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my cellphone has been named “sneakernet” for years. it’s a throwback to a time when it was faster to walk a zip disk across campus than it was to send it.
I'd walk with my CRT monitor and tower (stuffed all cables, mouse, keyboard inside) over to my friend's to play games/mess with computers a couple decades ago. We called it the "sneakernet", too.
And if you use your cellphone as a USB mass storage device, it still is!
it’s the wifi hotspot name.
Cool and reminds me of a project from like 15 years ago. Forgot what it was called but basically it was just people hiding thumb drives and finding them like a geocache. Fun idea but then I remember Stuxnet and I'm like nah.

Edit: found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_dead_drop

Pirate box is mentioned on that page. I forgot about that. I used to carry around an old android phone running pirate box. Sometimes people would connect at a coffee shop and that's how I found out about the band Death Grips

How does it work in practice is it like a whisper protocol for distributing sites among different USB drives. So my USB will start storing other sites when I meet someone to exchange data?
How does this differ from just, say, giving someone an HTML dump of a static site? I don't quite understand what this protocol offers.

How exactly is it peer-to-peer if it's essentially an offline, transfer via hardware?

Seems like a mobile app is needed for this. My phone has tons of storage that is unused and always with me.
It would be cool to add this as a tool in copyparty! I have had a few friends come over and copy files from my home server they want to use.
This looks like a partial reinvention of NNCP's sneakernet transport, but for a much more limited use-case: http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html

You can also run NNCP over networks if you want to.