Sneakernet

Sneakernet is an informal term for the transfer of electronic

information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape,
floppy disks, compact discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives
from one computer to another; rather than transmitting the
information over a computer network.

The term, a tongue-in-cheek play on net(work) as in Internet or

Ethernet, refers to walking in sneakers as the transport mechanism
for the data.[1]

Contents A USB flash drive allows the transfer of data

between individuals without use of the Internet.
Summary and background
Theory
Usage examples
In media
Non-fiction
Fiction
Similar concepts
See also
References
Memory cards are a popular physical medium for
transferring files and have become smaller in size
as technology has advanced
Summary and background
Sneakernets, also known as trainnets or pigeonets, are in use
throughout the computer world. 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 guest laptop is incompatible with the local network, or simply when two computers are not powered
up at the same time or lack the correct interconnecting cabling. Because sneakernets take advantage of physical media, different
security measures must be taken into account for the transfer of sensitive information.

This form of data transfer is also used for peer-to-peer (or friend-to-friend) file sharing and has grown in popularity in metropolitan
areas and college communities. The ease of this system has been facilitated by the availability of USB external hard drives, USB
flash drives and portable music players.[2]

The United States Postal Servicealso offers a Media Mail service for compact discs, among other items. This provides a viable mode
of transport for long distance sneakernet use. In fact, when mailing a sufficiently large hard drive or a spindle of DVDs, the
throughput (amount of data per unit time) may compete favorably with other methods of data transfer
.

Theory
From an information theory standpoint, sneakernets can achieve tremendous throughput, but they suffer from high latency (see
Network performance). The throughput of the network is directly proportional to the size of the transmitted file(s). Latency is based
on the amount of time it takes to fully process the request for information. Latency would include the time it takes to write the storage
media and the time to travel from point A to point B.

For example: Alice requests Bob to send her a DVD (4.7 GB) worth of information. Over the Internet, the latency for the file request
may be milliseconds—Alice starts receiving the information nearly immediately—but at a modest broadband download speed of
50 kB/s it may take up to a day to complete the transfer. On the other hand, Bob could burn a DVD and deliver it to Alice in an hour.
The latency was an hour, but the throughput of the transfer is roughly equal to a transfer rate of 130
5 kB/s.

If an Airbus A380 were filled with microSD cards each holding 512 gigabytes of storage capacity, the theoretical total storage space
onboard would be approximately 91exabytes. A 4h47m flight from New York to Los Angeles would work out to a data transport rate
of well over 5 petabytes per second, although this does not account for the time required to write to and read from the cards, which
would almost certainly be much longer than the duration of the flight.

Similarly, as of 2016 the highest capacity backup tape format available is LTO-7, with a capacity of 6 TB. If a tape of this capacity
were sent by overnight mail and were to arrive around 20 hours after it was sent, the effective data rate would be 664 Mbit/s. With
networking technology, this magnitude of speed over this distance would be very difficult to attain without a costly dedicated
connection as one would likely need to use severalhops and have a connection that is notoversubscribed.

Sneakernets may also be used in tandem with computer network data transfer to increase data security. For example, a file or
collection of files may be encrypted and sent over the Internet while the encryption key is printed and hand delivered or mailed. This
method greatly reduces the possibility of an individual intercepting both the key and encrypted data.

Another way sneakernets are used together with network transfers is to provide an initial full backup as a base for incremental
backups. In the case of a large (several terabyte) dataset that grows by just a few megabytes a day, the initial seeding of the data to be
backed up would require an excessively long time upload over a network. One solution is to make a local copy of the data which is
then physically relocated to the remote location and topped up with daily incremental backups over a network.

Usage examples
When Australia joined Usenet in 1983, it received articles via tapes sent from the United States to the University of Sydney, which
[3]
disseminated data to dozens of other computers on the country's Unix network.

