That could have interesting implications for the Chrome Notebook (I haven't really used one, but based on what I've heard).
The potential appeal of the Chrome notebook is its security-by-simplicity. If the only thing you can do is use Chromium, then your notebook is basically as secure as Chromium itself is (in theory, at least).
The irony is that we're essentially moving back to the way computers were a few decades ago - people used terminals to access a central computer. We moved to personal desktop computers for a while, then laptops (and mobile phones). It'll be interesting to see if the rise of interest in 'cloud computing' means that, in five years, our primary computers will just be portable terminals to access some main computer remotely.
Personally, I might be fine with that. Network speeds/reliability aside, everything I do could be accomplished easily over SSH, with X forwarding for a few applications. It's possible that these simple tools that we've had for decades could be packaged in a way that appeals to a more general use case.
I hope we go the way of the dumb terminal from an ease-of-use standpoint; I want my data to just "be", and not have to worry about syncing/backups/etc.
From the freedom/privacy standpoint, however, I'm not sure. I find it surprisingly easy to imagine a US government agency empowered by anti-terror laws to get access to my data.
This is why I want encrypted cloud computing for all my stuff. I dunno if the large players could actually do that and have the US govt be ok with it.
From the privacy standpoint am still uncomfortable at the idea of having my data on the cloud even if it's encrypted and would prefer to keep it local. Ofcourse, my rational side points out that i don't have any data that is worth my cloud provider to run brute-force attacks and decrypt....
But then there's also the fact that i have access to a decent set of hdd's and can store it locally rather with ease.with the cost being the attention and time of running smartctl once in a while to check the health of the hdd's and getting a backup...
The encryption key must reside only on trusted (client side) devices to allow your data to be hosted by a third party without them actually seeing your data.
There's an interesting area of research called Homomorphic encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption). In this schema, certain properties of the data are maintained even after encryption. In the general case you would be able to stored encrypted data in the cloud and perform operations on it without needing to decrypt the data.
Client side encryption doesn't seem to fit with the ChromeOS concept. All your information is in your Google account, all your documents on Google Docs and none of it is encrypted as far as I know (Open to Correction). An engineer at Google could theoretically look at all your bookmarks, documents, browsing history etc. Add aggressive US "anti-terror" laws into the mix and it looks like ChromeOS is not a good choice for those looking for real privacy.
If the government wants to read your documents, it's just as easy for them to get a warrant to search your house as it is for them to get a warrant to compel Google to give them your docs.
Except, as we've seen with wiretapping and so many other data breaches, if it's 'just there' and can easily be indexed and searched with the click of a mouse, then it will be. Searching someones house requires proper channels to be followed. Looking at files on a PC is so much easier, can be done without the person knowing and is, imho, too great a temptation to resist. The emergence of laws in the US to make such access as easy and automated as possible proves this.
I'm not actually sure that's true. It's not a full-fledged ssh client; it may well be a shell builtin. (It can't be the standard openssh client, because that lets you escape to a real shell.)
Back in the early days of ChromeOS, there was a much less restricted security model than I presume exists today based on what I'm reading. I haven't use it in a while, though, so I do not know how it works these days.
Basically when I installed it, it had to be compiled by you and installed on an SD card. You could easily change a setting on the system and drop to a shell. It was running on a stripped-down Ubuntu installation, so you could actually install Firefox inside of ChromeOS. It was nice having the base, fast-boot installation combined with the ability to basically run a full system if you needed to.
The potential appeal of the Chrome notebook is its security-by-simplicity. If the only thing you can do is use Chromium, then your notebook is basically as secure as Chromium itself is (in theory, at least).
The irony is that we're essentially moving back to the way computers were a few decades ago - people used terminals to access a central computer. We moved to personal desktop computers for a while, then laptops (and mobile phones). It'll be interesting to see if the rise of interest in 'cloud computing' means that, in five years, our primary computers will just be portable terminals to access some main computer remotely.
Personally, I might be fine with that. Network speeds/reliability aside, everything I do could be accomplished easily over SSH, with X forwarding for a few applications. It's possible that these simple tools that we've had for decades could be packaged in a way that appeals to a more general use case.