What is the difference.

I have several USB Pen drives ranging from 32G to 128G.

Some do the scanning thing and give me a choice of what to do: Open
Folder, etc. and appear in Windows Explorer.

What is the difference and why do some do that and others do nothing
except appear in Windows Explorer ?

PosErr wrote:
I have several USB Pen drives ranging from 32G to 128G.

Some do the scanning thing and give me a choice of what to do: Open
Folder, etc. and appear in Windows Explorer.

What is the difference and why do some do that and others do nothing
except appear in Windows Explorer ?

Windows 10 seems to have a lot of customizations for it ("Autoplay").

https://www.howtogeek.com/236241/how...in-windows-10/

The other OSes should at least offer to turn if off completely.
Maybe if you could find a reference on what registry
settings the Windows 10 interface uses, similar registry
keys might be used for Windows 7 ?

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...e-disable.html

I don't consider the function to be particularly useful,
if and when the interface controlling it and the rules
for running it, are like the interface panel on a 747.
If I had the time to waste on it, I'd just turn it off
entirely. I can usually figure out what to do with a
device, when I decide to plug it in. I don't need a variable-length
menu that's going to take five minutes to read and parse.

"You can boil this egg"
"You can scramble this egg"
"You can fry this egg"
"You can fry this egg with two strips of bacon"

That's what I see when the damn AutoPlay pops up.
Then I get hungry and head to the kitchen.

And it's hard to say what interactions exist with AutoPlay
and AutoRun and some of the things that trigger it. There's
certainly enough confusion between the two. Would one of
these parameters affect whether the menu appears ? Reverse-engineering
what Win10 is doing might help to uncover how it works.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mic...-for-a-device/

Could Microsoft explain it ? Only if they purchased HowToGeek.

Paul

On 10/31/2017 06:07 AM, Paul wrote:
PosErr wrote:
I have several USB Pen drives ranging from 32G to 128G.

Some do the scanning thing and give me a choice of what to do: Open
Folder, etc.Â* and appear in Windows Explorer.

What is the difference and why do some do that and others do nothing
except appear in Windows Explorer ?

Windows 10 seems to have a lot of customizations for it ("Autoplay").

https://www.howtogeek.com/236241/how...in-windows-10/


The other OSes should at least offer to turn if off completely.
Maybe if you could find a reference on what registry
settings the Windows 10 interface uses, similar registry
keys might be used for Windows 7 ?

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...e-disable.html

I don't consider the function to be particularly useful,
if and when the interface controlling it and the rules
for running it, are like the interface panel on a 747.
If I had the time to waste on it, I'd just turn it off
entirely. I can usually figure out what to do with a
device, when I decide to plug it in. I don't need a variable-length
menu that's going to take five minutes to read and parse.

Â*Â* "You can boil this egg"
Â*Â* "You can scramble this egg"
Â*Â* "You can fry this egg"
Â*Â* "You can fry this egg with two strips of bacon"

That's what I see when the damn AutoPlay pops up.
Then I get hungry and head to the kitchen.

And it's hard to say what interactions exist with AutoPlay
and AutoRun and some of the things that trigger it. There's
certainly enough confusion between the two. Would one of
these parameters affect whether the menu appears ? Reverse-engineering
what Win10 is doing might help to uncover how it works.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mic...-for-a-device/


Could Microsoft explain it ? Only if they purchased HowToGeek.

Â*Â* Paul

And to compound the story on USBs. I run Linux and have several also,
one being a Seagate 2TB drive. With it, I have a choice of safely
remove and eject. If I safely remove, it remounts. I then have to
eject it. This is the only drive I have to do this to.

I once thought it was the fact that it was a bootable device, but I now
have other bootables, both Windows and Linux and none do that. So it
seems that both OSes have their oddities.

On Tue, 31 Oct 2017 06:07:43 -0400, Paul wrote:

Windows 10 seems to have a lot of customizations for it ("Autoplay").

But he's posting this in a Windows 7 newsgroup...

--
s|b

s|b wrote:
On Tue, 31 Oct 2017 06:07:43 -0400, Paul wrote:

Windows 10 seems to have a lot of customizations for it ("Autoplay").

But he's posting this in a Windows 7 newsgroup...


That comment was intended to show the *potential* for
the OS to have volume-dependent behavior. The *potential*
for something or someone to modify how a stick behaves.

So rather than positing that the only known mechanism
was the RMB bit (which it isn't), the registry is
potentially full of crap on the subject.

It's your job now, to reverse engineer Windows 7 and
see if the same entries exist.

I'm not going to spend time on it, because it's
my strong opinion that both Autorun and AutoPlay
should be *completely* turned off. As perhaps a
means of protection against BadUSB. The fact that it
has more knobs than a 747 control panel doesn't interest me.

Even the Microsoft patch for Autorun doesn't go far enough.
A private person came up with a registry-based method
(kinda like a Software Restriction Policy, although
I don't remember the exact mechanism). If autorun.inf is
encountered, it is set to "not executable" to prevent the
OS from even considering it. I thought that was an
excellent mitigation, and much preferred to Microsofts
"we'll just leave optical media or BadUSB things that
fake optical media, enabled" approach.

This stuff is just totally unnecessary, from an
exploit point of view. I don't want anything popping
up when a volume mounts, no matter what kind of volume
it is.

When you have a Microsoft Word document on a USB key:

1) You know you just plugged in a USB key.
2) You know you did it because you wanted to open
that Microsoft word document on it.
3) You navigate to the appropriate place and deal with it.

Any other usages of USB or optical media can be handled
in a similar way. User mounts media, user navigates,
user clicks stuff. A nice, consistent model.

When Safe Hex counts, we should be promoting Safe Hex.

Not "Safe Hex sometimes, and not other times".

And in that respect, you're likely to find the instructions for
disabling these functions completely on Win7 and Win10
to be quite similar.

Paul