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when I was in highschool after a bad storm an iPod charger was sticking out of some dirt half buried. Wonder how long ago it was dropped, how different schools were back then
Funny coincidence.
Indeed, archaeology is created all the time. I just did an archaeological work a couple of days ago, when I decided to tidy my room
I love mystery flash drives
I once found one near a high school loaded with hilariously terrible naruto x pokemon romantic fanfics
and one that had like $150 in dogecoin
You found a random usb stick and plugged it in?
One of the classic blunders!
… Unless they’re using an airgapped device or carefully sandboxed VM (even still lol) to satisfy that curiosity.
Ugh I admit I’d be curious lol.
I’ll have you know that I put my entire OS installation on a broken USB stick that I found on a parking lot.
The plastic case keeps falling off, but it works fine.
Listen, not all of us are proud of everything we plug our holes with.
…yes? What did you think it could be? A larval hidden unvaccinated Russian that will activate and drink your blood?
There are tons of ways to exploit a computer via a flash drive like that. Lots of viruses exist that would immediately install themselves upon the drive getting recognized. Famously Iran had a nuclear power plant taken offline by a random flash drive somebody plugged in, but aside from state level threats they can also just steal your financial details and personal info
USB host devices are cheap and easy to come across. You can use a crap old PC with a fresh OS install, then wipe it. Or an old phone with microUSB OTG. Or a DVD player if you only need the file list (those can usually only open JPGs, GIFs, MP3s, and MPGs or AVIs with one of the video codecs allowed on VCDs/DVDs). Even some microcontrollers will have USB host capabilities and software libraries that will let you get the file list or contents slowly over serial.
If you’re worried about “killer USBs” (data line zappers), open it and check for capacitors (and antennas in case they use Find My or LoRa for exfiltration but that would be super unlikely). Generating overvoltage inside normal-looking chips is technically possible with charge pumps and embedded capacitors but very expensive to pull off.
So let me get this straight. You live in an average size North American city with a population of about a million. There have been billions, perhaps zillions of USB thumb drives manufactured over the decades. Every day there are thousands of potential situations where a completely normal and anonymous schmuck like you and me has the right conditions to drop a USB key. Maybe you had one in your backpack and it fell out. Maybe you have a hole in your pants. This can happen every day, in every city.
So now you’re walking down the street and see a USB key on the ground, and your first thought is “IRAAAAAN!! THEY WANT TO STEAL THE $12.15 IN MY CHECKINGS ACCOUNT!!! BECAUSE THEY KNOW MY EVERY MOVEMENT AND LOCATION TO PLANT THIS LUDICROUSLY COMPLEX AND CONVOLUTED USB KEY APPROACH TO $12!!!”
I suppose you watch the news and see a picture of a coronavirus and think “My God, it’s a WWII naval mine and IT’S COMING RIGHT AT MEEEEEEE!!!”
You see a USB key on the ground, you pick it up and plug it in. The unvaccinated Russian larva can be sterilized by sunlight.
You don’t work with anything important or sensitive, we get it.
It’s more akin to clicking on every ad you see on the web. Sure you might not get a virus from lots of them but the risk is real and it’s good practice to just not do that. It’s a real and frequently exploited attack vector, it’s just good practice for anybody with a semblance of concern about digital security
Find a USB stick in the parking lot? Don’t plug it into your PC and probably destroy it with fire.
Find a USB stick while digging in the park? Plug that baby in, jam to some Back to Black, and watch some vintage porn.
Some VMs are created only to be burned.
I chuckled. You could also plug it into a system win only a Linux live dvd, no storage, no speakers.
No speakers? How will you and your archeologist friends hear the porn?
headphones
Return the speakers once you determine safety.
Safer from malware, but not safe from usb “pranks.” I doubt anyone is leaving a port killer out, but getting your port gunked up, or partly disassembled via locks is a thing.
Disposability is worth considering as well
So are hubs and extensions.
Some used PCs with no disks are bought only to be booted into a live Linux distro and then some time later resold in the same condition.
USB killer
USB Kill Shield
A female to A male adapter with a replaceable fuse? Sounds like a hundred-dollar idea!
There’s always a bigge USB killer
But what if I have a USB Kill Shield Kill Shied Kill Shield
🤔
What are you talking about? I’ve stux every parking lot USB drive I’ve ever found into my pc and I’ve net to have a problem
I see what you done there… well played.
It burns when I pee, just from reading this
Nah use a vm on a computer which you dont care about
May i suggest a library pc?
time to buy a few hundred usb sticks, fill them with zip bombs, and bury them in random place.
FUCK YOU future archeologists
Their triple quantum computers implemented in their brain wants to say fuck you, too.
One day, an archeologist will find that one thumb drive I lost in 2016 and could never find again
At least you are not the guy who threw away his bitcoin wallet, are you?
James Howells, a Welsh IT engineer, mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin (worth over £500 million/$900M+ as of 2025) in 2013
Dude’s gone full tilt psychotic as a result and is selling shares to excavate the landfill it’s in (he’ll never find it intact and usable, but his life is forever ruined by his refusal to give up)
So true. It’s so insidious because there’s that vague hope that there’s a tiny chance he finds it and never goes back to work, or whatever.
It’s right there, balanced just at the end of his fingertips over the gaping maw of madness, like Indie in the Last Crusade reaching for the Holy Grail.
He needs that kindly father figure to tell him
“Lett et gohh, shon…”
I had binders full of Pokemon cards as a kid. Just collected em. They just disappeared after a few moves. It bothers me intensely to this day, what I could sell them for and what that could solve, or even just knowing what the heck happened. I wish I never bothered with them…
Yep, kinda sad, his life being consumed by that one mistake and not getting therapy and moving on.
Seriously, when he probably could have used that energy to grift like all the other shitcoin rug pulls.
Some day, a lucky archeologist will unearth the one true archive from an innocent-looking tarball.
(X) Doubt.
They won’t know what to do with a tarball anymore than I do
as long as a paper manual exists…
(tar -xzvf <file> btw, the dash before xzvf is optional)
I think that’s just finding a usb stick from around a decade ago
You could get lucky and find gold AKA bitcoin.
At what point does it stop being archaeology and starts becoming computer science?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_archaeology
The computational archaeologists run archaeo.social for Mastodon/Matrix. :) They are a rad group.
When some rich, Walt Disney-type buys an island and fills it with supercomputers in order to clone a park full of extinct Amy Winehouses?
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SHIT! Somebody finally found it! Man, I hope I didn’t have anything on there with my personal info!
Mmmm forbidden chocolate bar.
