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I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates,
by ssl-3 3y ago
I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about.
And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. (And disk quotas and attachment sizes have never caught up with either CD-R or DVD-R capacity, although transfer rates have.)
But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough.
And I'm somewhat loathe to hand someone a thumb drive. They're universal these days and can be cheap enough to not care about, but they can also be expensive and they just don't feel as forgettable as pulling another blank disc out of the box/off of the spindle, writing some data to it, and just letting them keep it was.
Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was. (Also, it's an active computer device -- there's very real concerns about trusting a foreign thumb drive that never existed with previously-used iterations of removable media.)
So now, to give someone some meaningful amount of data: I get to upload it to The Clown (with Dropbox or Google Drive or Discord or something). With the most-common methods, I also get to hope that I remember to delete it later (and also hope that they remember to save their own copy before I do delete it).
Which is great, I guess: I can send a mountain of data to anyone in the world this way and we never have to be in the same room.
But it also sucks: I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved. (It's like mailing a letter through a transciptionist service might have been, if that was ever a thing that was, instead of addressing it to the end recipient directly.)
As a final lament: What in the fuck ever happened to easily sending data, over the Internet, to a fellow peer? Transferring files with DCC on IRC seems like it was miles ahead of where we are today, and that was 25 or 30 fucking years ago.
(No, I'm not bitter. I'm just old, I guess.)
- francescovv 3y ago> What (...) happened to easily sending data, over the Internet And for mobile phones - without internet is similar, unnecessarily hard. The other day I was hiking with friends, and wanted to share a .gpx file with the route, at some spot with no cell coverage. I thought: "I 'member, bluetooth can send files". Well, we spent good 15 minutes trying and miserably failed, that's no longer possible in the name of "security". So I had to wait for cell signal to come back and send the file via whatsapp. To someone standing right in front of me.
- Varriount 3y agoHuh, I wonder what the problem was. I semi-regularly send files between my Windows laptop and my Android phone. I do recall never being able to get that functionality working properly with a Mac though.
- francescovv 3y agoThat was between two Android phones, with receiving phone being "oppo" or some such, with stock firmware. Receiving phone would see incoming file request, ask user to accept, then error out with "unknown file", and no way to actually save it. I've sent files via bluetooth from lineageos to lineageos, no problem.
- Varriount 3y agoI could totally see it being something stupid in how Android manages file associations or something. The default file managers tend to be fairly crippled and only actually show a subset of files present.
- actionfromafar 3y agoPerfect irony would be if the receiving Android attempts to check the incoming file against some kind of Internet service.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoIt also possible it just dropped it silently in the Downloads directory. Otherwise ironical that all of this behaves like the 90s PalmOS which could not store a file unless a program would accept it.
- nvarsj 3y agoPretty easy with iPhone+AirDrop. Just bring your iPhones together - it asks if you want to airdrop something, select file, done.
- 3y ago
- Rinzler89 3y ago>But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough. I beg to differ. In the 2000s and part of 2010s everyone had optical media readers at home or in the office. In my EU country, radiology offices still use DVDs to share or hand you over your X-ray/CT/MRI images that you can then share with your dentist/GP/specialist for diagnosis. Yeah, a national cloud system for radiology image storing and sharing part of the national healthcare system the would be much better, but computers and on-line services are still a new confusing thing to the government, so this is what we got now. So every medical practice still has functioning optical readers.
- yaomtc 3y agoThey said BD-R. Blu-ray. Not many computers have Blu-ray drives compared to DVD.
- Rinzler89 3y agoOh right, my bad. Though around the 2010s IIRC many laptops even on the budget end were being sold with BD reader combo drives.
- ssl-3 3y agoI held a portable USB3 Blu-Ray reader in my hand once. I could have used it, too, but I could not think of anything I wanted to do with it by that time in 2017 -- seven years ago -- despite my proclivity for making backups of films. BD on a PC has never been common in my world of computing, and by 2017 optical drives in general were becoming very uncommon in everyone's world. It never broadly caught on.
- bombcar 3y agoJust at the time Blu-ray would have made sense for computers everything went to downloads. I bought many games that came on CD or DVD but the only ones that ever came on Blu-ray were for console. And even those are mostly download now.
- kzrdude 3y agoYes, not having physical media sucks. Physical objects just work better on a human scale, we know where we put them (well..) and how to trade them.
- actionfromafar 3y agoNote to self - add "drop off once to friend" feature to my p2p program. (I.e. it makes sure a copy exists locally until your friend has downloaded the entire transfer, then it can be deleted from your local.)
