For those that don’t know what the sneakernet is it’s essentially transferring data through physical means. For example I would occasionally download TV shows to a hard drive for a friend who didn’t have access to the internet after they thought they cancelled their subscription to their ISP and acquired hundreds of dollars of debt. You can find a Wikipedia page for the term sneakernet here.
Have any of you set something up with your neighbors or family? I’d include LAN setups where content as shared as part of the sneakernet. Kind of similar to how stuff has been distributed in Cuba.
I personally download stuff for my friend who’s been stuck in a personal care place for the last ~6 months, getting him shows and movies he’s wanted to watch but never had the time before.
I often torrent on my Raspberry Pi as I go about my day, transfer to my laptop via FTP, double check for file integrity, then transfer to a 1TB “flash drive” I made out of a M.2 drive and enclosed bay at his care facility.
My upload speed is horrible, so I download items, compare my stuff to my friend,(freefilesync) then copy to an external ssd for them to import.
Is it just one friend? How would you compare using FFS versus creating and sharing a torrent?
do you transport said hardrive via yellow bag too while leaping majestically over rooftops?
well I setup a sneakernet script for my parents as they live in a deadzone and only got shitty celluar. I lived a few hours away so my script would grab the movies and shows for the past few months in its search and cp them to my disk. then i would run another script once i get to their place to upload it to windows and put it in the right folder. subsequent iterations the scripts were changed to shell script and python. their computer now runs Debian too. works great.
I’m a teacher and I have a USB stick full of textbook PDFs. It wouldn’t be cool to email them on my professional account but sneakernet is the ultimate VPN lol
My wife does this in the dental industry. She’s got loads of questionable quality USB sticks and I haven’t gotten her to copy it all to our NAS.
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PPN! (pp network?)
Back when I lived in Dubai, around 06, you’d go to some well known parking spots and some Indians guy would come to your car with a bunch of burned DVD in giant binders with all of the latest release, classics, complete series…
That was useful because internet was pretty shit and expensive. If I remember I was paying €120 a month for a theoretical 2Mb.
And there was even a “special” binder for that famous vin diesel movie. I guess he was very popular because it was very large binder that lots of people asked to see every week. It’s weird to me because pitch black was clearly his best and the only one worth rewatching but, every single week, people really seems excited to buy a new copy of xXx.
I just shipped n 8TB drive of children’s shows to a friend. First, because many of the shows I wanted to recommend him aren’t on streaming services and second, because he’s moving to the mountains soon, where the internet may or may not be available.
Other than this instance, the last time was likely around 2007.
Isn’t that the plot to Mirror’s Edge?
Johnny Mnemonic’s NAS.
Shiiiiiiiit, transferring stuff via physical media takes me back to high school. It was mostly porn videos to my friends, never charged a dime, only asked them to give me a blank CD
Haven’t done anything like that since I finished college. During those years, it was mostly sharing ripped versions of games that we could play straight from the USB stick on the college computers, mostly Counter Strike 1.6 , much to my distaste as I much preferred other games like Digital Paintball 2 and Age of Empires 2. Also a bit ironic that, despite all of us being CompSci students, I seemed to be the only one who was willing to endure the “pains” of setting up a SNES emulator so we could play Bomberman over the LAN.
Never heard of paintball 2, but dang, an fps from 1998 that’s still recording updates??? That’s nuts!
back in the dial-up and bbs days, i kept plenty of floppy disks (and later CDs) with my favorite media on them to play when i visited friends. in more recent history i have placed my digital media backups on drives to play at friends’ houses. it’s nice to be offline now and then.
while not technically sneakernet, we did have a piratebox set up at an office that i leased for backing up media collectively.
I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.
We used to play Halo CE and Minecraft at school with copies saved on thumb drives. Before that I installed Zoo Tycoon on one of the computers in my elementary school library.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down a highway.
Damn it. Beat me to it. I’ll be first ext time.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83.
That was a saying in the 80s already, and still relevant today.
Your example trails off into a non-example.
My dad used to occasionally get DVDs from a friend at work. Still have a shitton of them in the basement. Now my dad judges me for pirating but I’m like you did the same thing!
It’s like how a lot of parents these days don’t think their “jailbroken” Firestick is pirating
I send my mom a USB flash drive with photos periodically because it’s easier than getting her to use Google photos and I don’t have to manage more social media garbage.
