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USB 'Dead Drops'

Posted by Soulskill on from the peer-to-peer-sneakernet dept.

Okian Warrior writes "Aram Bartholl is building a series of USB dead drops in New York City. Billed as 'an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space,' he has embedded USB sticks as file cache devices throughout the city. Bartholl says, 'I am "injecting" USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your files and data.' Current locations (more to come) include: 87 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (Makerbot), Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY (Dumbo), 235 Bowery, NY (New Museum), Union Square, NY (Subway Station 14th St), and West 21st Street, NY (Eyebeam)"

9 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Yeeeahhh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Turn off AutoPlay first, kids. You'll thank me later.

    1. Re:Yeeeahhh by HungryHobo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ya I would have thought an open wifi network connected to a little ftp server (but for fun not the internet)would make a far better dead drop.
      for one you wouldn't have to be so obvious about connecting to it.
      Sitting in a coffee shop across the street would be far less conspicuous.

  2. Dead drops? by nebaz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is that kind of like a Glory Hole? Probably the same number of viruses.

    --
    Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
  3. Engineering aspects: by gblackwo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ok, so they chose to leave the male end sticking out of the wall- and instead of using some sort of extension cord plug the laptop directly in. It will not take much wobbling of the laptop to create a large amount of shear stress on the usb stick leading to failure.

    Also I'm sure many will complain about the possible dangers of viruses but imagine worse. How much damage could you do with a usb stick? It wouldn't be impossible to rig a car battery to the contacts from the other side of the wall.

  4. Re:Sounds great! by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A better way would be to build a simple open wifi AP. No internet connection, just storage.

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  5. It's like the 70's and 80's by WED+Fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...its like the era of near anonymous sex, eventually people started dying after hooking up. How long before we see people killing their computers, or going to jail because they plugged in and xferred something really illegal?

    This is REALLY smart.

    --
    Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
  6. Cops Will Not Like This... by IonOtter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From a geek perspective, I think this is awesome. It combines all the fun of geocaching with the rewards of actually getting something. I do think that viruses would be a concern, yes, but at the same time, anyone looking for one of these things is going to expect that, and will either be protected somehow, or will be using a machine they can keep in quarantine.

    From an art perspective, I think this is awesome. It's funny, fresh and gets people outside, exploring their world. It's using available materials to change the way people look at common, everyday items.

    From an engineering perspective, all I can see is broken USB hubs stuck in my port because I sneezed too hard. Or shorted out the port because it was wet on the inside of the plug. Or someone thought they were cute and put some WD-40 in there, instead of electrical contact cleaner.

    But from an societal point of view, I see strangers walking up to a building and holding their computers up against the wall. That's fine for things like monuments, park statues and maybe even trees in a park? But doing that outside a business might get you in trouble.

    Do it anywhere near someplace the NYPD consider "sensitive", and you might just become the latest headline news.

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    [End Of Line]
  7. Re:cfdisk /dev/sdb; mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 by redhog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can confirm that this works - I have a usb drive w one fat partition and one ext3. The fat one contains putty, winscp and stuff like that, plus a private ssh key. The ext3 one contains another private ssh key, plus a private gpg key. Never had any problems with windows trying to do anything with the ext3 partition. Linux mounts both of them :)

    --
    --The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
  8. Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked by Nyder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And here is an article on this exploit technique:

    http://www.dailytech.com/USB+Drive+Malware+Exploit+Windows+7+Flaw+in+Apparent+Espionage+Effort/article19065.htm

    http://www.dailytech.com/USB+Drive+Malware+Exploit+Windows+7+Flaw+in+Apparent+Espionage+Effort/article19065.htm

    What, you can't actually make a link?

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