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Jumping From Computer To Computer
Roland Piquepaille writes "Imagine a world where computers become so ubiquitous that the idea of carrying a laptop will almost be laughable, a world where any computer could be your computer! According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this is the goal of Intel Research Pittsburgh's Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) project, a project that may one day let your work jump from computer to computer without interruption by using the Internet, distributed file systems, and virtual machines. When the non-proprietary technology becomes available, a user will suspend a task on the computer he's working on, and resume this work using another computer in another part of a city or several thousands of miles away. The second system will look identical to the first one, with the same files and applications opened. This technology would also ease OS upgrades or eliminate the pain coming from a hard disk failure. The project has even a feature named Rollback which would permit to go back in time, eliminating these pesky viruses. A pilot test will start this fall, so don't expect to be able to use ISR for a while. You'll find more details and references in this overview."
With SSH, "screen", VNC, and X-forwarding, whenever I approach a linux box, I feel right at home, knowing I can connect to my apps, files, and data with little trouble.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Sun's has had this working for years on Sun Ray thin clients. Your working session is frozen when you remove a smart card, and is resumed on another appliance when you put the smart card back in. It works all over the country, so a session can be resumed anywhere.
Beautiful idea, but I want to carry his memory/state with me on a little and duplicable box or card.
What's in a sig?
this seems like a sneaky and highly effective way to deploy global DRM, to me. Especially the bit about 'not troubling with OS upgrades'.
Maybe because you don't want to carry around the 15 inch lcd and keyboard required to do actual work? I dunno, I think this could be cool, though the security problems seem basically unsolvable--typing on someone else's keyboard is never trustworthy, and how could we prevent a kiosk from being able to observe what your mobile virtual machine is doing?
Why keep each data in your separate devices? It's far more interesting if everything you have digitally is accessible from anywhere, like an IMAP connection is for email.
The trouble for me is, I like my personal machines. Not just the settings, which are relatively painless to transfer (since I don't use Windows when possible), but rather, the hardware: I love my particular old Marble FX trackball and NMB keyboard...
The late Isaac Asimov wrote about a single
computer that had acces points in the style of an ATM machine, all around the world. The bad thing is that the computer, tired of that burden, tried to commit siucide hiring some terrorists for the job.
Do not put all your eggs in the same basket...
The Unix Guys at work (e.g., me and my boss) recently sent out a memo to all corporate employees about logging in from public terminals. Because they are outside of company and/or individual control, it isn't possible to know what sort of software is running on them. Concordantly, it's quite possible that any given public terminal has a keylogger, packet-dumper, and any other type of spyware you would care to name.
Note that this memo wasn't just idle paranoia; we sent it out after having some IP address in Korea attempt to log in to our corporate webmail server, after one of our salesdroids checked her mail from a public terminal in the lobby of a business hotel. He had her username, password, and who knows what else in the way of corporate data, all from her using a public PC.
Me? I'll stick with bringing my laptop around, even if it looks funny, just like I stick to using GPG and public-key encryption on my emails.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
... comes around.
... thank you Microsoft, for de-composing computer tech ...
We've had this ability since the birth of computers, we just keep coming up with 'whiz-bang' junk that prevents us from maintaining it, as a feature, across consequent generations of computer technology.
seems like the further we get from the 80's, the more we forget about just how productive things truly were back then
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Am I expected to trust someones computer?
Very easy to put in a keyboard, mouse, USB key sniffer in.
If I can't trust my own computer running the 'standard' OS, how can I trust someone elses.
People have finally gotten to understand they must keep their bank PIN number secret, they should be able to understand putting it into random computers is also a bad idea.
Running VNC or X remotely? Why is this so revolutionary?
Do real work in VNC/X/Remote Desktop over a 128 kbs DSL and you know the answer to that.
This will run stuff on the local machine, and limit lags to filetransfers. I can live with a lag of a second or two when I save a file - NEVER a lag of 100-200 ms or even more everytime I hit a key or click my mouse - and this is the reality of X/VNC over anything but very fast connections.
A pendrive/ipod (in size, harddrive space) bluetooth enabled device that carried core applications and your home folder? Wether in be a unix-style home folder layour, or an xml/generic folder layout that has an abstraction to windows/unix/linux(various conflicting layouts in unixes). and OFCOURSE, the drive, preferably solid-state, would be encrypted with a public key...
