Sneakernet
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Sneakernet, also called sneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as
magnetic tape Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...
,
floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
s,
optical disc An optical disc is a flat, usuallyNon-circular optical discs exist for fashion purposes; see shaped compact disc. disc-shaped object that stores information in the form of physical variations on its surface that can be read with the aid o ...
s,
USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...
s or external
hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
s between
computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...
s, rather than transmitting it over a
computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...
. Sneakernets enable data transfer through physical means and offer a solution in the presence of network connections that lack reliability; however, a consequence of this physical transfer is high latency. The term, a
tongue-in-cheek Tongue-in-cheek is an idiom that describes a humorous or sarcastic statement expressed in a serious manner. History The phrase originally expressed contempt, but by 1842 had acquired its modern meaning. Early users of the phrase include Sir Walte ...
play on ''net(work)'' as in ''
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
'' or ''
Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
'', refers to walking around in
sneakers Sneakers (American English, US) or trainers (British English, UK), also known by a #Names, wide variety of other names, are shoes primarily designed for sports or other forms of physical exercise, but are also widely used for everyday casual ...
inside an office as the transport mechanism.


Summary and background

Sneakernets are in use throughout the computer universe. A sneakernet may be used when computer networks are prohibitively expensive for the owner to maintain; in high-security environments where manual inspection (for re-classification of information) is necessary; where information needs to be shared between networks with different levels of security clearance; when data transfer is impractical due to bandwidth limitations; when a particular system is simply incompatible with the local network, unable to be connected, or when two systems are not on the same network at the same time. Because sneakernets take advantage of physical media, security measures used for the transfer of sensitive information are respectively physical. This form of
data transfer Data communication, including data transmission and data reception, is the transfer of data, transmitted and received over a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication channel. Examples of such channels are copper wires, optical ...
is also used for
peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...
(or friend-to-friend) file sharing and has grown in popularity in
metropolitan area A metropolitan area or metro is a region consisting of a densely populated urban area, urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories which share Industry (economics), industries, commercial areas, Transport infrastructure, transport network ...
s and
college A college (Latin: ''collegium'') may be a tertiary educational institution (sometimes awarding degrees), part of a collegiate university, an institution offering vocational education, a further education institution, or a secondary sc ...
communities. The ease of this system has been facilitated by the availability of
USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...
external hard drives,
USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...
s and portable music players. The
United States Postal Service The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the executive branch of the federal governmen ...
offers a Media Mail service for
compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and was capable of hol ...
s, among other items. This provides a viable mode of transport for long distance sneakernet use. In fact, when mailing media with sufficiently high data density such as high capacity hard drives, the throughput (data transferred per unit of time) as well as the cost per unit of data transferred may compete favorably with networked methods of data transfer. A quantum version of sneakernet was proposed in a paper by Simon Devitt and collaborators in 2016.


Usage examples

Data analytics teams in the financial services sector often use sneakernets to transfer sensitive corporate information and information obtained from
data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...
, such as ledger entries, customer data and financial statistics. There are several reasons for this: firstly, sneakernets can generally provide very high security (and possibly more importantly, they are ''perceived'' to be secure) due to the impossibility of a
man-in-the-middle attack In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, or on-path attack, is a cyberattack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communi ...
or packet sniffing; secondly, the volumes of data concerned are often extremely high; and thirdly, setting up secure network links between the client business and the analytics team's facilities is often either impossible or an extremely convoluted process.


Afghanistan

In 2021
Taliban , leader1_title = Supreme Leader of Afghanistan, Supreme leaders , leader1_name = {{indented plainlist, * Mullah Omar{{Natural Causes{{nbsp(1994–2013) * Akhtar Mansour{{Assassinated (2015–2016) * Hibatullah Akhundzada (2016–present) ...
-governed
Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
, "computer ''kars''" distribute Internet-derived content by hand: "Movies, music, mobile applications, iOS updates, and naughty videos. Also creating Apple IDs and social media accounts, and backing up and unlocking phones and recovering data." The ''kars'' collectively maintain an archive of hundreds of terabytes of data. Four terabytes of the latest Indian or American movies or Turkish TV dramas, dubbed in the Afghan national languages Dari and Pashto reportedly wholesale for about 800 afghanis, or nine US dollars, while the retail price of five gigabytes of content is 100 afghanis, or one US dollar. ''Kars'' report that their earnings have dropped 90% under Taliban rule.


