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Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

maruos.com

221–230 of 264 posts

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#221
post #184
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should leave the default user's password blank on embedded Linux images! Why does everyone set them up with default passwords!? I'm surprised the raspbian maintainers have not realized this yet. sshd won't let you login with an empty password by default.

What percent of pi users don't connect a keyboard and monitor? I don't mind having a default password since when ever I've used a pi I ran it headless and configured it on first boot with SSH. It would make sense to force the pi user to change there password on first login, can't remember if this is the case.

I almost never do. I ssh into it.

To be fair, I had a Pi2 and used it to watch videos but it died and my tablet or my TV+USB key are more convenient to use now. I guess some people would use a Chromecast instead.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#222
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website is super polished and doesn't mention anything about being alpha quality. It would be easy to install this on your phone without any idea you were making yourself vulnerable.

It's version 0.4, so it's a pre-release build.

Putty is 18 years old and only reached 0.69

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But I have my phone anywhere, and peripherals are ubiquitous. My beefy silicone devices...not.

I guess that's my point, in a way. I've got my phone everywhere, but its utility is inherently limited by its power. My beefier machines are powerful, but inherently mobility-limited by their form factors. Plugging the phone into a dock or something increases its I/O abilities, but doesn't give it the extra benefits that make the non-portable computers useful. > and peripherals are ubiquitous. I'm not sure what you'r…

I mean "I can take my phone most places and expect to find both a HDMI-capable display and Bluetooth input devices." Of course, I don't expect massive computing power - but even as a thin client to more powerful machines, this would suffice; and always having a netbook in your pocket is also useful.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#224

I'm wondering how secure it is.. According to https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/Tips , they start sshd up by default, listening on the local network, with the default user maru and password maru. That seems like a bit of a red flag and makes me wonder if it is the tip of the iceberg.

There are legitimate use cases for sshd with default logins. Headless and embedded systems come to mind first. Of course, this should not reach production stage.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#225
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1! The way I see it, this is a "toy" (for the time being). The "2013 devices" makes me thing that this is a "toy" for people like "us" that have a Nexus rotting away somewhere and "it would be cool to fool around on your 30-inch screen and nothing more! It would be better if they would up-front say "this is not secure", "this is a demo", "this is a toy", "this is not the OS you're looking for". Imaginary CEO-CTO dia…

What's wrong with "2013 devices"? Nexus 5 probably has more alternative OS choices than any other phone available: LineageOS (based on Android 7.1), Ubuntu Touch (UBports continuation of the project), Plasma Mobile, Sailfish, and Maru OS. And what is the real benefit of having a newer device if the old one is still very capable of running modern OSes and applications?

You sure you don't want a 5000MP camera? Lol

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#227

I'm wondering how secure it is.. According to https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/Tips , they start sshd up by default, listening on the local network, with the default user maru and password maru. That seems like a bit of a red flag and makes me wonder if it is the tip of the iceberg.

Preetam here, founder and lead developer of Maru. Thank you for all the critical feedback on security in this thread. Maru used to ship with sshd disabled [0] but it was enabled because of all the requests I was getting from users who wanted to run the system headless without needing an HDMI display and BT keyboard/mouse around to set sshd up. I assumed that users would change the default password after the initial l…

There's is a fundamental issue here that comes up with lots of small organizations around security: If your process for prioritizing work is based on which issues people complain about the most, you will never prioritize security issues until its too late. Security problems are never obvious until the horse bolts.

It is very easy to accidentally add egregious security vulnerabilities to products if you don't know what you're doing. In fact, accruing small security issues (like this SSH password problem) is the default state of the world.

As a user, I pay the cost when products I use have bad security. If I get hacked via your product, it might be embarrassing for you, but its my device and my data that gets compromised. And because of that, I expect most small companies will not care about their product's security as much as I do as a consumer.

Of course, once a company grows large enough they'll hire a person or a team to look into their software security. At that point they'll fix all the obvious security issues. The database will gain a password. The root AWS account will stop being shared out amongst employees. Work laptops will have full disk encryption turned on to protect against theft, etc.

But until then, as a customer, I should be really nervous. How can you tell the secure products apart from the insecure ones? Well, one of the most obvious signs is that secure products will have already fixed the obvious mistakes. Things like connecting to backend services using unencrypted HTTP. Things like a backdoor-by-default SSH password published on the website.

That is why we (security wonks) make a big deal out of small security problems when they're obvious. They're a sign that nobody has even taken a look at the security situation, and for every obvious problem there's probably 10 more that aren't obvious. This issue might get fixed, but thats why your reply doesn't make me less nervous.

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And thats a shame, because your project seems super cool and I really want you to succeed! This has come across much more negative than I intended, and I'm more frustrated at the startup industry over this than I am frustrated with you or what you're doing. Hopefully you can get a security review done at some point to make sure there aren't any other simple problems that need to be dealt with. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1! The way I see it, this is a "toy" (for the time being). The "2013 devices" makes me thing that this is a "toy" for people like "us" that have a Nexus rotting away somewhere and "it would be cool to fool around on your 30-inch screen and nothing more! It would be better if they would up-front say "this is not secure", "this is a demo", "this is a toy", "this is not the OS you're looking for". Imaginary CEO-CTO dia…

> The "2013 devices" makes me thing that this is a "toy" for people like "us" that have a Nexus rotting away somewhere I'm writing this on a 2013 Nexus, thank you very much! A year ago it stopped booting and I tried searching for a newer, comparable tablet to replace it: no such device exists. I ordered a replacement main board and couldn't be happier. Until someone makes a new 7-inch tablet with a full HD display, i…

I was surprised when I came to replace my 7 inch nexus that there wasn't a recent 7 inch tablet from a major player with good reviews. I ended up going for the nVidia Shield tablet K1, which despite being an iteration on a more than 2 year old tablet seemed pretty good. I've been happy with it so far.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preetam here, founder and lead developer of Maru. Thank you for all the critical feedback on security in this thread. Maru used to ship with sshd disabled [0] but it was enabled because of all the requests I was getting from users who wanted to run the system headless without needing an HDMI display and BT keyboard/mouse around to set sshd up. I assumed that users would change the default password after the initial l…

There's is a fundamental issue here that comes up with lots of small organizations around security: If your process for prioritizing work is based on which issues people complain about the most, you will never prioritize security issues until its too late. Security problems are never obvious until the horse bolts. It is very easy to accidentally add egregious security vulnerabilities to products if you don't know wha…

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#230
I don't use a smartphone, and the only smartphone-ish device I have (iPod touch) I only even bought because some things won't even run on PC anymore. This is successfully selling me on getting a high-end android phone, something I never thought I would do. I'm always looking for ways to reduce the amount of space my office setup takes.
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