Hacker News Reader

Comment by yakult | Hacker News Reader

I would go a bit further: I want my state to be inside a seamless hardware agnostic VM, that I can access anywhere through public terminals that I only partially trust. I would have the option of either having my storage with me that I plug in, or in the cloud and I just provide 2fa. My device would have a cpu/gpu/etc befitting a mobile device, and the most barebones / untrusted terminals would just be screen/inputs/charger, but in better environments the terminal can optionally provide extra oomph if permitted.

View on HN

Turns out these are kind of available today

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

https://liquidsky.tv/

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

etc.

It's all niche ptoducts with no reach, though. I'd like something mass-consumer-oriented and ubiquous, so I can actually get (roughly) the same experience everywhere from bus stops and coffee shops to my office. The current situation is like pre-ipod mp3 players: the tech is all there, the ux and marketing effort is not.

I think the network bandwidth isn't there yet either. Latency will always be a constant that we'll have to deal with as well.

VMs are great, but clientside rending/editing, etc, will probably always be best, where it's only IO for storange/persistence that goes to the cloud.

You want the Nintendo Switch of computing?

Amazon WorkSpaces is just VNC/Remote Desktop-type tech. You get a desktop computer in the cloud, which you connect to as a thin client. Performance is exactly what you expect -- pretty bad, but probably okay if you're doing simple things like word processing or order management or call center stuff.

What is partial trust and how does it differ from full trust?

Presumably in the case of a public terminal, you would have to trust that your keyboard inputs and screen outputs weren't being recorded. But then you also have to trust that the VM container wasn't being malicious too, which the VM itself wouldn't be able to protect against...

Even if there's a keylogger on the machine, it should not be enough to access your accounts without you present. The trick is the USB key should use a crypto method so that when it's unplugged, the public computer can't access your data anymore.

Could that be done with a Linux pen drive? When I was in college I used to carry around a usb stick with a QEMU image of tiny core linux. With some trickery, that could boot on public, school computers. Back at my house I had a server running and could rsync files back and forth.

It sorta worked as a mobile work station but I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you had in mind. A vnc or gnu screen could help too but neither have 100% perfect usability (especially on slow networks).

There's another project that does the same[0] but using a usb stick isn't a BYO cpu/gpu solution.

[0]https://github.com/miklevin/levinux

I went with VirtualBox and Xubuntu on a USB 3.0 pen.

But I will probably change back to a "bare metal" setup next year. The performance is just so bad.

I'm hoping to one day be able to use my phone as this device.

I love this idea, but I'm not sure that the phone's heat dispersion capabilities (well, the lack thereof) will ever make it feasible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com