31 ms·

Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bu

Being a teen in the 90s, sneakernet was sometimes even more fascinating and exciting to me than internet connectivity. It had an air of secrecy to it, little bundles of precious data carried between a select group of people on various, often cumbersome and/or expensive storage media. When everything is connected by a bunch of wires, it’s just too easy. Sometimes I wish for a return a that feeling of preciousness, instead of incomprehensible amounts of data carelessly shoved down wider and wider tubes. For my own sneakernet-like uses, I turn to git-annex. See use case “The Nomad” here: https://git-annex.branchable.com/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/

bitwize 4y ago
I feel you. In the 90s I came into possession of a strange floppy disk with this on the label: Dear Friend, Please tell my story. Sincerely, Dave Koresh After doing a thorough virus scan, I examined the contents of the disk. It contained a bunch of stories and essays by various authors in text-file format, nothing dealing directly with David Koresh or the Branch Davidians. But the FBI raid of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 caused... unrest in certain pockets of the American politisphere, primarily on the right but groups like the ACLU also got involved, and Janet Reno was mocked on SNL for her role in the incident. Nobody liked the Branch Davidians, they were a weird-ass cult preparing for an apocalypse that never came except maybe in a parrot sense[0], but there were concerns that the FBI (and potentially the ATF before) acted too aggressively, overstepping legitimate law-enforcement bounds and violating the Davidians' rights, and that caused a lot of political introspection: on our status as a freedom-respecting republic, the competence of our federal law-enforcement apparatus, what is the threshold beyond which the government legitimately could or should take action against weird-ass prepper cults. So there was a lot of philosophy and politics stuff in there, often in the form of USENET postings and other 90s internet copypasta, that dealt tangentially with those issues. It felt... kind of weird and awesome to have and to read that stuff. Cyberpunk. Here were thoughts that people felt not quite safe transmitting or discussing openly, so they were copied and distributed as floppy-disk samizdat. It was a mysterious object, alarming at sight because it suggested that Koresh might still be alive somewhere (and the shortening of "David" to "Dave" made him seem... humbled?), whose contents held even deeper and more thought-provoking mysteries. [0] "I heard tell once of a Jefferson City lawyer who had a parrot that would wake him each morning crying out 'today's the day the world shall end as scripture has foretold'. And one day, the lawyer shot him for the sake of peace and quiet I presume, thus fulfilling, for the bird at least, his prophecy." -- Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln in Lincoln (2012).
sascha_sl 4y ago
git-annex by default will consider your data dead when it can't be checked in real time, but overriding will trust the data will survive offline forever. I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it. There is "git annex expire" (https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-expire/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-expire/).
liotier 4y ago
Forever memories of high school around 1990, passing around backpacks fulls of floppies in front of our uncomprehending classmates... And of course a lot of time spent copying - that second floppy drive made my life so much easier !
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  High speed dubbing for the win
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  It’s always the second-last floppy in a series of dozens that is corrupted.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    I can almost hear the sound of the FDD trying - and failing - to read that one bad sector.
  - myself248 4y ago
    Rar and par files, though! Shame it arrived so late in the game, because it was really an ideal match for floppies. Five disks of data, two... three... four? disks of parity, use 'em only if you need 'em.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahem, skype) actually open those links when you send them... who knows, they might even save the files there. Also, do you really wan't personal videos in the cloud? HTTP/(S)FTP servers too much of a pain to set up for a one time need. We atleast had DCC on irc, now not even that. So a USB flash drive it is... and a car ride.
- IAmLiterallyAB 4y ago
  If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult
  - mindslight 4y ago
    The difficulty created by NAT and IPv4 is drastically overstated. Even if users' devices generally had public IPs, users still wouldn't want to install server software nor leave their computer on. There is no money to be made pushing solutions that cut out the middlemen, so no advertising continually telling people "Try FooTransfer", and thus no network effects. Instead, one user goes "I can send you this using FooTransfer" and the second user goes "that sounds scary and hard". And doesn't Dropbox work for the given example? That's the mass-market productized/paid/marketed/surveilled solution.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I also opt for P2P whenever I can, but it does have drawbacks as well, besides NAT. First, both have to be online at the same time. Second, seems many connections are still not symmetric, so sending files are limited by the upload speed of the sender, and together with the first problem, makes the downloaders experience suffer because of the uploader. With that said, better infrastructure (IPv6 + better connections) can make P2P very feasible in the future, hopefully. Or software that defaults to local connections if it's possible (so if we can find the device via a private IP, use that connection instead).
treeman79 4y ago
Was transferring a 600KB (KiloByte) file to a friend. After 2 hours it failed. Tried again. Failed. Realized both times it ran out of hard drive space. I was 52 Bytes short. I proceeded to walk a floppy over to his house 2 miles away.
kzrdude 4y ago
Some good times as a student in a big university and student housing system around ~2005 - file sharing was banned with the outside world, but inside the whole student network the p2p networks like direct connect were very much alive. Some of the best file sharing ever, so many good music collections to browse through.

