Anyway, if you're interested in the hardware, it is open source!

Check out deadflash's repository at: codeberg.org/bitowlonline...

Firmware repo coming soon

As such, I am really excited for the @baochip.com to become available!

It it's in a really tiny CSP package, and has USB 2.0 HS as well as SDIO. I managed to get a devkit for this: github.com/baochip/dabao

At the time this project was conceived in November last year, the ESP32-P4 was the only thing that had USB 2.0 HS, high speed SDIO, which was in a small enough package (10x10 mm QFN) to fit on a flash drive and was reasonably priced. It was on hold until the P4 became generally available.

The purpose deadflash is to allow communities distribute files on the drive, while keeping opportunists from tampering with the contents of the drive.

The goal is not to stop a dedicated attacker (you cannot!) from tampering with the contents, but to keep out 15 minute opportunists.

The threat we are trying to protect against are far-right nuts finding out the location of dead-drops and putting material like child sexual abuse material on the drive and then calling the cops. A whole community could then be in legal hot water for no reason.

One method of distributing information in a way that would be harder to pin down would be to create "dead drops.". A flash drive could be placed a hole in the wall on the side of a building, unlocked utility boxes, etc.

But why not use a regular flash drive for this?

We are seeing a rise of policies designed to restrict access to information online and offline.

People in states like Utah wish to go after "Little Free Libraries" by campaigning to make owners of these libraries criminally liable for not adhering to book bans.
www.themarysue.com/utah-book-ba...

tl;dr: It's mounted read-only by default, and mountable as R/W only after authentication; the point being to distribute files in a manner you can prove no one tampered with its contents.

See @undergndonline.bsky.social zines about archival and data distribution: undergnd.online/zine#archiva...