A bit over two years ago, I blogged about the wonderful project made possible by two readers of Living Freedom: Mark’s (Greylocke’s) files of survival info installed onto a bootable Knoppix thumb drive by Scott (The Fat Man).
The device gives portable access to a wealth of preparedness info. It can be carried in a bug-out bag and the files accessed from whatever USB port is handy. (It will be bootable only on devices capable of booting from a USB drive, but that’s pretty common these days.)
Mark describes the contents:
The Knoppix Thumb Drive Project … contains a full reference library with the Third World Technology Files know as CD3WD and some extra files of many US Military Manuals on things ranging from Survival, Medical, Water purification and Sanitation to Construction.
Unfortunately, Scott was being treated for cancer at that time, and though he was expected to make it … he didn’t. Mark told me this week about Scott’s death; we both learned belatedly, to our shock and sorrow.
The ready-to-go drives haven’t been available for a while.
Now, for a limited time, you can send Mark an unopened 32 GB thumb drive and a self-addressed stamped return envelope (see details here) and he’ll send you back your own KTD with the survival files.
This service is FREE. Given that each drive takes a couple of hours to process, it would be nice it you sent Mark a few bucks, but that’s not required. He’s not doing this to make money; only to get the information out there. Just follow the “details” like above to find out more.
This could be an essential resource in a time and place where you have no Internet. I highly recommend it.
Mark’s also hoping someone else would like to take over the project and says he’ll help get things started.
Ah, yes. The CD3WD. Back when I was trying to get back control of my books from the pirate, I foolishly thought I should be showing a pattern of attempting to protect my copyrights. And some of my stuff is included in the CD3WD package. Seemed like every prepper-type site in the world was grabbing stuff from it. My personal favorite scumbags were the ones who grabbed the sundial article: A “polar shift” (I could never figure out if they meant magnetic pole or rotational pole, mainly because I don’t think they realized they weren’t the same thing) panic-group who was apparently sure that the first thing people need after the planet tips over is sundials.
They also never grasped why the Earth tipping over would render those mathematical instructions moot (aside from the whole initial survival thing).
Then there was the church group teaching starving third world Africans how to build sundials. When I told them that it would have been nice if they just asked, they explained 1) they didn’t know I was the “Carl Bussjaeger” who wrote the article (there are so many of us after all), 2) it’s too much trouble to even try to reach authors, 3) they had “permission” anyway since they lifted it from someone else, and 4) they’re by-G*d Christians doing G*d’s work and that means they can rip off anyone and I should feel privileged that they took my work and I’m going to Hell if I complain.
Now, I don’t much care, and when someone asks for the sequel or another short story in the NA/BP universe I just tell ’em it ain’t ever happening. Sometimes I suggest they get with the clown who told me that those stories weren’t my words and an unabridged dictionary and parse out the next story on their own. They clearly don’t need my alleged skilled at randomly shuffling words.
Sorry that happened to you, Bear. Sadly, all us little people who publish online know whereof you speak. A couple of my books ended up on The Pirate Bay.
Oh well. “Resistance is futile.”
Very sorry to hear of his passing.
Taking over the imaging is something that could easily be done, but I’ve got a few things I’d be apprehensive about – Given that this is a reference for “preppers” (an admitted target of US LE) that is bootable (target audience overlap with users who use something like Tails for privacy), the larger the audience grows, the more likelihood that the unopened bootable media is ::ahem:: “pre-conditioned” to infect the imager’s system. The infected system would then churn out infected copies for further infection.
If you read Schneier regularly, you may have found https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/air_gaps.html. If *I* were the one doing this, I’d be buying, with cash, a dedicated air-gapped system specifically for doing the imaging, I’d be watching what was going on with the USB drives I received *VERY* closely prior to starting imaging, and check-summing the imaged USB post image.
Blu-Ray would provide an advantage in decreasing the likelihood of an infection here, but I doubt very much that the number of people that have a BR reader is anywhere near the number of people that have a USB-bootable system.
Finally, there’s the issue of time spent. I’m not sure of the demand for this right now, but anything more than a few sticks a week would make it pretty time consuming. It would bypass the central point of infection thing as well as potentially make it easier for the distributor if the image was made available via Bit-torrent with a publicly available checksum posted in a couple of places.
I guess it’s all a matter of whether you consider that level of security to be paranoid or wise. I’m leaning toward wise, given recent history, but I welcome the distribution of it regardless.
I guess I don’t understand the concept. A USB port in a bug out bag?
Anyway, I don’t expect to be able to rely on electronic gizmos once the grid goes down. I think I’ll have to rely pretty much on the skills I’ve learned, preps I’ve made, and the community I came to be part of before the ball drops.
“A USB port in a bug out bag?”
LOL, probably not for most of us, ML. But carrying a USB stick in a bug-out bag still makes sense in a lot of circumstances. For instance, you could have electricity and a computer or tablet, but no Internet. And it doesn’t need to be a complete grid-down-zombies-at-the-door scenario. Could be many garden-variety emergencies. Could be your off-grid weekend cabin, for that matter.
Personally, I’m prepping for the Great EMP of Doom. Can’t have too many thumb drives.
Or steel garbage cans, to store them in…
Maybe charge extra if USB 2.0 rather than 3.0 is sent. Boot a liveCD linux, dd the stuff to a hard drive file, then dd from there to the new flash drives, one in each port you have. Yeah, look at the checksums to be sure…
Even easier, instead of sending flash drives, just send the money, in FRNs, to buy one locally, along with a “SASE” to return it.