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Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

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Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#151

Post by slowenough »

westi wrote: post #144
slowenough wrote: post #2

This represents over 1 year of work. Why am I open sourcing this? I don't see any other RBI / CBII vendor open sourcing their platform and in the security industry "closed source" can create issues. But what about business defensibility? I agree. Open sourcing removes the trade secret aspect that could make a defensible business. At the same time, a determined hacker would already have my source code. A hacked "free…

This is pretty cool. It might be work stopping the browser 'loading' itself inception style with some kind of blacklisting of loadable urls - I assume you already have something to protect against SSRF type attacks on the platform itself.

It sounds like it might be work to stop the browser loading itself inception style.

I like it can load itself.

What's the biggest problem you've had with that ability?

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#152

Post by slowenough »

gfodor wrote: post #145
slowenough wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good to know, thank you. What made you do that? Would it be too annoying to share some more about it?

We have a webgl app (hubs.mozilla.com) we wanted to determine the viability of doing cloud streaming of remotely. here's some personal notes from this. i didn't work on containerization, just raw VM setup. had to get x11 up and running and then set ffmpeg up for hardware streaming. https://gist.github.com/gfodor/3c88700ee81a10e01c783019b8a64...

Hey, thanks a lot for that!

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#153

Post by slowenough »

slowenough wrote: post #150
slowenough wrote: post #148

Hey HN, thanks for all the love on this, and for helping me think about other use cases for and how to communicate about this product. I really appreciate this! Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes. It occurred to me today that I could probably put t…

Edit: Servers are back up I moved from a single massive instance to a target pool behind a load balancer with health checks based on if there's available queue. https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz I have not worked out how to geographically load balance both of those from a single domain based on which you are closest too, but I want to see if these new smaller instances in load balanced target…

The load balancing setup I used today has issues, which you can see if you're using it now (very slow).

Namely, load balancing and scaling based on CPU is not a good metric, because new instances (which are still serving multiple users), will keep absorbing new users before the metric is triggered, and even when it is triggered, a new instance will take a while to spin up and build some browsers, so scaling lags too far behind load and the effect is existing instances get and stay overloaded.

So, I have an idea for a new autoscaling system that puts 1 tiny machine per user, but it will take some reconfiguring. So, in the meantime, I'm switching back to the old system (massive instances, vertical scale).

I'll do that now and the servers should switch to the new system in about 30 mins.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#154

Post by aplacelikethis »

aplacelikethis wrote: post #86
Nextgrid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a "feature" of ReCAPTCHA, and I believe there might even be a patent on it. The idea is that if you are sure it's a bot and want to deny them access you still waste their resources by making them solve impossible captchas.

That's called "slander". I hope whoever invented, implemented and OK'd this loses their home.

Right, it's not. It's only bad faith so retaliation is unjust.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#155

Post by slowenough »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #105
slowenough wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that downloads are important, so I'm committed to integrating with org's existing file/firewall policies and secure web gateways. I'm interested in what you said. Would it be a terrible idea for you to tell me some more about this certain segment of small business users?

I've seen a couple of them during my consulting gigs. They don't want to own any infrastructure and don't want to keep IT staff to maintain it. They indeed use G Suite, Office 365 and cloud varieties of line-of-business apps: order processing, inventory, accounting etc. If an app doesn't have a suitable cloud alternative, it's moved to VPS and accessed via RemoteApp (at this point you apparently get some IT guy). The…

Wow, this was really useful. Thanks for that! :)

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#156

Post by slowenough »

z3t4 wrote: post #149
slowenough wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great point, and something I have not considered. It's a big oversight, I'm sorry about that. Let me think about it. There must be a way to do this.

For screen readers you could run it server side. Then stream audio/video to the client. Although I dont think this is the best sution to the problem. A better solution would be to run the browser with a hardware abstraction layer, like a virtual machine.

That's a clever idea about running screen readers server side, thanks!

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#157

Post by stjohnswarts »

hathym wrote: post #42
slowenough wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean running the VM locally, then that has a risk of any exploits being able to escape the VM, and attack your machine directly. That seems less secure than facing the risk of any exploits being able to escape the hypervisor in the cloud, someohow come through the text protocol connection to your computer, and exploit you there. The extra layer of security provided by the remote cloud is important. If, on the…

What about a vm inside another vm?

I heard if you run VBox inside of QEMU inside of VMWare all running different flavors of linux then you good, dawg.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#158

Post by slowenough »

cryptozeus wrote: post #120
slowenough wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for your time on this report, and I'm really sorry about that! It sounds like the screen is pixelated and unusable. That must be very annoying! I don't have an iPhone next to me right now, and I have not tested in Safari for about a week. Would you mind sharing a screenshot? I know that because iOS Safari does not support WebP, I'm just using JPEGs which means the quality is worse there. As a short term…

Give me your email, i will send the screenshot of what I see. Any random emIl is fine.

Thanks for offering to send a screenshot of what you see!

Sorry I don't have a random email, but here you go: cris@dosyago.com

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#159

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