20th
A Possible Future for ChromeOS in the Cloud
The recent Wikileaks fiasco (among other developments) has me thinking about political control of the internet. How do you route around national firewalls and knee-jerk corruption of the DNS? Or institutional firewalls? Or even just untrusted networks, like the compromised wi-fi at the local coffee shop?
One obvious solution is to use a VPN with an endpoint in a country which not only loves freedom, but protects the specific Freedoms that ensure a free, open, and neutral internet. But as my friend Ian pointed out, surfing the web over a VPN is full of suck. And it’s not necessary for all things, just the subset of things that might be restricted at your physical location.
What you really want is a remote session that you can use for freedom-sensitive web browsing, while you carry out your normal business over the local web. That’s where ChromeOS could be incredibly helpful: a free, open source, lightweight, sandboxed, web-only “desktop” would be the perfect thing to VNC into for this sort of browsing.
national firewall
My Desktop ———-||———-> ChromeOS ———-> the internets
Yes, you could do the same thing with any unixy OS, but with a much greater management overhead and complexity. When all you really need on the remote side is a trusty web browser, why not go with something that is purpose-built? A remote browsing appliance, in other words.
The death of ChromeOS as a product for netbooks has been suggested. I hope that the developers might see remote computing (cloud workstation? cloudbook?) as a viable niche for their project instead. We don’t need Android in the cloud. But we do need a reliable browser with a keyboard/mouse paradigm that we can connect to for unrestricted browsing.
Tweak it slightly so that it includes a VNC server and the ability to enable remote login from the command line (or boot switches passed by the virtual host). Or re-architect it so that it runs as a userland service. The end result would be a very useful “OS” for anyone who needs to be able to use the web from elsewhere in the cloud.
