no longer incriminate yourself, so you can no longer refuse to testify and be protected. Continue to refuse, and they find you in contempt of court and lock you up until you change your mind.
Robert Heinlein made the point in "If This Goes On..." that the best thing in the world is to let them find something bad, but not bad enough to get you into trouble. So, if you are plotting the overthrow of the known world, you keep that info a deep, dark secret tattooed on the inside of your eyelids encrypted with a 4096 bit key, but you keep your goat porn on a drive they will find (with a little looking). Then, when they think you are hiding something and find the drive, they look a little longer, don't find anything, and move on.
But once again, the big trick is not to arouse suspicions in the first place. If they knock on the door, you've already lost.
www.eFax.com are spammers
This is just an Epia Mini-ITX motherboard in a bog standard Morex Cubid Mini-ITX case. I have both sat here on my desk and its a great little silent linux server.
They cost a lot less to buy what this company wants to charge you. Sure they added wireless card/hard drive/memory but $500 still seems a bit expensive.
Check out http://www.mini-itx.com for details of the motherboard / case. They also have an online store for Europeans...
BTW, you can easily get 2 hard drives in that case if you take out the included hd enclosure so you could make one with a lot more space than 120gb...
After all, the cops, even though they have a warrant and some sort of indication that you have illegal material, will probably just give up without looking in the attic. I mean, who would think someone might hide stuff up there? I learned this trick from the "porn computer in the attic article."
Digital cellphone are fairly low powered (couple hundred mW max). Wi-Fi devices are max 100mW. I worked with guys that have been around radio tranmission equipement for 10+ years and they have had zero incidents of cancer (which is actually lower than statistical average for the pool size). Basically I spent the last 2.5 years in a building with hundreds of AP's and had no fear for my safety.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
thats a good point.. now that were seing more and more digital pictures, digital films, etc, there will be an increase in need to keep backups. Not just on a floppy either. How hard would it be for someone design a fireproof little vault that you could stuff in some remote corner of the house, wireless enable it.. and have it easy enough to hook up that grandma could use it for data storage?
Just think.. then instead of having to try and mount the hardrive on a different computer when it breaks.. I can just format it.. install a fresh OS, and copy and paste from my little safe.
Or bettery yet.. just keep a copy of the whole hard-drive.. not just the data files.. so when grandmas computer breaks.. I can tell here to pop in the restore cd.. have it boot up.. and automatically restore the lastest stable image of her hardrive. I wouldn't even have to run across town.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
[quote]If you have the kind of porn that has to be hidden from police, you belong in jail.[/quote]
Really? So if you're gay in Alabama and want porn, you belong in jail? Or if you like oral sex in your porn and you live in Mississippi, you belong in jail? That's a pretty tough stance.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Maybe that's the only sort of data that
http://milkshake.dexy.org
There are a few studies. Most are inconclusive. The one guys who's studies were conclusive was discredited for faking those results. Oops.
But much of it comes from annecdotal evidence of people who have brain tumors shaped like their cell phone antenna, and there aren't very many annecdotes at that.
I'm not a molecular biologist or anything, but I would guess the low frequency radiation which can penetrate a little way into the body isn't damaging because it ionizes anything, but because it might trick some cells into setting up shop. So it wouldn't be the energy of the signal so much as the asymetry with which it is delivered. And it wouldn't so much cause a tumor, as choose it's location. But that's my layman's supposition. And I don't think I've seen any articles or research that support that viewpoint.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Bury a fanless computer six feet down in the back yard. Run power and cat-5 into the garage. Add physical intrusion detection. By the time the police figure out where the cable leads, the thermite charges packed around the hard drives have done their work and there's nothing to find but a glass-encased lump of slag.
If anyone's interested, thermite is actually very easy to make. Igniting it from the computer would probably require a multi-stage ignition, though - say, electric match to black powder to magnesium strip to thermite. And you'd want to make sure the ignition signal didn't get accidentally flipped on reboot or core dump or anything. =]
Encryption's all well and good, but you've got to keep the keys somewhere. Just try recovering data from a hard drive when you can't identify which lump of metal IS the hard drive.
