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Dead Drops P2P File Sharing Spreads Around Globe

Posted by Soulskill on from the will-someday-enable-a-revolution-in-dystopia dept.

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."

5 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Why yes! by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd be happy to plug my netbook / phone / multimedia device into this unknown thumb drive. Why not? I've got anti-virus...

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    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Why yes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not a thing. I have no idea how I am even making this post.

    2. Re:Why yes! by Hobadee · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You are making a pretty big assumption there that what you are plugging in is actually a storage device. It could easily be a device which shows up as an HID device and plays back a macro. "Alt-F2, 'xterm', Enter, 'rm -rf /', Enter" would be pretty devastating on your secure Linux box which doesn't run anything from removable media.

      Just because it looks like a thumb drive, doesn't mean it is one!

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      ...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
    3. Re:Why yes! by jkflying · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're thinking software. Try thinking hardware.

      I bet by hooking the other end of the USB up to 220V I could do some pretty nasty things to your computer.

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      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
  2. What a great idea! by Russ1642 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The technological equivalent of having unprotected sex through a glory hole at a Quebec truckstop.