USB 'Dead Drops'

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)"

Comments

Geocache much?

[dismorphic]

Sounds an awful lot like a high(er?) tech version of a geocache to me. Somebody should post these to geocaching.com and suggest a new style of cache... a data cache.

What dould possibly go wrong?

[Animats]

Could be worse. In 1969, the Museum of Modern Art in New York deployed Pulsa, an exhibit which included many strobe lights arranged to flash in sequence. There was a long line of strobes not only on the museum, but extending to adjacent buildings.

Pilots reported runway lighting in midtown Manhattan. The "moving ball of light" strobe system for runways was chosen because, even in cluttered urban areas with many parallel lines of light, there's nothing which looks like that. The FAA made them retime the strobes so that it didn't look like a runway.

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[LWATCDR]

Umm.. I guess you didn't read about the Stuxnet worm that used several zero day USB based explotes including a buffer overrun in lnk files.
Last I heard not all of those where patched so if you are using a windows machine odds are you are.
Also if one was to be really nasty they would hack a microcontroller to be a keyboard and then hijack your machine that way.

My grading of this idea:

[GameboyRMH]

Creativity: A+
Humor: B
Usefulness: F
Convenience: F
Security: F
Resistance to Vandalism: F