Re: Maleficent High Voltage USB sticks
I freely admit my ignorance of the underlying hardware here.
If you have a booby-trapped USB device which is designed to 'fry' what it is plugged into, is there any protection in first of all plugging it in via a USB hub?
Or, simply plugging into a powered (or unpowered) USB hub to ensure it discharges the capacitors into something relatively cheap and disposable first before plugging it into a PC? Of course, it might just take USB power to repeatedly recharge the capacitors and so repeatedly discharge nasty voltages.
And, in terms of protection against malware; is there any benefit in plugging into GNU/Linux or BSD systems to get the interesting/useful data off? There might be merit in having a sacrificial netbook (Remember those? If not, I think The Register has a well-known picture of one of the original netbooks to illustrate the device I'm talking about) to allow relatively safe data transfer.
Perhaps we should go back to distributing copies of slide-packs, documentation etc on CD or DVD?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