The May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan 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.[4][5]

In September 2009, Durban company Unlimited IT reportedly pitted a messenger pigeon against South African ISP Telkom to
transfer 4 GB of data 60 miles (97 km) fromHowick to Durban. The pigeon, carrying the data on a memory stick, 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 link.[6] A similar experiment was conducted in England in September 2010; the
"pigeonnet" also proved superior.[7][8] 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 card, a car carrying a USB Stick, or a Telstra ADSL line. The data was to be transferred a
distance of 132 km by road. The pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2
[9]
hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not coming back.

Google has used a sneakernet to transport large datasets, such as the 120 TB of data from the Hubble Space Telescope.[10][11] Users
of Google Cloud can import their data intoGoogle Cloud Storagethrough sneakernet.[12]
The SETI@home project uses a sneakernet to overcome bandwidth limitations: data recorded by the radio telescope in Arecibo,
Puerto Rico is stored on magnetic tapes which are then shipped to Berkeley, California for processing. In 2005, Jim Gray reported
ge amounts of data by postal mail.[13]
sending hard drives and even "metal boxes with processors" to transport lar

Many film editing and visual effects companies transfer large film-scans using hard drives shipped via courier (to reduce bandwidth
bills, and to reserve bandwidth for more time-critical transfers).

Wizzy Digital Courier provided Internet access to schools in South Africa with poor or no network connectivity by implementing
[14]
UUCP on USB memory sticks. This allowed offline cached email transport and scoops of web pages to back-fill a web cache.

When home broadband access was less common, many people downloaded large files over their workplace networks and took them
home by sneakernet. Today, as home broadband is more common, sometimes technical workers at institutions with congested WAN
links do the reverse: downloading data at home in the evening and carrying the files to work on USB flash drives.

In the early demoscene, the primary method of exchanging data was using snail mail to exchange floppies between groups. Each
group usually had at least one person designated as a swapper, who would exchange news, data and productions with swappers from
other groups this way. The best swappers were known to send and receive over 100 mails a month.

Online DVD rental services such as GameFly and Netflix, are effectively sneakernets. They deliver data, stored on DVDs and
occasionally other forms of digital media, via regular postalmail.

Petroleum seismic surveys routinely record field data which are many terabytes in size. A cluster computer is required to process
these data and may take a year or more, during which time the field crew will wish to work in other areas. The field data are generally
hand-carried on tape and increasingly on hard disk inserts, to the processing centre.

Data analytics teams in the financial services sector often use sneakernets to transfer sensitive corporate information and information
obtained from data mining, 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 attackor 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.

Very Long Baseline Interferometry 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).

The Rigsum Sherig Collection project[15] uses a sneakernet to distribute offline educational resources, including Kiwix and Khan
Academy on a Stick,[16] to hundreds of schools and other educational institutional in the Kingdom of Bhutan. Many of the schools in
Bhutan have computers or IT labs, but no Internet connection (or a very slow one).[17] The sneakernet, facilitated by teachers,
distributes about 25 GB of free, open-source educational software to the schools, often using external
hard disks.

North Korean dissidents have been known to smuggle flash drives filled with western movies and television shows, largely in an
effort to inspire a cultural revolution.[18][19][20][21][22]

El Paquete Semanal is a roughly 1TB compilation of media, distributed weekly throughout Cuba via portable hard drives and USB
memory sticks.[23]

In 2015 Amazon Web Services launched AWS Snowball, a 50 lb (23 kg), 50 TB device for transporting data to the AWS cloud;[24]
and in 2016 AWS Snowmobile, a truck to transport up to 100 PB of data in one load.[25] For similar reasons, there is also a Google
[26]
Transfer Appliance and an IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration device.

In media
Non-fiction

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

—Tanenbaum, Andrew S.(1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57.ISBN 0-13-166836-6.

The original version of this quotation came much earlier; the very first problem in Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook Computer Networks
asks the student to calculate the throughput of a St. Bernard carrying floppy disks (in 1981 the standard 8 inch floppy held
241 kilobytes of data per side, though various formatting and data blocking techniques could get that as high as 800 kilobytes per
side, while the 5.25 inch floppy held 180 kilobytes per side). The first USENET citation is July 16, 1985 and it was widely
considered an old joke already.

