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Chrome OS is not a full OS. It is a "lightweight OS designed primarily for web-based computing within a browser window."

Is the Chromebook Really Just a "Google Spyware Machine"?

Depends how you define "very popular" I guess. The most popular way to bypass state-level censorship in the Arab world and elsewhere is a product called HotSpot Shield. When Turkey blocked Twitter some time ago, HSS experienced 1000% growth and reached 1.1 million installs in the iOS App Store alone within only four days, with 800,000 regular users.

In contrast Tor went from 30,000 to 40,000 "direct connects" from Turkey.

HSS doesn't get much press in the geek world as it's just a plain old VPN run by a company in California that inserts ads into people's web pages to pay for the bandwidth costs. But usage wise it utterly dominates Tor.

Some friends in Cairo would like to bypass some of the online censorship measures. I've quickly suggested some things (below) to consider overnight. What have I missed?

Anonymous connection:
No:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/help-eff-research-web-browser-tracking

But:
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/

Also:
http://www.hotspotshield.com/

And services like:
http://filesharefreak.com/2008/10/18/total-anonymity-a-list-of-vpn-service-providers/
but verify on the ground.

Only if they understand the tradeoffs:
http://www.privoxy.org/
https://techstdout.boum.org/TorDns/

Avoid random lists of anonymous proxies or DNS servers.

To secure the computer:
Use a popular boot disk that leaves nothing behind, e.g.:
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

Remove metadata:
http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=144E54ED-D43E-42CA-BC7B-5446D34E5360&displaylang=en
and similar for other files they may deal with.

Delete/wipe files securely.

Many uses:
http://mailinator.com/
http://www.hushmail.com/

Consider:
http://www.disconnectere.com/
and its analogues

I was in China for a summer and was able to access anything, uncensored through this free vpn service. http://hotspotshield.com/

http://www.hotspotshield.com/ . I use them all the time when I am traveling. They have a nice free client on their site and if you do not want to install their client you can just configure a vpn link manually.

http://hotspotshield.com/

There are numerous free programs out there that allow you to encrypt your online activities by using VPN. I've been using Hotspot Shield and Tor. Give those a try, hopefully they are not blocked by your college's IT infrastructure. Also, use OpenDNS - this will bypass simple DNS filtering and protect you against worms such as Conficker.

Hotspot Shield is free with ads.

That would require getting up.

If I really cared there are ways around limitations on downloading by country, specifically IP identification.