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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

When this comes up, I always mention I like the convenience of diskettes and the fact they were rather cheap. I had no issues giving or mailing someone a diskette and never getting the media back.

CDs/DVDs are a PITA to write, plus most are write once. Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of diskettes were. These days, with flash drives, I would want the media back.

Back then, documents would fit on 1 diskette, now documents created with office applications are at best multi-MB, some approaching 1 gig.

Yes there is email and things, but I know some lawyers who like to distribute documents on brand new physical media because for them, encryption is hard and their clients have no clue about encryption. So they buy flash drives for that these days.

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Strange flashdrives are also a bit sketchy.

I know there were diskette-viruses, but you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in mind.

> you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in mind.

I don't think it's fair to claim USB is insecure because you can buy accessories that charge a capacitor bank over the 5V, and then feed that back to the computer.

That could be solved by using an isolated hub to host USB devices, like the Spectra 3022. Then again, if you have equipment that expensive, I hope you're not plugging random stuff into it...

I wonder if there's a market for USB hubs with breakers/fuses to protect against this. Probably only security researchers plugging in known-sketchy things though.

The thing is, adding an inline fuse doesn't guarantee that the host would be safe: if the fuse doesn't blow quick enough and lets enough current through, that's bad (plus, you'd have to add a fuse to P-, D+, D- and P+ just to be sure, not to mention USB3). The best option would probably be a complete isolation of the USB device from the host, with a hub that then transfers D- and D+ to the host without a direct electrical connection (while providing its own P- and P+). Think TOSlink, but for USB.

Galvanic USB isolators are a thing. Mostly for medical applications, but it's literally a chip you can buy off the shelf that provides total electrical isolation (with the addition of an isolated 5v supply).

There are digital isolator ICs, like ADUM3166 from Analog Devices, though like none of them are for USB 3.0+ Awful lot of isolation transformers in the IC diagram, so I'm sure that something like the transformers used for Ethernet could be reused to protect basically any USB ports from a USB killer attack, though they are awfully big for a smartphone

The industrial hubs I'm familar with use optoisolators to separate the host and attached devices, I think. Advantech has a USB-3 version (P/N USB-4630), but I can't speak to these personally.

Absolutley. In a hardware-development context, we use them to stop frying computers with broken devices. I've had good experience with the BB-UHR304 from Advantech. They're expensive and occasionally sacrificial, but cheaper than replacing an average pc / laptop. https://www.advantech.com/en/products/c9300564-0829-46eb-955...

You can either have a port where you can run trusted devices without hassle, or one where you can input untrusted data safely. You can't have the same port do both.

That's an inherent problem with universal ports that do a bit of everything as opposed to having distinct storage-oriented media. I don't know how you'd tamper with a diskette to brick a computer.

Ah, memories...

https://stickdeathgod.tripod.com/id23.html

My first Linux distro was about 50 diskettes ;)

Same! I think it was back in 1997 in college, and my dorm mate only had 4 floppies sitting around, and Slackware was around 50, so I kicked off the installation with the first couple of disks, and when I'd finish up with one I'd toss it across the hall to him, and he'd reimage it with the next in the sequence and toss it back. Pretty tedious, but it got the job done.

I'll never forget how foreign Slackware felt after having grown up on DOS. It wasn't long before I got used to it, though, and I never did go back. Great memories.

I had that but with a two mile walk round trip :(

I remember being blown away by Debian. It packed most common network card drivers, so that you needed just two diskettes to bootstrap the installation, and the rest was downloaded.

Of course, QNX was even more impressive, packing the os, windowing system, network and modem drivers, and a web browser on one single diskette. Amazing.

mine was tomsrtbt[1]. 1 diskette.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt

> Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of diskettes were.

Actually, that's close. On AliExpress, you can get 10 1GB USB sticks for about $15. Adjusted for inflation, that's about how much a box of 10 cheap 1.44MB floppies cost in 1990. It became a bit cheaper in the late 90s, but that's about the time CD-R took over for the purpose of handing out stuff.

Of course, these cheap USB sticks are not the most reliable by far, but neither were diskettes, at least for the cheap ones, they were absolutely terrible in that regard.

> Yes there is email

It may very well not be. Email is iffy for people that share the same domain, and completely useless for sharing stuff with random people.

That one democratic tool is already completely tamed out, and presents no risk for our corporate overloads anymore.

YOu can't make that comment without justification!

Email for sharing documents just works for me and the vast majority of the business and IT world. Frankly, I don't agree with you.

MicroSD cards would fit that definition today: cheap, lightweight, writeable and somewhat reliable.

Not that cheap, almost no computer has an exposed port for it, and way too lightweight for that use.

But yes, it's the closest we have.

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