bitwize 4y ago

I feel you. In the 90s I came into possession of a strange floppy disk with this on the label: Dear Friend, Please tell my story. Sincerely, Dave Koresh After doing a thorough virus scan, I examined the contents of the disk. It contained a bunch of stories and essays by various authors in text-file format, nothing dealing directly with David Koresh or the Branch Davidians. But the FBI raid of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 caused... unrest in certain pockets of the American politisphere, primarily on the right but groups like the ACLU also got involved, and Janet Reno was mocked on SNL for her role in the incident. Nobody liked the Branch Davidians, they were a weird-ass cult preparing for an apocalypse that never came except maybe in a parrot sense[0], but there were concerns that the FBI (and potentially the ATF before) acted too aggressively, overstepping legitimate law-enforcement bounds and violating the Davidians' rights, and that caused a lot of political introspection: on our status as a freedom-respecting republic, the competence of our federal law-enforcement apparatus, what is the threshold beyond which the government legitimately could or should take action against weird-ass prepper cults. So there was a lot of philosophy and politics stuff in there, often in the form of USENET postings and other 90s internet copypasta, that dealt tangentially with those issues. It felt... kind of weird and awesome to have and to read that stuff. Cyberpunk. Here were thoughts that people felt not quite safe transmitting or discussing openly, so they were copied and distributed as floppy-disk samizdat. It was a mysterious object, alarming at sight because it suggested that Koresh might still be alive somewhere (and the shortening of "David" to "Dave" made him seem... humbled?), whose contents held even deeper and more thought-provoking mysteries. [0] "I heard tell once of a Jefferson City lawyer who had a parrot that would wake him each morning crying out 'today's the day the world shall end as scripture has foretold'. And one day, the lawyer shot him for the sake of peace and quiet I presume, thus fulfilling, for the bird at least, his prophecy." -- Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln in Lincoln (2012).

sascha_sl 4y ago

git-annex by default will consider your data dead when it can't be checked in real time, but overriding will trust the data will survive offline forever. I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it.

cesarb 4y ago
> I'd love for it to have some kind of expiry on it after which I need to fsck it. There is "git annex expire" (https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-expire/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-expire/).

liotier 4y ago

Forever memories of high school around 1990, passing around backpacks fulls of floppies in front of our uncomprehending classmates... And of course a lot of time spent copying - that second floppy drive made my life so much easier !

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
High speed dubbing for the win
unsupp0rted 4y ago
It’s always the second-last floppy in a series of dozens that is corrupted.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  I can almost hear the sound of the FDD trying - and failing - to read that one bad sector.
- myself248 4y ago
  Rar and par files, though! Shame it arrived so late in the game, because it was really an ideal match for floppies. Five disks of data, two... three... four? disks of parity, use 'em only if you need 'em.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahem, skype) actually open those links when you send them... who knows, they might even save the files there. Also, do you really wan't personal videos in the cloud? HTTP/(S)FTP servers too much of a pain to set up for a one time need. We atleast had DCC on irc, now not even that. So a USB flash drive it is... and a car ride.

IAmLiterallyAB 4y ago
If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult
- mindslight 4y ago
  The difficulty created by NAT and IPv4 is drastically overstated. Even if users' devices generally had public IPs, users still wouldn't want to install server software nor leave their computer on. There is no money to be made pushing solutions that cut out the middlemen, so no advertising continually telling people "Try FooTransfer", and thus no network effects. Instead, one user goes "I can send you this using FooTransfer" and the second user goes "that sounds scary and hard". And doesn't Dropbox work for the given example? That's the mass-market productized/paid/marketed/surveilled solution.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I also opt for P2P whenever I can, but it does have drawbacks as well, besides NAT. First, both have to be online at the same time. Second, seems many connections are still not symmetric, so sending files are limited by the upload speed of the sender, and together with the first problem, makes the downloaders experience suffer because of the uploader. With that said, better infrastructure (IPv6 + better connections) can make P2P very feasible in the future, hopefully. Or software that defaults to local connections if it's possible (so if we can find the device via a private IP, use that connection instead).

treeman79 4y ago

Was transferring a 600KB (KiloByte) file to a friend. After 2 hours it failed. Tried again. Failed. Realized both times it ran out of hard drive space. I was 52 Bytes short. I proceeded to walk a floppy over to his house 2 miles away.

kzrdude 4y ago

Some good times as a student in a big university and student housing system around ~2005 - file sharing was banned with the outside world, but inside the whole student network the p2p networks like direct connect were very much alive. Some of the best file sharing ever, so many good music collections to browse through.