- ssl-3 3y agoI think I like you. But is your program actually P2P? (If it were, then: The sender would know when the recipient has completed the download, because the sender was finished sending it and the recipient has stated that they are done receiving it. And there would be no need for gymnastics.)
- actionfromafar 3y agoExactly like that. My program is half-way there to doing NAT hole-punching, a bunch of other stuff is missing and I'm deep into yak-shaving right now the likes of you wouldn't even believe, but I have had good progress the last few months. (Been tinkering for years, finally decided to do a serious effort. The commit log goes back years but for long periods very silent.)
- jmclnx 3y ago> I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved The only thing is writing to a CD/DVD can be a PITA. To me diskettes were very easy when it came to read and write to physical media. >Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was This I agree with, I have a tough time giving flash drives away for some reason. If one could buy a pack of 10 1gig flash drives for the same price as a box of Diskettes, it would be easier. Right now you can only buy flash drives 1 at a time.
- kijin 3y agoNot only that, but it's hard to buy small flash drives. The smallest I can find in retail stores around me are in the 16-32GB range, which feels like a total waste when all I need is a few hundred MB (i.e. just beyond the email attachment limit). Smaller flash drives are available online, in bulk, of course, but they're not much cheaper. I guess the cost of flash becomes a negligible part of the total price at the single-digit GB range these days.
- rightbyte 3y agoAt some point small memory sticks were used for like ads and brochures at conferances. They were quite neat and I guess they were bought in bulk. But I can't seem to find any big packs of cheap small sticks either...
- 8A51C 3y ago3.5 floppies were the peak of media for me. Built in case, small enough to fit in a pocket, small and light enough to carry a handful around all the time, cheap enough to share freely, tactile. Nostalgia alert, I recall this from my school days, jacket pocket with all my discs in, we would roam around the school looking for empty rooms with computers, then bang; in goes the floppy and I have all my files. Share something with someone? No issue, copy it on a spare and hand it over... CDs didn't fit in a pocket and had an annoying case, though you needed much fewer of them.
- herodoturtle 3y agoFellow pocket disk pirate here, loved reading this. We used to spray paint our discs with makeshift stencils to get a camo look (a bit like that one laptop prep scene in Hackers ‘95). Mostly used to collect / trade our .BAS files and the odd bit of saucy content from BBS.
- mrWiz 3y agoThe way it generally works IME is that if I want someone's data I better have my own thumb drive to get it, and if somebody wants mine they better have their own.
- nradov 3y agoYou've got to be kidding. There's no way I'm going to plug someone else's thumb drive into my computer. Who knows what kind of malware it could be carrying, like having unprotected sex with a random stranger.
- kijin 3y agoIs it any different when you receive a zip file by email? It could very well have been crafted to exploit a backdoor in your compression program.
- ssl-3 3y agoIt is different. A USB key can be anything, or even complex combinations of things. It can be a storage device and an HID keyboard input and an optical drive that autoruns software on the PC it is connected to, with all of this being intentionally supported by the host operating system. No back door is required: This can happen right at the front door, as the operating system does what it is intended to do when it detects new hardware. And as a parting shot: It can even deliberately physically destroy the host computer's hardware. (Try that with a crafty ZIP file.)
- mrWiz 3y agoThe USB drive I keep on my keychain is named STUXNET, so...
- mrob 3y agoIt's easier to exploit somebody's computer using a USB drive, because it can do things like pretend to be a keyboard and spoof your inputs, and because the attack surface is "every USB driver", but we have to assume a skilled attacker can do just as much damage with a DVD+R. AFAIK, no kernel filesystem driver is designed to be robust against maliciously crafted filesystems, and FUSE is not designed to be a security boundary. If you're taking security seriously you have to take the same precautions with each, e.g. disabling automount, and only mounting them in a disposable VM and accessing the files over the network. And even this might not be enough. Is your OS's partition table code robust against malicious input? I don't think there's any way to disable reading the partition table in Linux when a new block device is detected. In this case even copying a single file to/from the raw device with dd might not be secure.
- bigbillheck 3y ago> cheap enough to not care about You can get a ten pack of 16gb drives for $25, which after inflation is in the ballpark of what I remember floppies costing 30 years ago.
- crtasm 3y agoHave you tried this? https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole There's also various webapps that work similarly: set up the connection then have you transfer data directly to the peer.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoWith Telegram, you can send ulimited amount of data. Transfer is not always gast, and file size is limited to 2gb, but it works. Including to yourself, so you can use as a free cloud storage. Don't how they pull that off, costwise.
- Fatnino 3y agoYou can get packs of very very cheap microSD cards. Just good enough to put data on once to give to someone and then forget about. No performance or whatever. Trash tier.