Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
National Audio Co. is the only company in the U.S. that produces cassette tape. Now, as cassette tapes enjoy a resurgence in popularity, National Audio has less than a year's supply left of the stuff, The Wall Street Journal reports.
For the last 15 years, National Audio's co-owner and president Steve Stepp has been clinging to his company's dwindling supply of music-quality magnetic tape. In 2014, National Audio's South Korean supplier stopped making the material, so Stepp bought out their remaining stock before they shuttered — and has been left with a shrinking stockpile ever since.
Although the demand for tape has increased in recent years, the quality and supply has not; National Audio has long relied on outdated gear that Stepp jokes is "the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer." That's why the company — which makes cassettes for everyone from indie bands to Metallica — is planning to build the U.S.'s first high-grade tape manufacturing line in decades.
Crap! Where am I going to store my TRS-80 programs now?
Source: https://theweek.com/speedreads/735269/america-running-cassette-tape
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @09:57AM
So the device registers as USB hub with a storage and a keyboard attached. You're not surprised about the storage; that's what you expected anyway. The "keyboard" starts a script located on the storage device. The script installs some malware on your account. The next time you use your password (for example, to unlock your screen), the malware catches it. Since today's Linux systems are typically set up with sudo instead of root password (how that is supposed to be more secure on single user systems still evades me), and usually the user has just one account used for both admin stuff (thus having sudo enabled) and general stuff (thus it will be the account that is open when inserting the stick). Thus once the user-local malware has the user password, on the majority of current personal Linux installations it owns root.