Epic USB duplicator burns 60 thumbdrives at once: what would you copy?
Top ten things to copy with Virtua Console's USB Flash Drive Duplicator:
• Malware, so that the drives may be scattered in a corporate car lot, from whence the inevitable occurs.
• Porn, same ruse but more amusing results.
O.K., so I've already run out of ideas. Drat. Anyway, the box can do its job quickly, finishing up a rack of 1GB drives in 2 minutes. It can even discretely encrypt each one with its own unique key. It costs $8,000, and they're developing a system to link up hundreds of these units, so that one may copy data to arbitrarily-large numbers of USB drives at once.
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I went to a Bare Naked Ladies concert a while back and they sold the live recording immediately after the concert to the audience as an mp3 on USB sticks like these.
This kit would be perfect for those situations...
Nice one. I imagine that also circumvents that ludicrous patent someone holds on burning CDs of a live performance in sutu.
I think the anti-drm groups etc could use this quite well at a demonstration.
Throw on the correct pocket applications, setups, torpark, and you could have a protest that not only educates folks, but gives them the tools for further resistance.
Demo reels for film and television types?
There are also companies which ship their software on small USB keys rather than CD/DVD.
And folks churning out USB-key copies of software demos for trade shows. "Take it home and try it; at worst, you've got a free USB key with our name on it."
For any medium, someone will want to churn out copies in production quantities, and someone else will make a buck building them a machine to do so. What's more interesting here is that someone thinks there's enough of a market to justify advertising the machine as a product. The real test is going to be how much this cloner costs.
For $8,000 I would expect this thing to have a robotic loader/unloader.
I would burn a copy of the Boing Boing archives, seal the sticks in bubblewrap and throw them in the nearest body of water.
I would also add an autoexec file (and Mac /linux equivalent of course) that instructs the finder to goto http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html and tell us where/how they found it.
Band demos & small batch releases. You can pick up 512MB USB keys for $3 each, and you could load an albums worth of material & a video onto 60 of those keys faster than you can pull a completed batch & plug in the next batch of 60.
Admittedly some rather funny little program that shows some dolt doing a funky chicken dance while surreptitiously loading a keylogger and passing that info semi regularly to an account you have would be almost worth while spending the $8k for it. Not that I would encourage that. But I think there might be a better DIY solution that could be done, that is similar. Here on BB (not BBG, but BB itself) there was a discussion about how in Cuba a form of Samizdat was being spread via USB keys to people who wanted stuff, and having a local repository where you could plug in quickly get a download of stuff and go home might be interesting... almost say like the Cellphone charging stations once profiled here via Afrigadget I believe.
That floppy...
Goatse x60
Alejandro! No internet for you for the rest of the evening!
Another use may be in some types of IT shops when doing some type of rapid deployment, particularly when there's not much chance of a master server to simplify rollouts or where the IT techs have a specific need to bring their software tools with them in a pre-installed form. For example, Best Buy's Geek Squad home setup services. One USB key w/ the tools, then a small array of additional ones with other software ready for auto-installation that are wiped and re-duplicated as the software they typically install changes. Heck of a lot easier than carrying around a bunch of disks and handloading them. Particularly useful when the tech knows that the current OS is fried and (s)he would have to re-install the OS anyway.
Other than that, I definitely think the ideas expressed earlier vis-a-vis band demos and non-profit demonstrations are an interesting consideration.
I'd use it to bulk-erase all the crap left on my tradeshow swag thumbdrives.
Some corporate and institutional press releases are made on thumbs instead of CD-ROMs or paper. They can be distributed as embedded brower pages to hundreds of news organizations all at once.
This should be absolutely useless, but wouldn't it be fun to hack the thing and turn it into some sort of RAID array or expandable hard drive?
I belive that "that ludicrous patent someone holds on burning CDs of a live performance in sutu" is a patant for starting to burn the CDs while the performance is still happening. This would indeed be a way to get around that. I am of course depending on the gadgets.boingboing.net community to set me straight if I am wrong since I'm too lazy to look it up myself.
Thank you gadgets.boingboing.net community.
I belive that "that ludicrous patent someone holds on burning CDs of a live performance in sutu" is a patant for starting to burn the CDs while the performance is still happening. This would indeed be a way to get around that. I am of course depending on the gadgets.boingboing.net community to set me straight if I am wrong since I'm too lazy to look it up myself.
Thank you gadgets.boingboing.net community.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NS5QHJ-MHao
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nsH1atj4Tsg
those and Maybe Logic, Baraka, and free your mind...