Australia

When
Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
joined
Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
in 1983, it received articles via tapes sent from the United States to the
University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...
, which disseminated data to dozens of other computers on the country's Unix network.


Bhutan

The Rigsum Sherig Collection project uses a sneakernet to distribute offline educational resources, including Kiwix and
Khan Academy Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by Sal Khan. Its goal is to create a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short video lessons. Its website also includes suppl ...
on a Stick, to hundreds of schools and other educational institutions in the Kingdom of
Bhutan Bhutan, officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in South Asia, in the Eastern Himalayas between China to the north and northwest and India to the south and southeast. With a population of over 727,145 and a territory of , ...
. Many of the schools in Bhutan have computers or IT labs, but no Internet connection (or a very slow one). The sneakernet, facilitated by teachers, distributes about 25 GB of free, open-source educational software to the schools, often using external
hard disks A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...
.


Cuba

El Paquete Semanal is a roughly 1TB compilation of media, distributed weekly throughout
Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...
via portable hard drives and USB memory sticks.


Iran

A weekly data dump compilation collected through the satellite system Toosheh.


North Korea

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders China and Russia to the north at the Yalu River, Yalu (Amnok) an ...
n dissidents have been known to smuggle flash drives filled with western movies and television shows.


Pakistan

The May 2011 raid of
Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad Osama bin Laden's compound, known locally as the Waziristan Haveli (), was a large, upper-class house within a walled compound used as a safe house for militant leader Osama bin Laden, who was Killing of Osama bin Laden, shot and killed there b ...
,
Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...
, revealed that he used a series of USB thumb drives to store his email drafts. A courier of his would then take the saved emails to a nearby Internet cafe and send them out to the desired recipients.


South Africa

In September 2009, Durban company Unlimited IT reportedly pitted a messenger pigeon against South African ISP Telkom to transfer 4 GB of data from Howick to
Durban Durban ( ; , from meaning "bay, lagoon") is the third-most populous city in South Africa, after Johannesburg and Cape Town, and the largest city in the Provinces of South Africa, province of KwaZulu-Natal. Situated on the east coast of South ...
. The pigeon, carrying the data on a
memory stick The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory, flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage ...
, arrived in one hour eight minutes, with the data taking another hour to read from the memory stick. During the same two-hour period, only about 4.2% of the data had been transferred over the
ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over Copper wire, copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem ...
link. A similar experiment was conducted in England in September 2010; the "pigeonnet" also proved superior. In November 2009 the Australian comedy/current-affairs television program '' Hungry Beast'' repeated this experiment. The experiment had the team transfer a 700 MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest; A carrier pigeon with a
microSD Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary hardware, proprietary, non-volatile memory, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of port ...
card, a car carrying a USB Stick, or a
Telstra Telstra Group Limited is an Australian telecommunications company that builds and operates telecommunications networks and markets related products and services. It is a member of the S&P/ASX 20 stock index, and is Australia's largest telecomm ...
ADSL line. The data was to be transferred a distance of by road. The pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not come back. Wizzy Digital Courier provided Internet access to schools in South Africa with poor or no network connectivity by implementing
UUCP UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...
on USB memory sticks. This allowed offline cached email transport and scoops of web pages to back-fill a web cache.


United States

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
has used a sneakernet to transport large datasets, including 120 TB of data from the
Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the Orbiting Solar Observatory, first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most ...
. Users of Google Cloud can import their data into Google Cloud Storage through sneakernet.
Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...
similarly offers its Data Transfer Service to customers to migrate data to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or export data from it. The
SETI@home SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run ...
project uses a sneakernet to overcome bandwidth limitations: data recorded by the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico was stored on magnetic tapes which were then shipped to
Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
, for processing. In 2005, Jim Gray reported sending hard drives and even "metal boxes with processors" to transport large amounts of data by postal mail.
Very Long Baseline Interferometry Very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a type of astronomical interferometry used in radio astronomy. In VLBI a signal from an astronomical radio source, such as a quasar, is collected at multiple radio telescopes on Earth or in space. T ...
performed using the Very Long Baseline Array ships hard drives to a data reduction site in Socorro, New Mexico. They refer to their data transfer mechanism as "HDOA" (Hard Drives On Airplane). In 2015
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
launched AWS Snowball, a , 50 TB device for transporting data to the AWS cloud; and in 2016 AWS Snowmobile, a truck to transport up to 100 PB of data in one load. For similar reasons, there is also a Google Transfer Appliance, an IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration device, and Microsoft's Azure Data Box Disk service. Observation data from the
Event Horizon Telescope The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a Astronomical interferometer, telescope array consisting of a global network of radio telescopes. The EHT project combines data from several very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) stations around Earth, wh ...
is collected on hard drives which are transported by commercial freight airplanes from the various telescopes to the
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
Haystack Observatory and the
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy The Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfRA) (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie'') is located in Bonn, Germany. It is one of 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (German: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft). History By com ...
, where the data is analyzed.


