8 ms·

Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet

107 points by pabs3 4y ago

O__________O 4y ago
>> NNCP guarantees the integrity of packets, but not ordering between packets; if you need that, you might look into my Filespooler program. It is designed to work with NNCP and can provide ordered processing. Besides Filespooler, any other options?
_int3_ 4y ago
I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back. I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.
- zwirbl 4y ago
  Back in the day when I went to what you could describe as an engineering high-school we had very limited internet in the dormitory as well as at home. So we organized into teams, where the leader would gather Warez links for his teammates to download during the weekend. On Sunday and Monday, back at the dorm, we would upload all the series, movies and stuff to our data hoarders ftp server, giving many more people access, who in turn would copy the stuff to USB HDDs to carry it to school. There it got copied to our classmates storage and from there it got distributed throughout the region, reaching I don't know how many people. My team, doing mostly series and games, had about 10-16MBits, all teams together reached an unheard of (for consumer internet in that region) bandwidth. We just couldn't have done it alone Good times
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    I ran an open CIFS volume (windows share) in our dorm for music and movies. This was just after Napster went down but before Limewire or something. So the only way to share music was to upload everything you had and have access to whatever everyone else uploaded. You just dropped what you had in a writable folder and it would organize it in read only folders, doing any deduping for identical files and flagging non-identical files with the same meta or anything it didn’t understand.
    - ytjohn 4y ago
      This reminds me of Angelfire's ftp setup. You got free hosting, but to upload, you had to upload to their open ftp server and use the control panel to copy files into your webspace. The files on the FTP server had an expiration of so many hours, but was otherwise unrestricted. You could upload files larger than what you could use in your free space. It became rather interesting to just browse what people were uploading to the FTP server. I eventually found some people were just using it to transfer files, and some were using it like a message board, dropping .txt notes to each other. These notes were usually just things to indicate some larger file that was being uploaded.
- giomasce 4y ago
  I did the same, going to my dad's workplace. I had no USB drives, but pushed CD-RWs and multisession CDs to their limits. Cool times!
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I've been having to do that in Silicon Valley because of the data caps on our crappy Quest internet service. I take my MacBook Pro in to work, download new SDKs, customer memory dumps, etc, then hoof it back home to work on them
non-nil 4y ago
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).
TacticalCoder 4y ago
That's cool. However I don't like the idea of plugging in USB sticks and having them modified by anything. OS X was (and still is) a terrible offender: plug in a USB drive and the OS sneakily inserts stuff outside partitions (so you cannot easily find it but if you "dd" and take the hash of the drive it's different before and after simply plugging it in an OS X computer: to me that is pure madness and it took me a while to figure out what was going on).
- O__________O 4y ago
  Pretty sure Apple at the very least injects a hidden file that easy to see if you plug the drive into an Apple device then into a non-Apple device; no idea why they are adding it, though 99% sure it is for file operation administration. Edit: Appears at least one of the files added is called “ “.DS_Store” and is still around: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-users-stung-by-macos-dsstore-copyright-infringement-issue/amp/ https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-user...
  - lynndotpy 4y ago
    I learned a roommate was snooping around my flash drives because of this. A bunch of .DS_Store folders appeared in a drive that I had never connected to an OSX machine
  - csydas 4y ago
    DS_Store just includes basic window configuration information for Macs. Stuff like list vs icons, size of the columns, etc, so you have a consistent UI look when you're accessing your remote drives. It can be toggled to avoid it on removable devices when they're connected to Macs. It's benign, though I guess annoying to some non-Mac users.
  - tehbeard 4y ago
    It's the equivalent of desktop.ini on windows, so yeah finder customisation etc.. Expect Mac software does fuck all to prevent it "leaking", so pretty much every zip from a Mac user contains one of these in each folder. Only case we had desktop.ini do the same was with Dropbox.
trasz 4y ago
It’s cool and sounds like reinventing UUCP. Which has the advantage of serving as a transparent transport for ordinary email.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
  From the same author, "NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!" => https://www.complete.org/nncp/ https://www.complete.org/nncp/
- ytjohn 4y ago
  http://www.nncpgo.org/Comparison.html http://www.nncpgo.org/Comparison.html This is really amazing stuff. Years ago, I was heavily interested in scuttlebutt [1]. I'm interested in grid down and "occasionally connected" communications. I particularly liked the island to island sailing analogy. SSB has a few downsides - mainly that your client needs to download full logs. You can't just request the last 30 days. They call this out as well that your first sync could take over an hour and consume several gigs of data. I'm just today learning about NNCP, but I've used FidoNet and UUCP in the past, so the concept is pretty familiar to me. In my mental model, I would be less interested in sneakernet than standalone wifi hotspots that one could connect to and exchange data, possibly combined with an AREDN style mesh[2]. [1]: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html [2]: https://arednmesh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/arednGettingStarted/aredn_overview.html https://arednmesh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/arednGettingStart...
