Public File Sharing

By M.K Lim,

The man behind the project, Adam Bartholl

NEW YORK : Across New York City, a new kind of network is going up. You may see it. USB connections jutting out of walls at locations around the city.

     You can plug into, anybody can, and leave whatever they want and download what they want. The man behind the project, Aram Bartholl, describes the project he calls "Dead Drops".

     "An anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space.

     Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data."

     The allure is unmistakable. Admit, if you saw one of these, wouldn't you want to plug in? As Gizmodo puts it: "I mean, if I saw a USB stick stick out of a random wall, I'd be dying to know what's in there.

     I'd have to plug in. It'd also be interesting to see what people would anonymously share on the public drive, well, until some jackass decides to upload a virus to screw up everybody's computer."

     Bartholl has installed five USB drives in New York, and has plans for other cities, and to encourage others to take up the project in their town.
 

USB Port on the wall

     Here's a more sophisticated version of a similar idea. Cellular networks are centrally administered, enabling service providers and their governments to conduct system-wide monitoring and censorship of mobile communication. 

     This paper presents HUMANETS, a fully decentralized, smartphone-to-smartphone (and hence human-to-human) message passing scheme that permits unmonitored message communication even when all cellular traffic is inspected.

     HUMANET message routing protocols exploit human mobility patterns to significantly increase communication efficiency while limiting the exposure of messages to mobile service providers. 

     Initial results from trace-driven simulation show that 85% of messages reach their intended destinations while using orders of magnitude less network capacity than naïve epidemic flooding techniques.