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

Yeeeahhh

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Yeeeahhh

[HungryHobo]

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.

Re:Yeeeahhh

[Joce640k]

Came here to see a bunch of geeks fail to grok "art project" and go into endless loops over the merits of the technology involved.

Am leaving satisfied...

Dead drops?

[nebaz]

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

Re:Cool

[MoonBuggy]

5 free usb drives, where's my bike?

No longer where you left it, since a passerby though 'hey, a free bike'.

Excellent

[427_ci_505]

I can think of no security issues that could be introduced by this development.

a new trend

[tverbeek]

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.

Good way to get your laptop attacked

[techmuse]

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.

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[techmuse]

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

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[Arancaytar]

What kind of crappy machine is vulnerable to files on an external medium?

It's not the nineties anymore.

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.

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[Nyder]

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?

Re:Cool

[entotre]

But then a taxi came by and said 'hey, a free passerby'.
I invite continuation

Engineering aspects:

[gblackwo]

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.

Re:Engineering aspects:

[MoonBuggy]

Basically, this. A very reasonable point, and one that I hadn't considered myself.

Re:Cool

[bennomatic]

Then a tow truck came by and said, "Hey, free taxi!"

Re:Sounds great!

[MichaelSmith]

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

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:Cool

[Andy Smith]

Then a tow truck came by and said, "Hey, free taxi!"

Then Optimus Prime came by and said, "Longarm? Are you free?"

Re:Cool

[contra_mundi]

And then an analogy came by and said, "Hey, a free metaphor!"

Re:Sounds great!

[djdavetrouble]

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?

Curiosity killed the ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I definitely won't stick someone's hoo-hoo dilly in my laptop's cha-cha.

Re:cfdisk /dev/sdb; mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

[KibibyteBrain]

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.

Re:Cool

[AndreR]

And then two dozen ./ users came by and said, "Hey, free karma!"

Re:Cool

[Xaositecte]

Free Willy!

Re:Cool

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

One of the signs today at the Rally to Restore Sanity asked "What would Optimus Prime do?"

Re:Cool

[Haedrian]

That could get you on the sex offender's list

Re:How stupid can you get?

[bsDaemon]

They really don't have any standards for art anymore, do they?

Directory Listing

[Penguinshit]

goatse.jpg

Copy of goatse.jpg

Copy2 of goatse.jpg

Copy3 of goatse.jpg

...

It's like the 70's and 80's

[WED Fan]

...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.

Re:How stupid can you get?

[dangitman]

They really don't have any standards for art anymore, do they?

I hear the ISO is considering the issue, but if you want swifter action, I suggest you submit an RFC to the IETF.

Cops Will Not Like This...

[IonOtter]

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.

My grading of this idea:

[GameboyRMH]

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

Re:My grading of this idea:

[cerberusss]

Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? -- Douglas Adams

Re:Cool

[Andy Smith]

Then i came by and pissed on Optimus Prime. "Hey, free urine!"

You pissed on Optimus? Oooh, "urine" trouble now.

Re:cfdisk /dev/sdb; mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

[redhog]

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 :)