According to the OP in Reddit, this is how they sell music in Mexico:
Call me paranoid, but inserting a thumb drive from unknown origin into my computer is not a very smart thing to do. I am not saying that they do just more than piracy and go for hacking, but I rather not take my chances. Way too many pricks out there.
Speaking as a Technical Analyst, this seems perfectly legit. //SARC
I strongly suspect that this would end in several flavors of bad, and for just exactly the reasons you pointed out. The world is full of assholes that would take advantage of this method of transport.
Wait, somebody buy’s music?
Actually, if you have your computer’s settings configured right (mostly just telling it not to do *anything* when a new drive is discovered), it’s perfectly safe to plug a USB drive into your computer… assuming it’s a USB drive and not a capacitor with the leads soldered to the data pins. There are some USB drives which can be configured to pretend they’re CD-ROM drives, whicch will trigger Autorun to look for a “run.exe” file in some versions of Windows, but the last time I saw one was nearly 10 years ago.
Or you could just run Linux, of course.
*reasonably safe.
Honestly, the funniest part is that each of those little cardboard boxes is holding ~$15US in USB memory alone. There’s a reason why optical disks are still a popular distribution format.
You are thinking they bought those retail…or at all.
In that case they could clean house in the USB storage media market and avoid having to worry about any piracy charges.
You know, in case the RIAA ever gets their hands into INTERPOL.
This is how they sell Western-made movies in North Korea (Western-made movies are in VERY high demand there). It’s contraband in N. Korea, but USB drives from S. Korea are small and portable (read: concealable) enough that there’s a booming black market for them.
it’s just for a car use, not for a pc