Never Leave Your USB Drive Behind Again With USB Alert

Everyone knows the horror of looking for it when you need it only to realize that you left it behind plugged into the last computer you used.
With USB Alert, you'll get a warning when you shut down to unplug your USB drive before you go.

USB Alert will play a warning sound and display an on-screen alert every time you issue a shutdown or lock command warning you that you have a USB storage device still connected to the system. From there you can see your connected devices or dismiss the alert – but the warning makes all the difference.

Download USB Alert


How do you make sure you don't leave your drives behind when it's time to leave the office for the day?
Leave your tips in the comments.

How Bin Laden Baffled US Electronic Surveillance

Osama bin Laden didn't have an internet connection or a phone, but for years he was a prolific user of email  by saving messages to a thumb drive and having them sent from a distant internet cafe.


Bin Laden would type the messages on a computer that had no connection to the outside world and then instruct a trusted courier to drive to a cafe so they could be emailed.

The courier would then save messages addressed to bin Laden to the same drive and bring it back so his boss could read them offline.

The process was so tedious that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at the al-Qaida chief's ability to maintain it for so long.

US Navy Seals seized roughly 100 flash memory drives when they killed bin Laden at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound.

The cache of messages is so big that the government has enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over them.

Related articles

• Osama bin Laden Used Thumb Drives and Couriers to Send Email (shoppingblog.com)
• "Bin Laden's Sneakernet Email System (slashdot)" and related posts (freshnews.org)
• How did Osama bin Laden email without the US discovering? (protip: not Hotmail) (boingboing.net)