December 2010 happened to be an exciting one. Besides BSD getting FBI's trojans, Anons DDoSing websites, Millions of bogus advertisements delivered,... We have Google Chrome OS -- the dumb terminal to the cloud basically. We have moved from centralized environments (Timesharing anyone?) to Personal PC + Windoze era and now we're back to the centralized environments with ``thin'' machines. Truman did the same with the VmWare stuff.
And we had our famous man, Richard Stallman criticizing it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome-os-richard-stallman-warning At first I thought he was reasonable (as I don't like web apps), but I eventually came to the thinking that Stallman's is kind of humiliated when it comes to his arguments. Firstly, to whom is he trying his points here? ``Careless'' people, ``suckers''? Having your data backed up everyday or storing on a RAID-5 array is not something a normal user would do. And from what I know, unless the user is like Richard Stallman or Julian Assange, having a hard drive crashed or spilling coffee or having a malware infected by a n-day exploit is over 9000% more likely to happen to his/her laptop than having a search warrant from the government (also, btw, not all governments and not all search warrants are created equal, so saving documents NOT on a computer in your country in many countries is actually an advantage). Secondly, even with people know what to do with their computers, does it make your data trustworthier storing locally? How much can you trust in your local computer? We're not even talking about Intel users who have a super bogus KVM built-in right to the processor here (http://www.realvnc.com/products/viewerplus/index.html); I've heard that Richard Stallman uses a Longsoon (correct me if I'm wrong) laptop that has an open BIOS and runs GNU slash Linux. However, I don't know if he is aware of the fact that the CPU is produced by a Chinese company, and his software might have FBI's trojans: Storing data locally might be as well just as trustworthy as Google. As working with Truck (AKA Trubuntu), I realized that when dumb terminals get done (the right way), they are actually safer than most systems that a normal user can maintain. Getting infected by a nasty malware shredding all your data or sending your documents to someone with GMT+8 is zero-click away from a bogus flashvertisement on CNN.com (unless your surf the web by, you know, _sending emails_ -- http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/). TL;DR: Do you think that storing data locally can make your data ``safer'' in security and/or longevity sense of the word? - Huan. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to fsck-requ...@mtcs.truman.edu with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