Really? So if you're gay in Alabama and want porn, you belong in jail? Or if you like oral sex in your porn and you live in Mississippi, you belong in jail? That's a pretty tough stance.
The law is neither just nor moral when it comes to a persons sexual lifestyles.. Its used as a tool to keep the status quo.
Wake up people, when sodomy laws reach the us supreme court because state courts call certain life styles "Illegal", there is a massive witch-hunt and you need to protect yourself.
This is just another tool, to protect you from prying eyes. Since the 4th amendment "Being secure with your own papers against unjust searches and seizures..." is no longer valid, you need to secure them yourself.
The future is encryption of data. Of course how long encryption of data will remain legal, is a upto the whims of our congress critters. Patriot Act 2 here we come.
Humans are use to light in the visible spectrum so I wouldn't worry about a light bulb. The Sun puts out a lot of nasty stuff that our atmosphere and magnetic belt protect us from.
If we are not use to the specific spectrum in play, we can't guarantee how cellular biology will react.
It's not the absolute wattage that worries me although I believe that signal strength is governed by an inverse square law so the closer a source is, the greater its local effect.
First, thermite doesn't explode. It reacts quickly and violently, with extremely high heat. The parent poster was right, a multistage computer controlled ignition system would work and be tits.
For those you who think it burns and/or requires oxygen, your wrong. This is the equation for a thermite reaction:
Fe2O3(s) + 2AL(s) -> AL2O3 + 2Fe + energy
That's right. Powdered aluminum and powdered rust make thermite. It's ignition temperature is so high that it is normally lit with burning magnesium metal. It reacts so hot that a small amount (like a kilo) can melt a hole through the engine block of a car and keep going through the concrete. That'll definitely be suffucient to melt your porno.
Knowing a lot of healthy physicists that have been exposed to many times the power of a cell phone (like my boss that works with equipment that pulse around 10 kA and 5 kV), it would seem that small sources like that would not be much a threat.
Also, I have seen various results for the number of cell phone users that have cancer, and many of them indicate that they are less likely to get cancer than the population in general. I don't have the papers with me now, but I am sure someone less lazy than me can find it on google.
I also looked up the heat loss of the head in a book of physical constants of mine, and the head radiates around 4.6 W of energy, so unless the cell phone (around 1 W I believe) zaps a very small part of your brain like a magnifying glass, you should be able to dissipate the heat rather quickly between radiating it and cooling by the blood. I can't imagine it being any worse than a mild fever, otherwise you would be able to feel it with your hand or something.
Everybody seems to want to pull this into the
extreme, by mentioning police, feds etc.
I think a more normal, and more common cause would be simple protection for thieves:
- They have to work quickly in general.
- They are relatively low tech
- They are after the hardware, not the data. (why search the house for a $400 appliance for which they probably don't even get $100
So simple separating the visible part to of your
computers from the storage/data as far as thieves are concerned.
Target: normal, ordinary people with important records: dentist, doctors, some journalists, politicians (including local, often worth a lot of money to real-estate entrepeneurs) etc.
Am I the only one who's attic is about 110 deg F or higher in the summer?
Can't see something with no fans surviving long in the attic. Now in the winter, heck yeah, but in the summer?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
To tell you, in basic terminology, the looseness of correspondance the 5th ammendment of the Constitution of the united States of America:
You are not required to provide an answer to a Police Officer(s)' request for information.
You are not required to give them information!
You are not required to answer a question!
You are not required to incriminate yourself!
You are not required to incriminate another person!
You are not required to provide any information about another person!
IF THEY SAY YOU MUST GIVE THEM INFORMATION, TELL THEM THEY ARE BREAKING THE LAW AND SHOVE THAT RED PEN UP THEIR ASSHOLE!
BE AWARE OF ANY AND ALL INFORMATION YOU _VOLUNTEER_ AND BE AWARE OF YOUR PERCEPTION TO THE "POLICE OFFICER" (they are slandering and libelous bastards at taking notes on your physical/emotional appearance).
