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."

Re:Why yes!

[Hobadee]

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!

Antarctica doesn't need dead drops...

[babymac]

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!

Re:Why yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are blindly trusting that something physically appearing as a "USB key" is a usb storage class device. It could just as easily present some human-interface device endpoints and start injecting keyboard or mouse input to quickly control your computer. Or, it could simply zap your computer with a high voltage surge, potentially by drawing USB power to charge a capacitor...