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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)"
Turn off AutoPlay first, kids. You'll thank me later.
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
5 free usb drives, where's my bike?
No longer where you left it, since a passerby though 'hey, a free bike'.
I can think of no security issues that could be introduced by this development.
For an encore, he'll be setting up "Drop Dead" sites around the city. These will be little knobs mounted to walls, for anonymous people to "share" biological materials by walking up to them and licking them.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So basically, you are being invited to connect a USB device from an unknown source, with unknown code on it, to your machine. There have been many instances of people leaving USB sticks with exploit binaries around for people to find. You find the stick, stick it in your machine, and are promptly exploited. Regardless of whether the creator of the dead drops hasn't done this intentionally themselves (hopefully, they haven't), you have no idea what might have been placed on the sticks by others.
But then a taxi came by and said 'hey, a free passerby'.
I invite continuation
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.
kudos to the person who will find them all and format to ext4 file system.
Then a tow truck came by and said, "Hey, free taxi!"
The CB App. What's your 20?
A better way would be to build a simple open wifi AP. No internet connection, just storage.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... this concept would not go down well with the government, especially around their nuclear facilities.
It's kinda pointless and possibly dangerous there's something cool about a USB port in a brick wall. It's like plugging into the unknown
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.
Apparently, this person is willing to expose himself as a complete moron, just to get a bit of publicity. This is not even original, security experts have been using something very similar as network penetration technique for years.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There's a long tradition of young folks picking up nasty viruses from anonymous strangers in NYC; now their computers can too.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
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.
Then a tow truck came by and said, "Hey, free taxi!"
Then Optimus Prime came by and said, "Longarm? Are you free?"
And then an analogy came by and said, "Hey, a free metaphor!"
kudos to the person who will find them all and format to ext4 file system.
awesome post, but since it is almost halloween, why not a killer file system like reiserfs?
music lover since 1969
I definitely won't stick someone's hoo-hoo dilly in my laptop's cha-cha.
Hate to break it to you, but the first thing a Windows boxen will do when it is then plugged into the drive then will be prompt the user to format it, NTFS, sort of making this hardly any real fix, and really just more annoying to the projects spirit as whatever pdf of the Anarchist's Cookbook or whatever "contraband" files these kiddies will be spreading at these dead-drops will be deleted twice.
And then two dozen ./ users came by and said, "Hey, free karma!"
Free Willy!
One of the signs today at the Rally to Restore Sanity asked "What would Optimus Prime do?"
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Actually they are *all* unsuitable for removeable media. Both of them will have problems with permission inconsistancy, and NTFS really doesn't handle unclean disconnection well. This is why FAT32 has remained in use for so long.
The replacement is probably going to be exfat. It's not free, not even remotely - it's patented to hell by Microsoft - but it's still likely to take over for the simple reason that Windows supports it (Since Vista, I think), and no removeable media is going to be practical of 90+% of PCs can't read it.
That could get you on the sex offender's list
It's a great idea, but why put these things in such easily accessible locations where they could be open to anyone with less than noble intentions? I did the same thing as this guy a couple of years back, but was a little more selective in location, some of which are as follows:
* Mount Etna (near the mouth)
* North pole (well 40 ft underground at that point)
* 3 miles underground at an unknown location. There is a cave entrance though I think (well there was last time I went).
* In my house
* Inside the fossilized remains of a dead bird found somewhere in the Sahara Desert.
* Five are in the ocean too (I'll keep the exact locations secret, but you may have some luck checking out the Atlan... (hint hint) ).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
goatse.jpg
Copy of goatse.jpg
Copy2 of goatse.jpg
Copy3 of goatse.jpg
...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Stop throwing facts into a fun conversation.
That way i can get my free viruses without having to plug something in.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...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.
He would KICK ASS... with a cool voice.
Unless of course people feel there is something 'cool' about having to be in a specified location to receive information in this day and age.
