I found a USB stick on a train, probably about 10 years ago. This very one, in fact.
I considered briefly plugging it into my laptop, which I was working on at the time, but the smarter part of my brain prevailed. I grabbed my spare netbook from my backpack, booted up from a Linux live USB I used for diagnostics at work, and plugged it in to poke around. Turns out it had some poor student’s homework on board. I switched back to my laptop, tethered to my good old Tmobile MDA (early Windows Mobile smartphone) and with about 5 minutes of painfully slow searching, I’d found an email address that matched the student name and school listed in the papers on the stick. I shot them an email letting them know that I’d found their USB stick. An email or two later to confirm I had the right person, and I got home and fired over the contents of the stick’s memory to the student. The student in question didn’t want to meet with me to retrieve her USB stick - an understandable position to hold when dealing with strangers in the big city, so I wiped the disk and added it to my collection.
At the time, that 4gb stick was the biggest one I had in my collection, so I enjoyed my good fortune. I’d definitely be far more paranoid in today’s age of USB thumbdrive shaped nasties, but as long as I can pull the drive apart first to check the internals, and then use an airgapped low-priority computer like my old netbook for checking it out, I’d gladly try to reunite the drive/data with its owner even today.
Read other answers by James Stewart on Quora:
- What do you think of this setup?
- What is your favorite mechanical keyboard, and why?
- Do you know how to drive a stick shift (a manual transmission automobile)?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2iAYseT
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