NEVER SPEAK WITHOUT THE COUNCIL OF SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THE LAW!
TO SEIZE PROPERTY, THEY MUST FIRST PROVIDE A NOTICE/REQUEST TO SEIZE THE PROPERTY ALONG WITH A _PROBABLE_CAUSE_ (not just "Probable Cause"), AND IF YOU DO NOT _VOLUNTEER_ TO THEIR REQUEST FOR EVIDENCE THEN YOU TELL THEM TO GET A WARRANT. THEY CANNOT ISSUE A WARRANT BEFORE FIRST INQUIRING TO YOU WITH AN INITIAL REQUEST/NOTICE.
If they do otherwise than what the LAW OF THE LAND, Common Law and Constitution of the united States of America, then you will understand that they are NOT operating under the LAW OF THE LAND. Do not confuse municipal corporation laws (local, county, state, etc) with the LAW OF THE LAND (Common Law and Constitution of the united States of America).
When your secured rights are violated, then you will obviously wonder where the fuck all your slanderous neighbors went. Why do they turn a blind eye to your private property and humanity, and always suspect:
"Gosh, that always looked suspicious and was quite...he must have done somthing to deserve the police on his doorstep. Hope they turn him strait! Heil Commander-In-Chief!"
YOU AND I ARE THE PRINCIPLE, We the People, THAT OF WHICH CORRECTS THOSE THAT BREAK LAWS THEY HAVE CONTRACTUALY OPERATED UPON. PERHAPS NOW YOU KNOW WHY THERE IS A "FREEMEN OF MONTANA".
Just be sure to write a script into your .bash_logout that wipes your .bash_history & all relevant log files...
Not that I've done this or anything...
Wonder if I should have posted this anonymously...
LFS. Have you built your system today?
if you're american don't read the following since it could be used to hide information from 'the man' and such is terroristic activity.*bad humour to half mode*
because most of the time the cops won't bother snooping around totally, and in other countries than usa they might not have the right to stay at the computer and look whats going on once they bust you (basically, they can't alter the data, so they can't keep it on, or don't even have anyone available who would be able to figure it out). and i would bet that still most of the busts(the actual seizing of the machines) are held by not very geeky officers. and such hw is easy to place at your neighbours house or where ever, just make sure you got lots of other suspicious computers to seize. why would one want this privacy is his own thing(for one, it's not certain you will get your hw back as it is, even if you are innocent)..
not that hiding cd's was that difficult either, but that would involve too much running around the house.
though, using home-pna could prove out to be more convinient/cheaper and wouldnt involve wireless sniffing possibility, and you could place that out of sight pretty easily too.
i would put the machine inside a cast-beton case that had it's own ups inside that(that when disconnected would start to wipe the hd), and that would explode the innards if opened or wrong button pressed(while at it have the hd's spinning open without top covers and have some good goo/acid flow on them..), and while at it have it built into houses base too.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They may not have "all the rech"
but they can easily bring along a
signal strength meter in the appropriate band
and wander around until they find the source
Powerline would be the answer.. how do you track that down?
just to figure out which branch it's on would require
tripping each circuit breaker one at a time until you know.
Then you have to rip out all the walls
bury it in your neighbors yard, tapped into his electricity, and they'll never find it
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Surprised its not been mentioned before. Assuming its 802.11b, I get 5MBps speeds right next to the AP. In a room next door with my laptop I get 2MBps over wifi. A room further away is an erratic 0.5MBps.
Now a 120GB hard drive over a wireless link? Possibly enough to stream DivX, forget about DVD, and to fill the drive would take over two days!
"As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus."
Is this common knowledge? Great concept. In the long run I'd think they would be better off running blade computers to save power and reduce heat etc.
Tieing back to the subject... Network Attached Storage is the way of the future. Ultimately I'd rather have everything online somewhere where is it getting backed up properly. If I have to keep the data in my house at all I'd certainly rather it be on a specialized device that does one thing and does it well rather than on a Windows machine where it is at the mercy of the latest service pack.