GEO caching came readily to mind. Find an interesting (and hopefully somewhat safe site) and when people get there, not only can they share whatever, but they can have a unique experience as well.
From sneaker net ot peer to peer to USB Dead Drops? lmao...
Might be good practice for when Fascism takes over thanks to Citizen United vs FEC.
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
I used to do Geocaching...before kids ;)
I had reservations about finding boxes hidden and opening them to see what's inside. On all occasions the contents were benign.
I think it's a shame that the first thing people think to do with these is to load them up with exploits or porn. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be plugging my laptop in without some serious protection. However one thing I liked about Geocaching was that it caused you to go to places off the beaten track or informed you of interesting facts about the location. It was great as a tourist.
There is so much interesting stuff about this...and yet...now I'd be too afraid to plug in.
Another train of thought, If the artist wanted to present some interesting social study, he/she would monitor the files at each location and build an instillation to show what type of file, when uploaded, how much good and bad, yadda yadda.
I'm sure with a bit of extra thought with respect to the security aspects by the artist, this could be made acceptably safe. For instance, could the stick be simulated on a system which actively scans and cleans between uploads?
Thats ok. And we hate you. :)
You ultimately don't have to connect to the USB stick if you don't want to. And as for your suggestion, you've obviously missed the point, because the concept behind it is NOT to share files with someone you know. But rather to create drop spots in an urban environment to see what happens. Think of it as creating a parallel (and sllightly subversive) infrastructure that people might use in new and original ways. I would expect that in the age of "oh nohs! all the guvernmsnts r trackingzz us!!!" you would applaud this in a small way. With a bit of encryption you might be able to do all sorts of stuff with it.
But as we say in Art: glad you don't like -- must mean its doing something right.
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.
[End Of Line]
Then i came by and pissed on Optimus Prime. "Hey, free urine!"
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Creativity: A+
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Usefulness: F
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"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Partition the usb drive into two. sdb1 is a tiny ntfs partition with some barney pics, and sdb2 is ext3 with all the awesome stuff on it. Windows won't even know how to access the 2nd partition AFAIK. Last time I checked Windows wouldn't even let you partition a usb thumbdrive w/ more than 1 partition.
Yeah, because the "open" guys have really shown that they know how to all control their egos and make sure everything they do is in the best interests of the "community", and not in the pursuit of some ridiculous need to flex an e-peen or get the last word.
I predict the first day you declare your utopia has been achieved, at least 3 people will fork it because they can't abide by trivial differences in your set of rules, and several dozen blog posts will go up lamenting the shoddy architecture and insecure design of your utopia, and talk about how short-sighted you are to have not anticipated these issues.
Because that's how your vaunted community works in actuality. Thank you, but as someone else mentioned, we'll be -- blessedly -- long dead before this hellish 'utopia' comes to pass. God save us from technical savants with the will to power and limited or nonexistent social skills.
Then i came by and pissed on Optimus Prime. "Hey, free urine!"
You pissed on Optimus? Oooh, "urine" trouble now.
Just wait until someone drops kiddie porn on it or the latest malware!!
The guy obviously overlooked the "people are assholes" factor. Some jerk will eventually show up with a hammer and destroy the thing just for the hell of it.
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.
> I figured it would also need some code to figure out who was getting too close to the hidden antenna and drop transmit power or the connection outright to mask the actual location.
1) If I sniff only, you will not detect me
2) No matter what you do, unless you switch positions, I can find you over time
> I also figured the network would need to occasionally switch off and vanish if devices nearby were lurking and not sharing, even with that, no way to defeat passive wifi sniffing.
How will you find out that I sniff when I only sniff? I will send _nothing_.
I can put a JPG, MP3, PDF, anything that exploits a zero-day (or known) vulnerability on the drive. As you will not only _copy and store_ but _open_ the files...
Also, what stops me from emulating a keyboard and entering a load of crap? "Windows-c (?) deltree c:\\ /y\n" comes to mind.