There’s a scene in Cory Doctorow’s excellent novel Pirate Cinema where the protagonists decide to illegally distribute a movie by copying a pre-release version to cheap Flash drives and then giving the drives to people waiting in line for the movie. The problem, of course, is that they could be recognized or photographed doing
so and the characters in the novel go to great lengths to disguise themselves and thwart any surveillance attempts.
A better alternative for such mischief might be wireless hard drives like the Patriot Gauntlet Node. This is essentially a boring old 2.5″ hard drive enclosure with a lithium-ion battery and WiFi.
The market for things like this at the moment seems to be for streaming videos and music to mobile devices which still tend to have rather anemic storage options. Patriot claims that the 3,500mAh battery is good for 5.5 hours, though reviewers generally have found 4 hours is more realistic.
The device will support up to 8 simultaneous wireless connections, and offers WPA2.
Load one of these up with video or pictures and bring it to your next get together with friends or family and allow them to copy whatever they like to their heart’s content.
Or load one up with embarrassing documents and videos about a political candidate to his or her next press conference, give the device’s wireless name a fairly inflammatory name and watch hilarity ensue.
