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The big thing about this release is not that they include LXC, that is been around for years, but that they included Docker, that simplifies and goes beyond what LXC does.

Actually, lots of people use containers:

https://www.docker.io/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-x9wC94E38

Facebook, Google and many smaller players understood this years ago.

(not talking about the ridiculously oversubscribed VPS you can get for $3 a month)

This year had been a lot of noise regarding linux containers, and this book seem be not aware of them or how they could change the landscape. Docker gained a lot of steam, and a lot of cloud service providers are adopting it (part of the magic is not just being based on LXC containers, but also combining it with aufs to make some sort of inheritance between containers). Also there are some newcomers like lmctfy, the recently released open source version of the google containers technology, or warden from cloudfoundry that could be another approach

Some of those things can come after it got released. You probably want to build a community around it, and that community could do some of that work, or have better ideas and feedback on how to do them. Be sure that don't contain anything that is not meant to be public, release and announce it. You could build some momentum before releasing it, gathering people very interested on it as betatesters or to give feedback before going fully public. I.e. Docker had some showing in presentations giving a hint of what it did, and how, and some weeks later released the base code, and documentation, tutorials, extra tools, and community contributions piled up with time. Delaying till everything is ready and perfect risk not releasing it at all.

You should had to be running Firefox 17 on windows afaik (that was the version included by the Tor Bundle). Anyway, running a browser in a disposable linux container should be more or less safe between sessions.

This year they will need your support more than ever. There are several new developments (like Docker) that could change everything they are used to. And they got the nightmare of having a very probable and hardly detectable NSA (and company) intrusion or backdoor in their systems.

Running Firefox in a linux container, like Docker that saves no history could stop some of the tracking stored in your computer. Some extra addons (tor, https everywhere, etc) could improve a bit things.

> since you clearly cannot give them root access.

and yet that's what it seems to be doing here. I heard a lot of folks say that LXC was DOA, because it didn't offer any protection against the classic "escalate chrooted root user to full system access," and I am not an expert but I'd say that has changed, you _can_ give your customers root without giving them root on the host system. Check out http://docker.io/ </shameless>

(I heard there were alternatives to docker too, but I haven't found any other than RTFM and Edit The Damn Configs And Cross Your Fingers. Docker has just entered version 0.3 release and development is moving quickly.)

Sometimes with just LXC (or Docker for a friendlier interface) you have more than enough.