USSR

In later
USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, the operating system called
DEMOS Demos may refer to: Computing * DEMOS, a Soviet Unix-like operating system * DEMOS (ISP), the first internet service provider in the USSR * Demos Commander, an Orthodox File Manager for Unix-like systems * Plural for Demo (computer programming ...
was created and adapted for many types of Soviet computers by cloning versions of
UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
that were brought into USSR on magnetic tapes bypassing the
Iron Curtain The Iron Curtain was the political and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. On the east side of the Iron Curtain were countries connected to the So ...
. This allowed to build Relcom country-wide
UUCP UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...
network to provide global
Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
access for Soviet users which led to the registration of .su ("Soviet Union")
top level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains i ...
in 1990.


In media


Non-fiction

The first
USENET Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
citation is July 16, 1985, and it was widely considered an old joke already. Other alleged speakers included Tom Reidel, Warren Jackson, or Bob Sutterfield. Although the station wagon transporting magnetic tapes is generally considered the canonical version, variants using trucks or
Boeing 747 The Boeing 747 is a long-range wide-body aircraft, wide-body airliner designed and manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in the United States between 1968 and 2023. After the introduction of the Boeing 707, 707 in October 1958, Pan Am ...
s or C-5s and later storage technologies such as
CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...
s,
DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...
s,
Blu-ray Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-defin ...
s, or SD Cards have frequently appeared. The very first problem in Andrew S. Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook ''Computer Networks'' asks the student to calculate the bandwidth of a St. Bernard carrying
floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
s.


Fiction

* In '' Minority Report'', the computer center of the "Precrime" police division operates by transferring data from one console to another using a thin, flat storage device. * The
Terry Pratchett Sir Terence David John Pratchett (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015) was an English author, humorist, and Satire, satirist, best known for the ''Discworld'' series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983 and 2015, and for the Apocalyp ...
novel ''
Going Postal ''Going Postal'' is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the 33rd book in his '' Discworld'' series, released in the United Kingdom on 25 September 2004. Unlike most of Pratchett's Discworld novels, ''Going Postal'' is divided int ...
'' (2004) includes a contest between a horse-drawn mail coach and the "Grand Trunk Clacks" (a
semaphore line An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals (a form of optical communication). There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph whic ...
) to see which is faster to transmit the contents of a book to a remote destination. * William Gibson's novel '' Spook Country'' (2007) also features sneakernets, with iPods being the storage device used to clandestinely move information. * In Cory Doctorow's novel '' Little Brother'', the main character uses the term ''sneakernet'' to describe how he and his friends distribute the fictitious XNet software for encrypted communications.


Similar concepts

* Delay-tolerant networks, such as the Haggle project at
Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...
. *
IP over Avian Carriers In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) is an ostensibly functional proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in issued by the Internet Engi ...
(RFC 1149), an April Fools' Day RFC describing the transmission of messages via
homing pigeon The homing pigeon is a variety of domestic pigeon (''Columba livia domestica''), selectively bred for its ability to find its way home over extremely long distances. Because of this skill, homing pigeons were used to carry messages, a practice ...
.


See also

*
Air gap (networking) An air gap, air wall, air gapping or disconnected network is a network security measure employed on one or more computers to ensure that a secure computer network is physically isolated from unsecured networks, such as the public Internet or an ...
*
Darknet A darknet or dark net is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social n ...
* Data Mule *
IP over Avian Carriers In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) is an ostensibly functional proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in issued by the Internet Engi ...
*
Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...
* Meatspace * Pod slurping *
Sideloading Sideloading describes the process of transferring files between two local devices, in particular between a personal computer and a mobile device such as a mobile phone, smartphone, PDA, tablet, portable media player or e-reader. Sideloading ty ...
* Twilight (warez) *
USB dead drop A USB dead drop is a USB mass storage device installed in a public space. For example, a USB flash drive might be mounted in an outdoor brick wall and fixed in place with fast concrete. Members of the public are implicitly invited to find files, ...


References

{{Software distribution Computer jargon Computer networking Data transmission File sharing networks 1980s neologisms