[liberationtech] Chromebooks for Risky Situations?

[Andreas Bader]

On 02/06/2013 04:24 PM, Tom Ritter wrote:
> Nadim, I'm with you.  I'm not sure it's the perfect solution for
> everyone, but like Nathan said, if you already trust Google, I think
> it's a good option.
>
> On 6 February 2013 07:12, Andreas Bader <noergelpizza at hotmail.de> wrote:
>> Why don't you use an old thinkpad or something with Linux, you have the
>> same price like a Chromebook but more control over the system. And you
>> don't depend on the 3G and Wifi net.
> We started with the notion of Linux, and we were attracted to
> Chromebooks for a bunch of reasons.  Going back to Linux loses all the
> things we were attracted to.
>
> - ChromeOS's attack surface is infinitely smaller than with Linux
> - The architecture of ChromeOS is different from Linux - process
> separation through SOP, as opposed to no process separation at all
> - ChromeOS was *designed* to have you logout, and hand the device over
> to someone else to login, and get no access to your stuff.  Extreme
> Hardware attacks aside, it works pretty well.
> - ChromeOS's update mechanism is automatic, transparent, and basically
> foolproof.  Having bricked Ubuntu and Gentoo systems, the same is not
> true of Linux.
> - Verified Boot, automatic FDE, tamper-resistant hardware
>
> Something I'm curious about is, if any less-popular device became
> popular amoung the activist community - would the government view is
> as an indicator of interest?  Just like they block Tor, would they
> block Chromebooks?  It'd have to get pretty darn popular first though.
>
> -tom
> --
>
But you can't use it for political activists e.g. in Syria because of
its dependence on the internet connection. This fact is authoritative.
For Europe and USA and so on it might be a good solution.