  - myself248 4y ago
    Yeah, this use-case fascinates me as well. I've been noodling around with the idea of a 249-gram drone that flies SD cards between locations. BVLOS is still problematic in the US regulatory environment, but perhaps useful elsewhere. And I can always do demo flights indoors. It would be ultra cool, IMHO, to fly SSB and NNCP traffic between "islands", whatever form those take. For bonus points, do it with pigeons, which have the advantage of operating in a GPS-denied environment. I don't mind the full sync for SSB, I mind the lack of any progress indicator while it's doing so. But that seems like an easy UI tweak and maybe they've addressed it since I last played with it. What I haven't figured out is whether a brand-new user can sync from another existing user on the same island, or if they need a real internet connection for that first bit.
O__________O 4y ago
Anyone know of a existing automated way of processing untrusted USB to the extract known and expected encrypted volumes? _____ * Core issue I have never been able to workout is how to know given the potential for firmware hack how to make sure only the known trusted data makes it out of the isolated processing system to the trusted system; open looking at anything though as long as it open source, doesn’t have to solve that specific issue.
- WJW 4y ago
  Worse than malware, eventually you'll get people dropping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer)s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer)s for the lulz.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    FYI your link got corrupted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer And interesting, always knew high voltage was a threat, but never thought of capacitor being used, since it wouldn’t require an independent power source.
  - myself248 4y ago
    Yeah but I can drop an ADUM3160 isolator on the port for a few bucks. If they kill that, I replace that for a few bucks more. In most cases a chain of cheap hubs would work too.
    - O__________O 4y ago
      For clarification, all USB ports are 5 volts DC; transformer (or computer) will take care of converting the 120/220 AC current to the necessary 5 volts DC. Commonly two types of isolation data and power chipsets. For a dead drop, you would want a cheap voltage isolator set to trip/blow a fuse at 5 volts DC — with no data isolator.
      - myself248 4y ago
pmontra 4y ago
I didn't understand if it can handle this use case: a file server with (simple case) a hot swappable SATA3 bay (or any other bus), N disks (N - 1 are offline.) Send files to the server (rsync, scp, anything), remove the disk and replace it with another one, iterate. NNCP should handle this so far. But would it be able to tell me on which disk a file is stored? If this were handled at file system level, the FS should pretend all disks are online to let me list files and directories. When I want to access an offline file or mkdir or perform any write operation on offline disks, it would raise an error and tell me which disk to load into the server. Then I try again. If NNCP doesn't do that, is there and Linux file system able to do it? I googled but I didn't find much.
- pabs3 4y ago
  That use-case seems like what git-annex is designed for.
O__________O 4y ago
Curios, anyone know of any active dead drop networks besides ones listed below? This website been around since at least 2010, but number of the drops listed were physically removed, but not delisted from the site: https://www.deaddrops.com/ https://www.deaddrops.com/
- giomasce 4y ago
  I like the idea, but I'm not sure I would plug an random USB thing in my computer...
  - cesarb 4y ago
    A safer alternative would be something like a piratebox (https://piratebox.cc/ https://piratebox.cc/) instead of a USB dead drop, since a piratebox would have no physical connection to your computer.
    - myself248 4y ago
      I keep being annoyed that Piratebox, Internetinabox, Othernet, aren't all the same project. Like of course an IIAB node should include a messageboard. Of course an Othernet node should have support for offline payload bundles and user uploads. Of course a Toosheh bundle on newly-inserted storage media should be automatically extracted and presented in the interface... If I ever grow some more software clue, I'll be trying to unify all of the above into a single interface. Wish me luck.
      - O__________O 4y ago
        (IIAB) being “Internet In A Box” _____________ Toosheh being a “satellite filecasting technology deployed in Iran and the Middle East that uses common satellite equipment to deliver digital content without relying on access to the Internet” per Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toosheh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toosheh
    - O__________O 4y ago
javier_e06 4y ago
You'll be reliably tackled and body-searched walking around the data center floor with a usb drive in your pocket.
RunSet 4y ago
More information on NNCP (including what those four letters mean) here: http://www.nncpgo.org/ http://www.nncpgo.org/
santimoller66 4y ago
[flagged]
brudgers 4y ago
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” ― Andrew S. Tannenbaum
sitkack 4y ago
NNCP has similarity to a block chain. This is really cool! > NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!

