When someone asks me for a read-only USB stick, I recommend to use an SD card with a SD-to-USB adapter, because these are easier to find than USB sticks with write-protection. Most SD cards have a write-protection tab.
But last time I got a surprise: when testing a new SD card reader, I was able to write to the write-protected SD card. Turns out that this particular SD card reader doesn’t support the write-protection tab and always allows the OS to write to the SD card.
Didier Stevens 