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State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

blog.invisiblethings.org

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Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#22

Post by fapjacks »

tjoff wrote: post #20
fapjacks wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the joke [0]. But otherwise this is what I meant by "shed your expectations". Even if it were possible to prove something was not possible, how would you build it? There might be some free money in there somewhere. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I know(? it feels like I'm missing something). It is just that I feel the opposite. This is exactly the type of project that HN would like. And not heckle, because there are no similarities with the Dropbox case.

I mean, at the time of my posting this, literally every other top-level comment but two are kind of heckling the idea. I agree that a (working) project would be very interesting to the HN crowd. But it definitely also is an idea that many of those same people would have doubts about, very much like the Dropbox Show HN comment.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#23

Post by fit2rule »

tjoff wrote: post #17
fapjacks wrote: post #16

Interesting! I hadn't seen this work before. Honestly this seems exactly like the kind of service that would get heckled on HN in the classic Dropbox-Show-HN style. So much so that a couple of my friends and I tried to build something like this a few years ago, essentially outsourcing the end-to-end-encrypted transport of sensitive information via a user-friendly service. We thought a user should be able to designate…

I don't see the connection with "HN+dropbox". Dropbox was/is easy to do by yourself as a techie depending on your usecase. This is not easy/possible at all and the closest I can think of, which has long ways to go in pursuit of this (and they aren't pursuing this directly (I think)), is something like NixOS - which seems to be quite popular on HN.

> Dropbox was/is easy to do by yourself as a techie depending on your usecase.

Dropbox should have come from the OS vendors. It didn't, because we don't have OS vendors any more - we have ad agencies.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#24

Post by akvadrako »

mastazi wrote: post #2

It's frustrating that the author is using the word "stateless" because it usually means something different in the context of computer-related topics. Maybe the title of the paper should have been something like "A proposal for an ephemeral-storage laptop" or something along those lines.

Not clear from your comment what definition of "stateless" you mean, but it is clear from the HN title.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#25

Post by [deleted] »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #19
mastazi wrote: post #2

It's frustrating that the author is using the word "stateless" because it usually means something different in the context of computer-related topics. Maybe the title of the paper should have been something like "A proposal for an ephemeral-storage laptop" or something along those lines.

What different do you mean? In computer-related topics state always refered to the ability to change or not change after an interaction has finished. I don't see how he used a different usage?

[deleted]

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#27

Post by coldtea »

mastazi wrote: post #2

It's frustrating that the author is using the word "stateless" because it usually means something different in the context of computer-related topics. Maybe the title of the paper should have been something like "A proposal for an ephemeral-storage laptop" or something along those lines.

>It's frustrating that the author is using the word "stateless" because it usually means something different in the context of computer-related topics.

Not really different. State is state.

Re: State considered harmful: A proposal for a stateless laptop (2015)

#28

Post by jstanley »

I've started running Tails on my laptop on a daily basis. It's great. https://tails.boum.org/

It runs off a USB stick and presents a pristine system each time you boot. Modifications to the filesystem go on a ramdisk "overlay", which disappears as soon as you power it off.

It does support "encrypted persistent storage", but there is quite fine-grained control over what things are allowed to go in it. In particular, nothing to do with the web browser persists across a reboot unless you go quite far out of your way to make it persist. And each time you boot, you can opt not to unlock the persistent storage if the work you want to do is either liable to get you infected with malware, or just doesn't need any of your persistent data.

Additionally, all of the networking is done over Tor, and the firewall blocks non-Tor traffic, so you can't even miss out Tor by accident. (But if you don't want to use Tor, it's probably not for you, although having used Tor in the past, I was pleasantly surprised how much faster it is now than it was then).

EDIT: And for those who don't know, OP is developer of https://www.qubes-os.org/ which I tried out for a while, and really like the premise of, but found just slightly too inconvenient to use, and I currently prefer Tails.

Qubes has multiple container VMs. All applications run inside a VM, but the I/O is transparently multiplexed into one desktop environment. The window decorations tell you which VM each application is running in. You can copy and paste, and share files, between different VMs, but only where you explicitly want to. You can create VMs to separate data for different purposes (e.g. one just for email, one just for web browsing, and different ones for working on different projects). The VMs can even run different OS's, and there are VMs included by default that route all of their internet over Tor. It is great.

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