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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

That's cool. However I don't like the idea of plugging in USB sticks and having them modified by anything. OS X was (and still is) a terrible offender: plug in a USB drive and the OS sneakily inserts stuff outside partitions (so you cannot easily find it but if you "dd" and take the hash of the drive it's different before and after simply plugging it in an OS X computer: to me that is pure madness and it took me a while to figure out what was going on).

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Pretty sure Apple at the very least injects a hidden file that easy to see if you plug the drive into an Apple device then into a non-Apple device; no idea why they are adding it, though 99% sure it is for file operation administration.

Edit: Appears at least one of the files added is called “ “.DS_Store” and is still around:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/19/google-drive-user...

I learned a roommate was snooping around my flash drives because of this. A bunch of .DS_Store folders appeared in a drive that I had never connected to an OSX machine

DS_Store just includes basic window configuration information for Macs. Stuff like list vs icons, size of the columns, etc, so you have a consistent UI look when you're accessing your remote drives.

It can be toggled to avoid it on removable devices when they're connected to Macs. It's benign, though I guess annoying to some non-Mac users.

It's the equivalent of desktop.ini on windows, so yeah finder customisation etc..

Expect Mac software does fuck all to prevent it "leaking", so pretty much every zip from a Mac user contains one of these in each folder. Only case we had desktop.ini do the same was with Dropbox.

I have to wonder - are there any USB sticks available that have a read-only toggle like floppies used to have?

The original USB sticks had this, but it was no longer included as the devices became commoditized.

No, or very niche, and there's no guarantee that those few that do have write protect enforce it in hardware. For cases when you absolutely most not allow the flash content to be modified there are USB devices called write blockers. They're used mainly in forensics, where the data might be used as evidence in court and there needs to be clear chain of custody and an audit trail to say the bits analysed are the same as the bits when the device was first seized.

They exist but they're more expensive. One brand is Kanguru: https://www.kanguru.com/collections/kanguru-usb-drives-with-...

You might want to have a look at USB SD card readers instead of USB sticks. Many (most?) (normal and mini but not micro size) SD cards and adapters have write-protect slider switches. Be careful though, I've found some of these sliders to be rather flimsy, I've had several break off or fall out of SD cards and adapters over the years.

Disk Arbitrator allows you to force OSX to mount new volumes as read-only (or prevent mounting them entirely) to avoid this. https://github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator

I wish it were built-in.

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