Hi, I know there is a dedicated mailinglist for TAILS, but I figured I would reach a larger audience here, and it might be of interest to many who are not subscribed to the TAILS list. Ideally, you use TAILS from a read-only medium. CD is best, but many devices these days don't have an optical drive, and handling CDs is not as convenient as a USB stick. For quite some time, people kept recommending the TrekStor CS USB stick [ https://geizhals.de/trekstor-cs-8gb-50324-a240853.html ], one of the few sticks available in Germany with write-protection switch. Turns out they use a new firmware, and now don't support booting from it in read-only mode. The company confirmed this via email. There are roughly no alternatives, and I figured I'm not the only one looking for USB sticks with write protection switch. Via alibaba.com, a "wholesale Chinese ebay", I contacted various Chinese suppliers, and ended up ordering two samples. Even there, the selection of sticks with write protection is very limited. I ended up paying paying 60€ for the 2 samples because of shipping and Western Union fees. The sticks are not very fast, but acceptable, and boot in read-only mode. They are not as slim as I hoped for, but the supplier is friendly, production and shipping was very fast. (less than 2 weeks altogether). Logo printing is cheap ($0.15 per stick), so to try the quality I also had them print a logo on the samples. I am still undecided whether I want the final sticks to have a logo, or simply be blank to not attract too much attention. If you have a nice idea for a logo, let me know. I want to order 100 sticks in time for Chaos Communication Congress 30C3. The production cost is $4 per stick (8GB), the final price (taxes, GEMA, shipping) will likely be around $15. Pictures: http://share.pho.to/48Egt # dmesg [55679.884123] usb 2-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd [55680.051089] usb 2-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=058f, idProduct=6387 [55680.051092] usb 2-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [55680.051094] usb 2-1.2: Product: Mass Storage [55680.051095] usb 2-1.2: Manufacturer: Generic [55680.051096] usb 2-1.2: SerialNumber: B6BA8F3F [55680.051459] scsi9 : usb-storage 2-1.2:1.0 [55681.051827] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic Flash Disk 8.07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [55681.053860] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0 [55681.055544] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] 15937536 512-byte logical blocks: (8.16 GB/7.59 GiB) [55681.056665] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [55681.056676] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 [55681.057742] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [55681.176618] sdb: sdb1 [55681.179808] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk # hdparm -t /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 54 MB in 3.07 seconds = 17.60 MB/sec # dd if=tails-i386-0.21.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M 891+1 records in 891+1 records out 934471680 bytes (934 MB) copied, 170.058 s, 5.5 MB/s -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk