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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

You aren't gaining or losing much - but they are gaining a huge risk. Just as you above show by being able to easily move files to any USB drive or Google Drive

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Are you saying that your employers prevent you from accessing any potential data-leaking avenues? No usb ports, really? That’s an insane level of paranoia. Do you work for the mob or a drug cartel? How do you even compile and debug?

I've worked in strategically important sector and only USB devices that were allowed were keyboards and mice. The use of Bluetooth keyboard/mouse was discouraged.

My company locks down the USB ports on our macbooks so that only input devices are recognized. Flash drives and the like are not recognized. We’re a small private company in the telco space so definitely not the mob or a cartel.

Why would I need a USB drive to docker build or run a debugger?

Firmware development, IoT, basically anything embedded. Mobile devs that want a responsive debugger. Yubikey authentication. Smart card readers. Remoting into air-gapped machines.

Thats just stuff I do.I’m sure there are many other use cases.

For context, I work for a very large company in Redmond that has a renowned history of antitrust litigation.

Lot of places just lock down USB to read only. Exceptions could be made for specific machines and device IDs.

It's pretty common really - and if the internal disk is fully encrypted reasonably hard to easily exfiltrate a large amount of data.

Of course that doesn't stop taking screenshots with another device but that's a slow process

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