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Secure, Portable, Virtual Privacy Machine
solcity writes "Looks like an online privacy company, Metropipe, are
planning to release a secure linux virtual privacy machine that runs from a USB stick. The image contains a pre-release of their new 'Metropipe Tunneler' product and also contains Firefox, and Thunderbird with the Enigmail/gpg extension. Looks
like the whole thing is based on damnsmalllinux
and uses qemu to boot on Windows or Linux
without any installation or configuration. Very interesting use of qemu and damnsmalllinux, and all 100% GPL."
No, PGP is a commercial, non-GPL'd product.
They mean GPG, open source software that works in the same way.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
The zip is 82MB. Probably want to run this on a 256MB or larger key so you have room to store data as well...
RTFA: it's run on the qemu emulator. You first boot the host OS, and your qemu session is just a process under that, with no more rights than otherwise.
:-).
If you had a boot CD, now that would a problem. Would I let someone boot my laptop from Knoppix? Not unless I would trust them to sysadmin my laptop
As the above poster says, security accepted wisdom is that physical control implies vulnerability.
sigs, as if you care.
The ./ story, as well as the link (Portable Virtual Privacy Machine), say that it's 100% GPL, but at least the Mozilla parts (Firefox and Thunderbird) are under the Netscape Public License.
Huh? NPL is Gone. Dead. Buried. Mozilla has been (mostly, and the exceptions should be BSD etc. GPL-compatible) LGPL/GPL/MPL tri-licensed for quite a while now, the new licensing policy is over three years old.
Well, they've provided a torrent too, which seems quite well seeded for the moment. So, should not be a problem!
The limitation on the number of writes to a particular area of memory has been known since flash memory first started to appear. Most devices or drivers should account for the issue by either rotating writes to avoid overusing one particular region or by remapping failing sections into other areas. Remapping failing areas will cause the available capacity of formatted flash devices to gradually shrink, while rotating writes will attempt to keep any areas from wearing out too fast (making it more likely that multiple areas will start to fail around the same time). Someone who's done more looking into this should be able to give a good idea which technique(s) are most widely used.
fencepost
just a little off
I just tried this on two reasonably modern machines, and it's slow as hell. Unusably slow. QEMU claims to be a 'FAST!' emulator. It is not.
Why not use Cygwin instead? Almost all of the apps in this distro has have been ported to cygwin, and I doubt there'd be much trouble porting Firefox if someone got serious about it.
A cygwin based distro could pack a minimal installation (including X) on a USB keyfob that would provide all of the same functionality, but running the apps as native code, at near native speed (minus the small cygwin/POSIX to win32 api translation penalty).
Now of course this solution won't work on a Linux machine, but I think it would be rare that you'd encounter a Linux machine that you'd want to run this on. Most likely you'd be at a friend's house, or in a computer lab where everything runs windows.