Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 202 posts

Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

#161

Post by fabianhjr »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #157
Barrin92 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been an arms race and nations and companies have always strategically opened themselves up to acquire knowledge. When Germany was trying to catch up to the industrialised UK, they send business people to the UK to copy the layout of factory floors to reimplement them at home. For the longest time, Japan only allowed trade under restrictive conditions to maximise exposure to foreign technologies while mini…

If you honestly don't know why I will explain it to you. It is because it is theft. If I were to steal some or all of your possessions and give it to the disadvantaged, then I suppose you shouldn't honestly get all that upset about it, but I doubt that would happen.

> In economic terms, intellectual property is non-rival, whereas tangible property is rival. As a result, the “piracy” of intellectual property is simply not the same sort of zero-sum game that car theft — or theft of any tangible property — is. And that means that when Hollywood or the U.S. government says that music or movie downloaders are “pirates” or “thieves,” they are indulging in a bit of loose rhetoric. There are, in general, good moral reasons not to take what doesn’t belong to you. But as this video by filmmaker Nina Paley so beautifully illustrates, copying is not theft.

Source: http://freakonomics.com/2012/04/02/copying-is-not-theft/

Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

#162

Post by philwelch »

justherefortart wrote: post #62
gaius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyways, did IBM have a big leak recently or something? Yes, this is almost certainly about leaks to publications such as El Reg. Eg. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/26/ibm_gives_services_...

Slack instead of email? That's hilarious.

Not to mention sad, soulcrushing, and generally illiterate.

Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

#163

Post by trumped »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #151
trumped wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't need USB, it can be done using WiFi

You do need USB. You still have to plug the Android phone into the PC every time unfortunately - then you can enable wireless debugging and disconnect the cable for that session. When you come back to your PC later, you have to plug in the cable again. I know this because I'm trying to learn Android development and it's infuriating.

Not if your device is rooted, apparently: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19117359/android-debug-w...

Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

#165

Post by squarefoot »

This is going to hurt everyone but really motivated hackers in there.

If I had to smuggle some data out of a PC I'd use the audio card at a very low volume but known frequencies to output the data the FSK way, leaving a phone near the speaker recording the audio, then at home I'd reconstruct the data just as old modems did 40 years ago.

Other methods could also be used: blinking a pixel (or the optical mouse led left on the phone camera), raising the cpu power usage by making it run busy loops according to data ones and zeroes (nobody would object a bluetooth power consumption measurement device connected to the PCs mains cord), or manipulating innocuous fields into IP packets such as the Time To Live: make it higher than X and it's a one, make it lower and it'a a zero; routers will ignore the trivial difference but a passive (100% undetectable) tap into the network cable still allows to sniff the data. Actually, unless the infrastructure is instructed to report Ethernet frames sent to wrong addresses, one could send malformed frames carrying data into the payload so that they could be ignored at switch level but still readable by a tap on the cable: that would allow data smuggling at blazing fast speeds, much higher than USB.

Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

#166

Post by brian-armstrong »

Sammi wrote: post #127
brian-armstrong wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It made the rounds on show HN a couple years ago. Also my dirty secret is that it isn't really JS, it's C via emscripten https://github.com/quiet/quiet Currently supports everything Liquid DSP supports which is GMSK, PSK, QAM, OFDM and a lot more. Working on adding DSSS soon edit: Here's a sort of lab/playground https://quiet.github.io/quiet-profile-lab

So what transmission rate can you hope to get with this?

Depends quite a bit on what you have. I've seen about 10 kbps over air and 64 kbps over cable

Re: IBM bans USB, SD cards, flash drives and portable devices from every office

#170

Post by ssharwood »

dang wrote: post #158
JdeBP wrote: post #134

This is a third-hand story. Most of it is lifted verbatim from the PCMag article ... * https://www.pcmag.com/news/361098/ibm-employees-cant-use-rem... ... which is in turn sourced from an article in The Register . * https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/10/ibm_bans_all_remova...

Ok, we've changed to that original URL from https://boingboing.net/2018/05/10/ibm-bans-usb-sd-cards-flas... . Thanks!

Gosh, thanks! Certainly didn't expect the change or want to be seen as asking for it. But it's lovely that you did it so thanks!
Post reply on HN