On Thursday 15 January 2009 19:08:43 Amedee Van Gasse wrote: [...]
Suppose you are on the road, and you have your usb stick with some precious documents. You urgently want to print something, so you'll want to plug in the stick somewhere, mount it r/o, pipe the file to lpr and be done with it. However, on every "user friendly" distribution there are all kinds of windows that pop up when you plug in the usb stick, but none of them is a shell prompt. Worst of all, you notice that your stick is already mounted read/write! This is on an unknown system that you know nothing about. It might as well wipe your stick, or install a rootkit on it. How are you ever going to know what the userfriendly police is doing behind your back?
That is why decent USB memory sticks have a write-protect switch on them; regardless of how the system tries to mount it, if the write protect switch is set the write line should be disabled and nothing should be able to write to it... -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ===================================================