There's a lot of band-width in a station wagon.

-Gruenberger, Fred (1971). Computing: A Second Course. San Francisco: Canfield Press. p. 138. ISBN 978-
0063834057. Retrieved 24 January 2017.

Other alleged speakers included Tom Reidel, Warren Jackson, or Bob Sutterfield. The station wagon transporting magnetic tapes is
the canonical version, but variants using trucks or Boeing 747s or C-5s and later storage technologies such as CD-ROMs, DVDs,
Blu-Rays, or SD Cards have frequently appeared.

Fiction
The Terry Pratchett novel Going Postal (2004) includes a contest between a horse-drawn mail coach and the "Grand
Trunk Clacks" (a semaphore line) 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, withiPods being the storage device used
to clandestinely move information.[27]
The "valuable data file" has become a common MacGuffin in action films and television programs and indeed the motif of the
"valuable letter or documents" (pre-electronic information storage technology) dates back hundreds of years.

The film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), based on the short story by William Gibson, stars Keanu Reeves as a digital
courier with 320 GB of corporate data transported in his head.
The film Live Free or Die Hard (2007) depicts a digital thief attempting to download 500 TB of financial data to a
suitcase-sized package.
In the episode "Amen" ofThe Newsroom (2012), associate producer Maggie Jordan, after being told "it's 2011, we
don't run film manually", is told that the video is taking too long torender on the local machine.It cannot feasibly be
transferred over the network in raw form and must be run to the newsroom manually on USB a drive.
In the film Elysium (2013), produced, written, and directed byNeill Blomkamp, Matt Damon as Max Da Costa
downloads sensitive data into his brain implant in a data heist.
In the film Snowden (2016), the titular character is seen evading security by carrying a data chip concealed in a
Rubik's Cube.
In the James Bond film Skyfall (2016), MI6 sets up a sneakernet due to security concerns.

Similar concepts
Delay-tolerant networks, such as the Haggle project[28] at Cambridge University.
IP over Avian Carriers (RFC 1149), an April Fools' Day RFC describing the transmission of messages viahoming
pigeon.

See also
Air gap (networking)
Darknet
 Data Mule
Jargon File
Meatspace (tongue-in-cheek implication of the real world as a similar analogue to cyberspace writ large)
Pod slurping
Repurposing
Sideloading
Twilight (CD-ROM)
USB dead drop