I walk up to an unused machine, sit down, the login script/screen detects my bluetooth device, notices that is a user account storage device, and prompts for a username/password that is checked against the device via encrypted bluetooth... If successful, links, shortcuts, small apps(putty), documents, contacts, email, etc.. are all 'loaded' onto the local machine, as if i were at my home computer...
Even better if these were on a linux/x11 setup so we could do some automatic screen attach/detach scripts on all processes/programs running!
This is *exactly* right. Having terminals everywhere isn't the point, but having computers everywhere *is*. We're not far away from a situation where (initially only in localised areas) a computing substrate is ubiquitously available to all at all physical locations: the infrastructure might as well be wired/wireless Internet. The middleware is the key because processes are no longer tied to a particular computer. Processes and the underlying hardware can be supplied by separate vendors, and the process can migrate itself to another platform transparently - at a cost.
:)
And there's the interesting bit. How do we automate the interaction and composition of processes in a market environment? How do we allow services to submit bids to some consumer, and have it choose the best bid; thousands of times a second? How do we arbitrate and regulate such an environment?
Welcome to my PhD
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
And it's called the iPod.
... without disrupting the current Mac configuration whatsoever except for the needed reboot. Emulation layer suggested _is_ being worked on... :)
It's tiny standardized robust plugable hard-disk (Firewire based) and 5G is all that I need to "keep running". That's enough space to have the core OS [X] and my Applications directory tree (which is absolutely loaded with only ~3G used).
I'm able to listen to my music anywhere -- and boot "my computer" on any Mac I encounter
I don't see what the big deal is here.
The big deal is making it easy for Joe User to do it every day without thinking. I should remind you that Joe User is no scripting wizard.
Intel's Digital Briefcase will be realized with the introduction of the following technologies:
1) High-density, low-power, nonvolatile memory
2) Integrated logic & wireless
At this point, the Personal Server becomes feasible. A specification for "personal server compliant" operating systems helps any compliant PC in the world "log on to you", as they say in Soviet Russia. All of your preferences down to the last minute detail (wallpaper, favorites, browsing history, etc) will immediately be transferred to this particular PC and it will be as if it were your own.
This is close. Since Microsoft will try to "embrace and extend" this to the point that we can't use these devices without Windows, the open-source community will need to rapidly develop this into an open, robust standard that will work with all PCs. I give it two years... Power consumption will be the biggest issue. Otherwise, you could stick a WiFi link on an iPod and do it now (though I suppose it could be done with a cable that also supplies power).
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Now let me explain.
I want to carry a small device(possibly like an iPod, I can listen to my music on it, but it is primarily a portable HD)
I walk up to ANY computer and insert the device. I press a button. The computer loads MY OS setup, and shows my files and settings.
I use the computer as I need to, press a button, and it ejects my device.
To make this work, it would require a new kind of hardware setups. The Hardware would have to have a basic OS setup, and an abstraction layer for hardware. for network settings, various video cards etc. It would then at the press of the button, setup an interface layer with the OS on the device, and boot that OS. It would give full hardware access to all local hardware(cd-roms, usb firewire ports, 3D cards etc.
Apple are you listening? Your the only one who could pull it off.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You are thinking about it in the wrong way. In The Future(tm) everyone will use one big shared HD, and its name will be Google.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I use a mix of macs and a few different kinds of PCs, so to share files betwixt them, I already carry both my filesystem and my OS with me. I have a 128 Megabyte USB flash drive and two knoppix discs (one for Apple Boxxen, the other for IBM and similar). This allows me to open my files and settings on almost any computer I come across, even library card catalog kiosks with IDE CD drives. The whole package is less than 100 grammes. If I had a 1 or 2 gigabyte bootable USB flash drive, I could even eliminate the discs. _ Of course, this system requires me to restart the computer to set the boot options, but it nonetheless helps me share files between mac and PC. I suppose that with the system suggested above, I could boot off of the 'Net, making the total load zero. It's an interesting idea. Meanwhile, I use my knoppix discs for cross-platform sharing.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
wouldnt it be more useful if you could goto someone elses PC and use packages you don't have from anywhere. obviously i mean with consent sort of a public library of CPU time and software.
need word for a couple of hours just login at xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx there are a lot of possibilitys for this kind computing. ok privacy might be an issue but there are a lot of times when you just dont care and 5 minutes of connection with a fast computer or an advanced program could save you days if not weeks struggling with your home system.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Yes, but assume (if the powers that be at the Internet providers decide to allow it...) conectivity imporves and bandwidth is not an issue? We are getting closer and closer to that every day. Some public utilities have started to bring fibre to the door of every house in their district. Some day soon this will be common. At that point your argument will nolonger be valid.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I actually had the idea while working with special USB encryption devices.
