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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.
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.
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)
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
Semi-off-topic story:
Friend of mine lived in an apartment that caught fire. He had a couple of PC's at the time, including a high-end (at the time) 1Ghz Athlon. He and his roommate were able to get most of the valuables out of the place, including the Athlon PC, but most of their possessions were lost. The fire investigator came across the roommate's shotgun (they were hunters) that had a shorter than normal, but legal, barrel. The police were called in, all weapons were confiscated, and amazingly so were the computers. Even if the shotgun were illegal, I still can't figure out what relationship a computer would have to it. Chalk it up to post-Columbine paranoia I suppose, although these guys were in their early 20's. No charges were ever filed, but the computers were never returned despite several iniquiries. The kids were pretty scared after the whole ordeal and never really pursued the matter.
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."
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.
Um, the cops would seize the backups, too.
This is why you leave a copy of your backups with your attorney.
A company I worked for sent one of the weekly offsite sets to our corprate law firm so we would have access in case of legal entanglements.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
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.
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.
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?
"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'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.