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by jjkaczor 325 days ago
As others have said - it would be standalone, not connected to the internet.

Have debated making it "read-only", but then I would be culpable for the curation of content...

That and perhaps I just don't want to encourage people loitering around in front of my house for long-transfers...

OTOH - this could be useful for essentially a "dead-drop" independent standalone box for, uh... "civil disobedience" reasons... (or a free alternative to those "prepper-internet-in-a-box" devices they are currently selling...)
2 comments
aspenmayer 325 days ago
Check this out. This was at one point one of the cheapest and smallest Linux computers around. It’s USB powered and this project turns a WiFi device designed to share photos from an SD card over a standalone SSID into a male USB A powered miniature SBC. (Edit: okay it’s two PCBs technically)

https://github.com/Emeryth/openwrt-zsun

https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader

I got them in bulk from China for ~$6 each.

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echelon_musk 325 days ago
It would still be physically located on your property with potentially illegal content on it. Sounds like a nightmare.
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jjkaczor 325 days ago
... well, I live in Canada - my understanding is that the maximum lifetime fine for copyright infringement is about $5,000 when files are shared for personal, non-commercial use...

Which sounds like alot, but if we factor in the extended family and cross-media sharing and the number of separate streaming services we all subscribe to across many many years, then this is a "deal"...

OTOH - I don't want to be the first case/person to help determine what precedent will be set if something actually gets taken to the end-state statutory damages..

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sfilmeyer 325 days ago
On the spectrum of illegality, things can get a lot more extreme than a bit of copyright infringement.
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jjkaczor 324 days ago
True - I mean, one could try and block based on file-extension/MIME-types, but... nothing stopping a malicious user from renaming a file to an allowed extension, with some sort of malicious/secret payload. (Or... spreading some sort of malware/virus/exploit via media file formats, I have never looked into the possibility of that until just now, apparently it can be a thing - https://cyberpress.org/cybercriminals-exploiting-media-files...)

So yeah - this is probably one of those half-baked ideas that just wouldn't be a good one to actually implement "in-the-wild".

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