Talk:USB dead drop

site is down

the origin site is down. I think this project was long time ago ended. 84.163.65.90 (talk) 15:23, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

Damage to laptop

It would be difficult to keep a laptop connected to a USB device in the air without causing damage to the laptop, usb device or both without the use of a USB extender cable — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:56A:F330:5A00:F04F:EBE5:6BD7:650D (talk) 04:40, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Notability

The page is now sourced from The Daily Mail, a main-stream publication, and a little more context has been added. --Old Moonraker (talk) 06:35, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

IMO (and to my surprise) it clearly meets notability guidelines, see my Google searches below and particularly note the top hits are from mainstream news sources, so I'm removing the tag. Andrewa (talk) 14:50, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move per request.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:12, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

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Dead Drop (USB) → USB dead drop — Googling for references shows that USB Dead Drop is the common name. Caps down to match WP naming convention. --Old Moonraker (talk) 10:53, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

• Support. My Google searches confirm the claim that the proposal is the common name, and also that the topic is notable enough for an article. Andrewa (talk) 14:38, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

MOS

This article lead needs some MOS work... I'll make a start. Andrewa (talk) 14:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Pros

The Pros that are listed (giving utopia a chance and datalove) are absolutely not encyclopedic. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a mention of something along that lines (if it's talked about in a source somewhere anyway) in the article, but one imagines that the pros would be along more practical lines, about anonymity and the like. At the moment it just sounds like naïve bullshit.

Not meant to be a criticism of the project by the way. My personal opinion on the subject is just something like it's vaguely cute. 86.29.7.17 (talk) 01:39, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

I cleaned it up a little, and considered deleting that stuff, but the refs I was able to find strongly indicate that actual people that actually *use* existing USB dead drops (unlike myself who have never seen one physically), often do it for social reasons. Thrill of discovery, ideology related to off-grid lifestyles, as a communal piece of art, that sort of thing. It is a sociological pursuit, kind of a nerdy-artsy-hobby, not a practical one. There are some practical aspects (anonymity/cost/etc) but those are secondary from what I was able to tell. Although some of the types of use the dead-drops are known to involve (porn/pot/survivalism/etc) take advantage of the practicality-aspects in some degree, for the most part the data being uploaded, as listed by sources at least, tends to be idealistic and or curiosity-driven (poems/wikipediaBackups/interestingPhotos/manifestos/similar). So I think that the 'datalove' sort of motivation aka "benefit" to using the system, is pertinent. If practicality were the main driver of the infrastructure, then clearly the wifi-based dead drop would be vastly preferable (especially now that vehicles and cellphones now often come stock with wifi), but there are roughly ten of them, versus roughly a thousand of the usb-connector-sticking-out-of-a-palm-tree-or-a-brick-wall type of dead drop. Time will tell if the project remains in the vaguely-cute-but-fascinating-to-the-right-person sort of phase, or if it will grow more practical with the passage of time; one suspects that email in the mid-1970s was similar in nature, and it eventually became so 'practical' that forty years later it is ubiquitous yet simultaneously fairly useless (spam in the inbox taking a serious toll nowadays). We shall see where USB dead drops and wifi dead drops end up, but if a major vendor like Cisco were to start implementing wifi-dead-drop storage SSIDs that were flipped on by default in their home/SOHO access points, with even ten gigs of flash storage available to any passerby with a wifi-enabled smartphone, very likely the wifi-dead-drop phenomenon would quickly explode. Especially if every AP came with an offline copy of the text of wikipedia articles, with a working edit-button (for REALLY anonymous editing that somebody MAY or may not ever upmerge to the online wikipedia-servers). USB dead drops are an interesting article-topic, in other words, that being too trivial for paper and CDROM encyclopedias, would probably ONLY ever be written for a place like wikipedia, which Anybody Can Edit.™ Best regards, 47.222.203.135 (talk) 21:36, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

BadUSB

BadUSB should be included among the hazards, as it doesn't really fit in the existing list. I'm not sure how to phrase the entry. It relys on USB's ability to act as multiple devices, so it can appear both as a drive and a keyboard. The keyboard part will rapidly "type" a trusted script into the victim which will cause the victim device to install malware or upload its files to the attacker. BadUSB can't be blocked with an antivirus or by disabling autoplay mechanisms. It relies on victim device trust of Human interface devices (HID) like keyboards and mice. -- SpareSimian (talk) 19:58, 4 April 2026 (UTC)