Phison

Phison Electronics Corporation is a Taiwanese public electronics company that primarily manufactures controllers for NAND flash memory chips. These are integrated into flash-based products such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs). Some Sony MicroVault USB sticks and Verbatim Store n Go USB sticks use Phison USB-to-Flash micro-controller ICs.

Phison claims to have produced the earliest "USB flash removable disk," dubbed "Pen Drive," in May 2001. Phison is a member of the Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group, which aims to standardize the hardware interface to NAND flash chips.

In early October 2014, security researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson publicly released source code to a firmware attack against Phison USB controller ICs. This code implements the BadUSB exploit described in July 2014 at the Black Hat Briefings conference.

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Pishon

The Pishon or Pison (Hebrew: פִּישׁוֹן‎ Pîšōn) is one of four rivers (along with Hiddekel (Tigris), Phrath (Euphrates) and Gihon) mentioned in the Biblical Book of Genesis. In that passage, these rivers are described as arising within the Garden of Eden. The Pishon is described as encircling "the entire land of Havilah."

Identification

Unlike the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Pishon has never been clearly located. It is briefly mentioned together with the Tigris in the Wisdom of Sirach (24:25), but this reference throws no more light on the location of the river. The Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, in the beginning of his Antiquities of the Jews (1st century AD) identified the Pishon with the Ganges. The medieval French rabbi Rashi identified it with the Nile.

Some early modern scholars, including A.D. Calumet (1672–1757), Rosenmüller (1768–1835), and Kell (1807–1888), believed the source river [for Eden] was a region of springs: "The Pishon and Gihon were mountain streams. The former may have been the Phasis or Araxes, and the latter the Oxus." James A. Sauer, former curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum, made an argument from geology and history that Pishon referred to what is now the Wadi Bisha, a dry channel which begins in the Hijaz Mountains near Medina to run northeast to Kuwait. With the aid of satellite photos, Farouk El-Baz of Boston University traced the dry channel from Kuwait up the Wadi Al-Batin and the Wadi Al-Rummah system originating near Medina.