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Dead Drops P2P File Sharing Spreads Around Globe
Lucas123 writes "After beginning as an art project 3 years ago in Manhattan to thwart government online spying and offer a physical depiction of our digitally-connected society, a trend of embedding USB thumb drives in walls has caught on and spread to every continent but Antarctica. Dead Drops, as the anonymous P2P files sharing network is called, now has more than 1,200 locations worldwide and has morphed as participants have become more creative in not only where they place the drives, but how they share files, including creating WiFi locations. The thumb drives, which range in size from a few megabytes to 60GB, have allowed people to share music, video, personal photos, poetry, political discourse, or artwork anonymously. Dead Drops creator, German artist Aram Bartholl, said the project is a way to 'un-cloud' file sharing."
I'd be happy to plug my netbook / phone / multimedia device into this unknown thumb drive. Why not? I've got anti-virus...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
While it requires power, something like the PirateBox seems like a safer alternative. It relies on wifi, which means you don't have to be in one physical spot to use it, and you don't run the risk of pluggin your computer into something you can't see. You never know, it could be a 240 volt power line attached to that USB plug.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The technological equivalent of having unprotected sex through a glory hole at a Quebec truckstop.
Well, do you?
If so, XWhInhE6emE
I used an ARDUINO to load one of these with BITCOINS and BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE.
I hope there is some delicious Cheese Pizza recipes and nude beach photos on them.
Sneakernet, for you youngsters, is like the Internet, but with more walking.
[ Links make things "Informative"... :-) ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
How is this different from sneakernet? Other than having a centralized database of locations (which I would imagine undermines the whole secrecy/privacy goal), isn't this what we've been doing since before the internet began?
I don't see how this thwarts government spying. A catalog must be online somewhere, and anything the government is interested in, well, bonus, set up a cam opposite and write down whoever visits. Hell, it makes foreign spying even easier -- just another tourist visiting your country.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... that the government can find and plug into these as easily as anyone else?? And then load software to track who is downloading??
Another creative ideas from people from children living in their mom's basements who really don't have a clue.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
In a sneakernet you move the media to the computer, with dead drops you move the computer to the media.
use an offline, disposable computer to read these drives if you want to play the game.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
it's just a particularly slow one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a six month veteran of the US Antarctic Program, I can tell you McMurdo Station doesn't need dead drops. There's plenty of file sharing going on pretty much in the open. I attended meetings in the library that would pretty much devolve into file sharing swap meets. I suppose it must have been like the mid-1990s on college campuses. Fun stuff!
"War makes me sad." - Me
Mod up.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Oh, look a sock puppet.
1 - God only knows what virus is on that device or if its not just wired to 220 and fry your machine on contact.
2 - Who is watching? It wouldn't be considered entrapment if its the government.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
we are looking for people who would be interested to bring the deaddrops.com project fwd. things were slow but caught up now again in post snowden era ;) if you know php and are interested to support please get in touch! dev at deaddrops.com ;)
thx!
ARAM (i m the guy in the video
Sounds cool.
Harbor freight solar disguise it as a sat antenna, thumb drive, wifi and some computer on a stick near a busy location.
I could upload and down load new files from the busy location once in awhile.
It sounds cool.
I've placed a couple of dead drops here in Seattle (the gum wall @ Pike Place Market & the Fremont Bridge) but both are long gone. Looks like it's an idea whose time has come. Time to plant some more all over town... http://jetcityorange.com/dead-drops/
Dear incoherent racist troll:
When you die, you'll have accomplished nothing but making life for others slightly less wonderful than it otherwise would have been. You will have created nothing of lasting beauty, and wasted the only opportunity you'll ever have to do something great. You get one chance at this game of life, and you are losing at it. Badly.
Those *might* be ok to use. at least then you can scan what you are getting, plus it wouldn't be obvious you are doing it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This comment is hidden.
Cause who gives a shit about netbooks anyway?
except for THAT example - Stuxnet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
The smart Jews are reading this article and investing in NAND flash memory plants.
Rant all you want.
One of the better responses to this in awhile. Bravo.
One of the linked articles mentioned a Chinese student placing a 120Gb at a Sydney TAFE but when you look at the location database map option, it is pinned to a location which is about 30-40km's from where it really is. It shows it as being in Western Sydney when it should be showing it as being in/near to the Sydney CBD. If you look at the photos one of them shows a sign for Harris street which is a main road the TAFE is located next to in/near the Sydney CBD. Not sure how it ended up so far away on the map.
As an aside, I wonder how many of these drives are now infected with malware etc by now.
I hope you physically disconnected your hard drive first. Otherwise you're at even greater risk, because your LiveCD probably has "sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL" in your /etc/sudoers.
See Hobadee's comment about HIDs and its children, and realize what would happen if it could get root without asking for a password -- just by adding "sudo" before the command.
Hint: "/usr/bin/sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" from a LiveCD will completely ruin your day. Even if you manage to kill it in the first second, your partition table is already gone, and most of your primary partition's directory structure is probably gone too. I hope you had a backup.
But you're going to need an industrial-strength "USB condom". Data lines optoisolated. Power lines hooked to a battery in the condom. Both data and power lines on the "dangerous" side protected with fuses and overvoltage protection devices. And a microcontroller implementing a filter to make sure it can't pretend to be anything but a block storage device. Feasible, but worth it? I don't think so.
Anyone who thinks this offers some form of anonymity in any way hasn't been paying attention. For instance, the locations are all known, there's a website that lists them all! Anyone interested in exactly who is downloading or uploading what just has to put up a hidden camera to watch the thumb drives.
So, interesting concept, poor execution. Now if the drives were accessible through wireless means, that would be a step towards creating a true dead-drop network. This thing as described is just a stunt. Art project? Yeah, I can believe that.
Your anonymity in a dead drop system depends on the dead drop location being known only to you and to the person with whom you want to exchange the secret.
As soon as you publish the location of the dead drop anyone can observe it and you have no anonymity whatsoever.
Ah yes the USB glory hole.
Mod parent funny!