May 8, 2018 - Most of us use external hard drives and USB flash drives from time to time. A USB flash drive, check the connector for signs of damage.
Possibly, but Mac OS X is based on Unix, and without getting into great detail, let's just say that it is significantly more challenging to write a program such as this for a device independent OS as opposed to device dependent OS like Windows. Creating a program that will block any and all devices is one thing, but selectively blocking only those exceeding 4GB is a wholly different topic. I'm just not sure it could ever be effectively done on a device independent OS. The Aqua GUI that most people associate as being Mac OS X, is really just a program running on top of a Unix OS known as Darwin (which is derived from FreeBSD, which ultimately traces its roots back to the original BSD Unix). Darwin doesn't really know or care what is or isn't attached to the computer at any given time, it just serves as a request broker.
![Test Usb Drive For Damage Mac Test Usb Drive For Damage Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125609591/295390362.jpg)
![Usb Usb](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125609591/209695957.jpg)
Some app sends a request to a device that should be at a specific port on the computer, and all the OS does is pass that info along. The device is expected to be able to figure out what to do with it. And if the device sends any info back, the OS just passes it along to the app. The OS pretty much stays out of things. I'm no programmer, so there may be a better way, but the only method I'm coming up with here is to be perpetually polling all USB, FireWire, and Thunderbolt ports and checking not only for the presence of a device, but then also the capacity of the device. This would create a MASSIVE amount of overhead and really degrade performance of any USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt device.
It would also have to run as a root process, or as a user with access to hardware devices, which would make it a huge security risk. Actually, when I think about it a bit more. There MAY, and I do stress MAY, be a way to tinker with the auto-mounter in OS X.
I assume Apple wrote their own, because they were doing auto-mounting of devices long before virtually anyone else in the.nix world. So, if it's a part of the Darwin source repository, you could theoretically hire someone to modify it to suit your needs, as Darwin is open source. But I'm really not familiar with the auto-mounter and whether or not it even has any configuration options. It probably doesn't, but it is at least a potential place to start looking as there's at least a small possibility the functionality you want already exists in the OS if you're willing to dig deep into the Unix layer. But if you already have the names of some programs that do this for Windows, why have you not simply gone to the respective websites and checked to see if they have a Mac OS X version? Or even typed in the name of the program and 'Mac' to Google or whatever search engine you prefer. Who claimed those titles worked was not happy when we let them try them out and then let us try to get around them to get the files out.
Our first method to leak was to ftp the file out. IT blocked all FTP ports. Now we emailed it out. IT claims that doesn't count as they track that.
It's still a leak since the horse has left the barn. We played along and booted the machine from USB and copied it to USB there. They disabled the BIOS. We opened the case and reset the BIOS password and did it again. At every turn there seems to be a way to get the files out. Maybe the idea here is these are Personal Computers and not well suited for lock down?