[liberationtech] Chromebooks for Risky Situations?

[Nathan of Guardian]

On 02/06/2013 10:29 AM, Nadim Kobeissi wrote:
> I'm frankly not sure about this idea, it may certainly be a bad one, but
> I've been using a Chromebook for almost a week now, and I've had some
> observations regarding this device. I'd like to discuss whether it's a
> good idea to hypothetically have Chromebooks used by activists,
> journalists, human rights workers and so on, as opposed to laptops with
> either Windows or Mac OS X running on top.

For NGOs that have already standardized on Google Apps/Domains for their
primary groupware backend, I think Chromebooks make a huge amount of
sense. This is especially true for many of the groups I work with, who
are under constant attack from some pretty serious malware attacks,
using the Windows/Mac-focused spearfishing approach. Chromebooks would
negate most (all?) of these kind of attacks.

The one downside is that they are still hard to get abroad, and even
then it isn't the 3G version, so you need to have plentiful wifi. Also
battery life is not that great (4 hours typically), so I am more
inclined to perhaps push orgs looking to replace traditional laptops
towards using Nexus 7 or 10s.

+n