[neilv]

I once did something based on the same principle, for a (very-very light) security solution, atop a simple closed-source media appliance that could play from USB Storage.

I made a script on Linux to create a huge directory tree representing every possible sequence of a password of length N. Only one password path through the tree got the viewer to the directory that had the non-kid-safe media files.

The non-security caveat of this was that the appliance seemed to scan the entire filesystem upon mount, which took a long time. (Even though it provided no UI, other than clicking to open directories and media files within them. Maybe the reason for the scan was to report to the mothership what content each user had, though, in this case, I had networking permanently disabled.) At least the huge tree didn't overflow any limit that prevented the appliance from working after an initial delay.

[smusamashah]

I felt like I wrote this comment because I did exactly the same once long time ago. Made directories like 0/1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 starting from 0 all the way to 9 billion. I was doing it on a Windows XP machine. I don't exactly remember if I completed the process or stopped it midway but in the end I had this structure which windows could never search through in any reasonable time. Only I would know where my files are. After that I tried zipping all that structure and remember taking it like 65MB or something and took many hours. Deleting this whole thing was also very painful. It also grew the size of MFT file significantly.

Never tried this again. And I don't remember availability of USB drives back then.

[wwweston]

Love this, but seems to me that if most directories didn't have files, you could `find` your way through...

[neilv]

The "very-very light" part is that it was easily defeated if you removed the USB Storage from the dumb appliance, and plugged it into almost anything else.

If you had only the dumb appliance UI, however, finding the files would be a bigger chore than even energetic kids could accomplish in mere hours, and only if they knew it was there (the "password UI" was also hidden a little).

[landryraccoon]

Interesting. You’d need about a billion files to store all possible 6 character file names assuming you limited yourself to latin alphanumeric characters. How big are these USB drives?