107 points by pabs3 4y ago

>> NNCP guarantees the integrity of packets, but not ordering between packets; if you need that, you might look into my Filespooler program. It is designed to work with NNCP and can provide ordered processing. Besides Filespooler, any other options?

_int3_ 4y ago

I used sneakernet years ago, mostly as a last mile connection to internet. I would go to place with more bandwidth , download stuff burn it to CD , or save it on external hard drive, and go back. I think many people still do it like that. There are 3.7 B people in the World without internet.

zwirbl 4y ago
Back in the day when I went to what you could describe as an engineering high-school we had very limited internet in the dormitory as well as at home. So we organized into teams, where the leader would gather Warez links for his teammates to download during the weekend. On Sunday and Monday, back at the dorm, we would upload all the series, movies and stuff to our data hoarders ftp server, giving many more people access, who in turn would copy the stuff to USB HDDs to carry it to school. There it got copied to our classmates storage and from there it got distributed throughout the region, reaching I don't know how many people. My team, doing mostly series and games, had about 10-16MBits, all teams together reached an unheard of (for consumer internet in that region) bandwidth. We just couldn't have done it alone Good times
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I ran an open CIFS volume (windows share) in our dorm for music and movies. This was just after Napster went down but before Limewire or something. So the only way to share music was to upload everything you had and have access to whatever everyone else uploaded. You just dropped what you had in a writable folder and it would organize it in read only folders, doing any deduping for identical files and flagging non-identical files with the same meta or anything it didn’t understand.
  - ytjohn 4y ago
    This reminds me of Angelfire's ftp setup. You got free hosting, but to upload, you had to upload to their open ftp server and use the control panel to copy files into your webspace. The files on the FTP server had an expiration of so many hours, but was otherwise unrestricted. You could upload files larger than what you could use in your free space. It became rather interesting to just browse what people were uploading to the FTP server. I eventually found some people were just using it to transfer files, and some were using it like a message board, dropping .txt notes to each other. These notes were usually just things to indicate some larger file that was being uploaded.
giomasce 4y ago
I did the same, going to my dad's workplace. I had no USB drives, but pushed CD-RWs and multisession CDs to their limits. Cool times!
Firmwarrior 4y ago
I've been having to do that in Silicon Valley because of the data caps on our crappy Quest internet service. I take my MacBook Pro in to work, download new SDKs, customer memory dumps, etc, then hoof it back home to work on them

non-nil 4y ago

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).

TacticalCoder 4y ago

That's cool. However I don't like the idea of plugging in USB sticks and having them modified by anything. OS X was (and still is) a terrible offender: plug in a USB drive and the OS sneakily inserts stuff outside partitions (so you cannot easily find it but if you "dd" and take the hash of the drive it's different before and after simply plugging it in an OS X computer: to me that is pure madness and it took me a while to figure out what was going on).

O__________O 4y ago
Pretty sure Apple at the very least injects a hidden file that easy to see if you plug the drive into an Apple device then into a non-Apple device; no idea why they are adding it, though 99% sure it is for file operation administration. Edit: Appears at least one of the files added is called “ “.DS_Store” and is still around: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-users-stung-by-macos-dsstore-copyright-infringement-issue/amp/ https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-user...
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  I learned a roommate was snooping around my flash drives because of this. A bunch of .DS_Store folders appeared in a drive that I had never connected to an OSX machine
- csydas 4y ago
  DS_Store just includes basic window configuration information for Macs. Stuff like list vs icons, size of the columns, etc, so you have a consistent UI look when you're accessing your remote drives. It can be toggled to avoid it on removable devices when they're connected to Macs. It's benign, though I guess annoying to some non-Mac users.
- tehbeard 4y ago
  It's the equivalent of desktop.ini on windows, so yeah finder customisation etc.. Expect Mac software does fuck all to prevent it "leaking", so pretty much every zip from a Mac user contains one of these in each folder. Only case we had desktop.ini do the same was with Dropbox.

