Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I’m a teacher and I have a USB stick full of textbook PDFs. It wouldn’t be cool to email them on my professional account but sneakernet is the ultimate VPN lol

I send my mom a USB flash drive with photos periodically because it's easier than getting her to use Google photos and I don't have to manage more social media garbage.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down a highway.

In high school I used to pass USB flash drives in an Altoid can (to protect it), good times.

I also used to be the CD-R guy (and later DVD+RW) for my group of friends, I was really into .cue sheets and putting hidden tracks on those (including dumb shit like seeking back in the middle of a slow song would reveal heavy metal or something).

These days I host a Tailscale network — unfortunately with residential upload speeds being trash, I’ve moved all my Blu-ray rips to Storj and set up a WebDAV gateway on a VPS (running Tailscale). It’s fast as hell but I’m not in love with decrypting on the VPS.

Isn't that the plot to Mirror's Edge?

Last Christmas I gave a family member a flash drive containing ~10 high quality movie encodes, basically a shortlist of the year's personal highlights I think they'd enjoy too. I don't know if they've used it, but I'm going to make a habit of it until I hear otherwise. A drive for a handful movies is cheap enough to not worry about if it's never seen again. Give them a large capacity drive however, or access to a Plex server, and paralysis of choice occurs.

I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.

Your example trails off into a non-example.

My upload speed is horrible, so I download items, compare my stuff to my friend,(freefilesync) then copy to an external ssd for them to import.

Shiiiiiiiit, transferring stuff via physical media takes me back to high school. It was mostly porn videos to my friends, never charged a dime, only asked them to give me a blank CD

Haven't done anything like that since I finished college. During those years, it was mostly sharing ripped versions of games that we could play straight from the USB stick on the college computers, mostly Counter Strike 1.6 , much to my distaste as I much preferred other games like Digital Paintball 2 and Age of Empires 2. Also a bit ironic that, despite all of us being CompSci students, I seemed to be the only one who was willing to endure the "pains" of setting up a SNES emulator so we could play Bomberman over the LAN.

My dad used to occasionally get DVDs from a friend at work. Still have a shitton of them in the basement. Now my dad judges me for pirating but I'm like you did the same thing!

I just shipped n 8TB drive of children's shows to a friend. First, because many of the shows I wanted to recommend him aren't on streaming services and second, because he's moving to the mountains soon, where the internet may or may not be available.

Other than this instance, the last time was likely around 2007.

It's been a long time since I pirated over sneakernet. I shared a lot of music with friends that way though. I had an mp3 player with a big hard drive and it had a USB host port, so you could plug in a flash drive and copy files.

I transfer shows and movies to people I work with via external hard drive all the time. When I was a kid we'd copy pc games and CDs we got and share them around.

well I setup a sneakernet script for my parents as they live in a deadzone and only got shitty celluar. I lived a few hours away so my script would grab the movies and shows for the past few months in its search and cp them to my disk. then i would run another script once i get to their place to upload it to windows and put it in the right folder. subsequent iterations the scripts were changed to shell script and python. their computer now runs Debian too. works great.

back in the dial-up and bbs days, i kept plenty of floppy disks (and later CDs) with my favorite media on them to play when i visited friends. in more recent history i have placed my digital media backups on drives to play at friends' houses. it's nice to be offline now and then.

while not technically sneakernet, we did have a piratebox set up at an office that i leased for backing up media collectively.

You know, there was a much shorter range version of this that was predominantly used in offices and college computer rooms. It was called FrisbeeNet.

I personally download stuff for my friend who's been stuck in a personal care place for the last ~6 months, getting him shows and movies he's wanted to watch but never had the time before.

I often torrent on my Raspberry Pi as I go about my day, transfer to my laptop via FTP, double check for file integrity, then transfer to a 1TB "flash drive" I made out of a M.2 drive and enclosed bay at his care facility.