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.
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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.
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.
In high school I used to pass USB flash drives in an Altoid can (to protect it), good times.
I also used to be the CD-R guy (and later DVD+RW) for my group of friends, I was really into
.cuesheets and putting hidden tracks on those (including dumb shit like seeking back in the middle of a slow song would reveal heavy metal or something).These days I host a Tailscale network — unfortunately with residential upload speeds being trash, I’ve moved all my Blu-ray rips to Storj and set up a WebDAV gateway on a VPS (running Tailscale). It’s fast as hell but I’m not in love with decrypting on the VPS.
Isn’t that the plot to Mirror’s Edge?
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.
Last Christmas I gave a family member a flash drive containing ~10 high quality movie encodes, basically a shortlist of the year’s personal highlights I think they’d enjoy too. I don’t know if they’ve used it, but I’m going to make a habit of it until I hear otherwise. A drive for a handful movies is cheap enough to not worry about if it’s never seen again. Give them a large capacity drive however, or access to a Plex server, and paralysis of choice occurs.
Your example trails off into a non-example.
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!
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?
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 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.
It’s been a long time since I pirated over sneakernet. I shared a lot of music with friends that way though. I had an mp3 player with a big hard drive and it had a USB host port, so you could plug in a flash drive and copy files.
I transfer shows and movies to people I work with via external hard drive all the time. When I was a kid we’d copy pc games and CDs we got and share them around.
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.
You know, there was a much shorter range version of this that was predominantly used in offices and college computer rooms. It was called FrisbeeNet.