References
1. "Oxford Dictionary" (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sneakernet). Retrieved 2016-09-09.
2. Boutin, Paul (2002-08-26)."Sneakernet Redux: Walk Your Data" (https://web.archive.org/web/20091119134710/htt
p://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/08/54739). Wired News. Archived from the original (https://www.wired.
com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/08/54739)on November 19, 2009. Retrieved 8 June 2010.
3. Marquis, Bret (1983-03-29)."Australia joins USENET"(http://article.olduse.net/467@sdchema.UUCP)
.
Newsgroup: net.news.newsite (news:net.news.newsite). 467@sdchema.UUCP. Retrieved 14 February 2016.
4. Apuzzo, Matt & Goldman, Adam (May 13, 2011)."How bin Laden emailed without being detected by US"(http://ww
w.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/13/how-bin-laden-emailed-without-being-detected-us/)
. The Washington
Times. Associated Press. Retrieved June 29, 2012.
5. McCullagh, Declan (May 13, 2011). "How bin Laden evaded the NSA: Sneakernet"(http://news.cnet.com/8301-3192
1_3-20062755-281.html). Privacy Inc. CNET. Retrieved May 17, 2011.
6. "SA Pigeon 'Faster than broadband'" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm)
. BBC News. September 10,
2009.
7. "BT feathers ruffled over pigeon-based file transfer caper" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/17/bt_bird/). The
Register. September 17, 2010.
8. Pigeon flies past broadband in data speed race(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11325452), BBC News
Technology, September 16, 2010
9. "The Great Australian Internet Challenge"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci2bFFGM8T8). ABC
Television/Hungry Beast. 10 November 2009.
10. "Google helps terabyte data swaps"(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6425975.stm)
. BBC News. March 7,
2007. Retrieved May 23, 2010.
11. Farivar, Cyrus (20 March 2007)."Google's Next-Gen of Sneakernet"(https://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/ne
ws/2007/03/73007). Wired. Retrieved 5 February 2013.
12. "Offline Media Import / Export"(https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/offline-media-import-export). Google.
Retrieved 29 January 2016.
13. "A Conversation with Jim Gray"(https://web.archive.org/web/20091205080459/http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=8
64078). ACM Queue. 1 (4). July 31, 2003. Archived fromthe original (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864078)on
December 5, 2009. "Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to
shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer?
"
14. "Seeking Riches From the Poor"(http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/04/63131?currentPage=all)
,
Megan Lindow, 04.23.04, Wired.com
15. Rigsum Sherig Collection(http://sherig.rigsum-it.com/)
16. Khan Academy on a Stick(http://mujica.org/khan/)
17. "Only a Third of Government Schools Have Internet Access"(https://archive.is/20130615201815/http://www .kuensel
online.com/only-a-third-of-government-schools-have-internet-access) . Kuensel. April 18, 2013. Archived fromthe
original (http://www.kuenselonline.com/only-a-third-of-government-schools-have-internet-access)on June 15, 2013.
18. Fighting The State, Without The Web: North Korea's Sneakernet Insurgency | Techli (http://techli.com/2012/05/north-
korea-sneakernet-insurgency/)
19. https://www.wired.com/2015/03/north-korea/
20. How One Man Wants to Free North Korea With USB Drives and Pirated Movies(https://gizmodo.com/how-one-man-
wants-to-free-north-korea-with-usb-drives-a-1688814490)
21. North Korea’s Secret Movie Bootleggers: HowWestern Films Make It Into the Hermit Kingdom - The Daily Beast(htt
p://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/22/north-korea-s-secret-movie-bootleggers-how-western-films-make-it-in
to-the-hermit-kingdom.html)
22. Balloon activist sends 'thousands of copies' of The Interview to North Korea | Film | The Guardian
(https://www.thegu
ardian.com/film/2015/apr/08/balloon-activist-sends-thousands-of-copies-of-the-interview-to-north-korea)
23. In Cuba, An Underground Network Armed With USB Drives Does The Work Of Google And YouTube (http://www.fas
tcompany.com/3048163/in-cuba-an-underground-network-armed-with-usb-drives-does-the-work-of-google-and-youtu
be)
24. Kastrenakes, Jacob (October 7, 2015)."Amazon made a huge plastic box called Snowball so people can ship data
to the cloud" (https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9471381/amazon-snowball-data-transfer-device). The Verge.
Retrieved October 8, 2015.
25. Dignan, Larry (November 30, 2016)."AWS' Snowmobile data transport truck highlights why cloud giant is so damn
disruptive" (http://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-snowmobile-data-transport-truck-highlights-why-cloud-giant-is-so-damn
-disruptive/).
26. Sharwood, Simon (19 September 2017)."IBM packs 120TB into a carry-on bag, for snow-balling cloud uploads"(htt
ps://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/ibm_cloud_mass_data_migration_appliance/)
. The Register. Retrieved
19 September 2017.
27. Poole, Steven (August 18, 2007). "Sign language" (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/18/sciencefictionfa
ntasyandhorror.fiction?gusrc=rss&feed=books). The Guardian. London: Guardian Media Group. Retrieved
September 24, 2009.
28. Ben Hui (March 1, 2006)."Haggle" (https://web.archive.org/web/20150628135144/http://www .cl.cam.ac.uk/research/
srg/netos/haggle/). University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
. Archived from the original (http://www.cl.cam.ac.u
k/research/srg/netos/haggle/)on June 28, 2015.

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