trasz 4y ago

It’s cool and sounds like reinventing UUCP. Which has the advantage of serving as a transparent transport for ordinary email.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
From the same author, "NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!" => https://www.complete.org/nncp/ https://www.complete.org/nncp/
ytjohn 4y ago
http://www.nncpgo.org/Comparison.html http://www.nncpgo.org/Comparison.html This is really amazing stuff. Years ago, I was heavily interested in scuttlebutt [1]. I'm interested in grid down and "occasionally connected" communications. I particularly liked the island to island sailing analogy. SSB has a few downsides - mainly that your client needs to download full logs. You can't just request the last 30 days. They call this out as well that your first sync could take over an hour and consume several gigs of data. I'm just today learning about NNCP, but I've used FidoNet and UUCP in the past, so the concept is pretty familiar to me. In my mental model, I would be less interested in sneakernet than standalone wifi hotspots that one could connect to and exchange data, possibly combined with an AREDN style mesh[2]. [1]: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html [2]: https://arednmesh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/arednGettingStarted/aredn_overview.html https://arednmesh.readthedocs.io/en/latest/arednGettingStart...
- myself248 4y ago
  Yeah, this use-case fascinates me as well. I've been noodling around with the idea of a 249-gram drone that flies SD cards between locations. BVLOS is still problematic in the US regulatory environment, but perhaps useful elsewhere. And I can always do demo flights indoors. It would be ultra cool, IMHO, to fly SSB and NNCP traffic between "islands", whatever form those take. For bonus points, do it with pigeons, which have the advantage of operating in a GPS-denied environment. I don't mind the full sync for SSB, I mind the lack of any progress indicator while it's doing so. But that seems like an easy UI tweak and maybe they've addressed it since I last played with it. What I haven't figured out is whether a brand-new user can sync from another existing user on the same island, or if they need a real internet connection for that first bit.

O__________O 4y ago

Anyone know of a existing automated way of processing untrusted USB to the extract known and expected encrypted volumes? _____ * Core issue I have never been able to workout is how to know given the potential for firmware hack how to make sure only the known trusted data makes it out of the isolated processing system to the trusted system; open looking at anything though as long as it open source, doesn’t have to solve that specific issue.

WJW 4y ago
Worse than malware, eventually you'll get people dropping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer)s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer)s for the lulz.
- O__________O 4y ago
  FYI your link got corrupted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Killer And interesting, always knew high voltage was a threat, but never thought of capacitor being used, since it wouldn’t require an independent power source.
- myself248 4y ago
  Yeah but I can drop an ADUM3160 isolator on the port for a few bucks. If they kill that, I replace that for a few bucks more. In most cases a chain of cheap hubs would work too.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    For clarification, all USB ports are 5 volts DC; transformer (or computer) will take care of converting the 120/220 AC current to the necessary 5 volts DC. Commonly two types of isolation data and power chipsets. For a dead drop, you would want a cheap voltage isolator set to trip/blow a fuse at 5 volts DC — with no data isolator.
    - myself248 4y ago

pmontra 4y ago

I didn't understand if it can handle this use case: a file server with (simple case) a hot swappable SATA3 bay (or any other bus), N disks (N - 1 are offline.) Send files to the server (rsync, scp, anything), remove the disk and replace it with another one, iterate. NNCP should handle this so far. But would it be able to tell me on which disk a file is stored? If this were handled at file system level, the FS should pretend all disks are online to let me list files and directories. When I want to access an offline file or mkdir or perform any write operation on offline disks, it would raise an error and tell me which disk to load into the server. Then I try again. If NNCP doesn't do that, is there and Linux file system able to do it? I googled but I didn't find much.

pabs3 4y ago
That use-case seems like what git-annex is designed for.

O__________O 4y ago

Curios, anyone know of any active dead drop networks besides ones listed below? This website been around since at least 2010, but number of the drops listed were physically removed, but not delisted from the site: https://www.deaddrops.com/ https://www.deaddrops.com/

giomasce 4y ago
I like the idea, but I'm not sure I would plug an random USB thing in my computer...
- cesarb 4y ago
  A safer alternative would be something like a piratebox (https://piratebox.cc/ https://piratebox.cc/) instead of a USB dead drop, since a piratebox would have no physical connection to your computer.
  - myself248 4y ago
    I keep being annoyed that Piratebox, Internetinabox, Othernet, aren't all the same project. Like of course an IIAB node should include a messageboard. Of course an Othernet node should have support for offline payload bundles and user uploads. Of course a Toosheh bundle on newly-inserted storage media should be automatically extracted and presented in the interface... If I ever grow some more software clue, I'll be trying to unify all of the above into a single interface. Wish me luck.
    - O__________O 4y ago
      (IIAB) being “Internet In A Box” _____________ Toosheh being a “satellite filecasting technology deployed in Iran and the Middle East that uses common satellite equipment to deliver digital content without relying on access to the Internet” per Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toosheh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toosheh
  - O__________O 4y ago

javier_e06 4y ago

You'll be reliably tackled and body-searched walking around the data center floor with a usb drive in your pocket.

RunSet 4y ago

More information on NNCP (including what those four letters mean) here: http://www.nncpgo.org/ http://www.nncpgo.org/

santimoller66 4y ago

[flagged]

brudgers 4y ago

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” ― Andrew S. Tannenbaum

sitkack 4y ago

NNCP has similarity to a block chain. This is really cool! > NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet; NNCP is an Encrypted, authenticated, onion-routed version of UUCP!