I experimenting with various uses. It was a poor DVR DVR, due to the limited CPU and the small HDDs back then; it was an okay MP3 server but sometimes hiccuped if playing songs locally while streaming to other machines; NT-150 hackers still use the smart card slot for satellite card hacking, but that wasn't my gig.
It eventually became the least powerful CPU in my junkbox, but I liked its small, silent form factor and hated to trash its other capabilities. With a few components, I added an IR data reciever. the transfer rate never reached 10Mbps, but it was faster than the wireless networks of the time.
In the 70's, when lasers diodes ran $10+ surplus, hobbyists routinely used IR LEDs to communicate 100s of meters. A cluster of today's high-powered IR LEDs might reach a km or more (the transmitter needn't be directional if it's bright (illuminate a 6" translucent plastic cap and make the reciever directional with a cheap lens+tube focused on the emitter. Imagine, for example, a detector with a 1" dia "directional" tube fixed high in a tree on a distant hill, connected by RF or camouflaged wire to a buried server.
To be really clever, plant a second set-top box, filled with legal but embarrassing material in your backyard. When the cops "persuade" you to surrender the device, they won't suspect the existence of the real one.
As a matter of fact, I never got around to getting it back from the distant tree I used for range testing. If the battery weren't long since dead, I might give it a spin. Sure, rain, fog, and foliage would be problems over time, but depending on your location, you might be able to find a suitable location (e.g. the roof of a distant building). Power is also a problem, but the NT-150's current 10W draw could easily be handled by a small solar cell charging a battery (it'd charge 8-16 hours a day, but would probably only be used a few minutes a day) and even building technicians are hesitant to mess with unknown devices.
(The Stazi kept a covert surveillance station in Prague's old clock tower, but never gave a second thought to a wiring box along the power lines they ran up the tower stairway. It recently was found to contain a radio relay believed to be have been used by the KGB to relay small local KGB bugs to a Soviet office downtown. The KGB stole Stazi power because the tower -perfect for a relay- wasn't otherwise electrified, and they did not want to inform the Stazi about their local bugs)
This was, and is, beginner-level hardware hacking. It costs more in ingenuity than cash.
PORN.
This is what I did to combat the police problem. I bought several industrial demagnetizers and installed hard drives on the demagnetization surface. The demagnetizers are all attached to a solenoid. Pushing a single switch, which is hidden in a convenient place, immediately and irretrievably destroys all information on the hard drives. (That's because the demagnetizer stays on for the entire time the police are searching the place.) By the way, the information stored on these hard drives is as follows:
- Photographs proving that the women in my family have walked in public without being covered by a tablecloth. (We live in Afghanistan.)
- Videos proving that we have taught children how to read and write.
- MP3s, purchased from the Internet per the intellectual rights requirements of the content provider. (Music is illegal here.)
- Documents that criticize the actions of our local politicians.
No other information is stored on any of our hard drives."Personally, I keep my hard drive in my pants.. to each their own I guess. :o)"
Disadvantages of having a hard drive in your pants.
1-Warrenty returns are a bitch.
2-You get funny looks everytime you access your hard drive.
3-If it's an IBM Deskstar? You get even stranger looks when a loud screeching, clicking noise comes from your pants. See #1
4-"Chesnuts roasting" is not just limited to Christmas. See #3
5-The comment about how it's just your hard drive winding up get old after having been repeated for the 100th time.
6-Not being able to go out in public without people making comments like "Is that a hard drive in your pants, or you just glad to see me?"
7-The SCSI people laughing at your IDE.
8-The cache is bigger than everything else.
9-That confounded 12v battery you have to run it off of.
10-You learn to loath metal detectors.
I've got some porn. Actually, quite a lot of it. It's on my hard drive.
Now the cops can threaten me with revealing my secret porn empire and I'll just yawn and say "old news, and nobody cares."
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.