Would it be an interesting and novel concept to have a key that allows you to plug it into a pub terminal (with appropriate package) that allows you to have your user profile and preferences on it?
IE you could buy USB device/key, set up your desktop environment on it, and then be able to carry it around with you from terminal to terminal. Perhaps keeping the general windows user structure on the key (IE my documents/mypictures folders).
This way you could keep files and such, and if the password you entered in the login screen was also the password which opened the key, you could keep it secure as well.
When you downloaded you could only download to your KEY or a temp folder on the hard drive which would be immediately deleted after you logged off.
If the keys had sufficient on-board memory, say 256 megs, you could get a goodly amount of documents/cookies/cached images on it etc...
People could also buy bigger keys just for this purpose.
I think it would be a great idea.
I also have a few other ideas with portable keys, but this one seems kind of obvious to me.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I mean, even with the SunRay, it's like, whoo-hoo, we combined VNC and H.263 and you should jump for friggin' joy.
You can already do it with rdesktop and windows, vnc and any vnc-enabled graphical environment, even X11 if you have the right kind of proxy extension enabled. I'm just waiting for someone to polish up a client for the SunRay protocol (it's mostly understood, but no one seems to care enough for someone to finish a client...)
I don't think anyone really wants this.
I think a visual protocol is too specific. The work needs to be in creating a widget/RPC API that lets you splat a standardized local GUI onto remote application servers. XML-RPC might be a part of it, or maybe just a component. Something that lets you pick your "skin" and standardizes on a backend with an interface description language... like XUL or Glade or something, but remote.
Then it'd be real easy to have a consistent view of the state of the app from anywhere.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
A universal, single connector including video, keyboard, mouse and network.
An iPod-size device that has one such connector. The device has a processor and a disk, which contains your favourite OS.
And you just plug your device at any connector that you find.
There's a fairly simple way to make any keylogger useless - one time passwords. I've for some time now had the idea of an extension to VNC that works like this:
- You connect to your PC and press the 'Request password' button.
- A one-time password is sent to your preconfigured cell phone number.
- You log on with this password, and after you're done working you log out, and the password becomes invalid.
This way, it doesn't matter how insecure the computer you're on is. Worst case, the keylogger only gets a useless password.
No, actually, worst case, a simple keylogger gets credit card numbers, correspondance between a person and their SO/lawyer/accountant, serves to break a pseudo-anonimity shield, etc. etc.
And note the "or worse" in my post. As someone else mentioned, once you're on, the session can be hijacked. Files can be accessed and copied. Anything can happen. Using untrusted hardware for anything sensitive is a terrible mistake, there are no precautions you can take to make it secure.
- You connect to your PC and press the 'Request password' button.
- A one-time password is sent to your preconfigured cell phone number.
- You log on with this password, and after you're done working you log out, and the password becomes invalid.
This way, it doesn't matter how insecure the computer you're on is. Worst case, the keylogger only gets a useless password.
Except that once you're logged on, the keylogger will still capture everything you do; account numbers, notes to your mistress, etc., which is what you were trying to protect in the first place. And what happens if your cell phone is stolen? The thief has himself a perfectly good one-time password to use at any of these public terminals.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Project Athena at MIT already did all of this, back in 1983. Digital Equipment Co Ltd (DEC) even took the technology, productized it and told it onto some Universities in the UK. And all with (at the time) state of the art MIPS Unix workstations.
Here's a link with some info about the MIT implementation:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N19/history_of_ath
It was really cool technology and way ahead of its time. The only reason it didn't take over the world was because of the prohibitive price of RISC workstations back then. Way too expensive for a corporate desktop. Shame really.
Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly!