Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#241

Post by zmgsabst » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

selykg wrote: post #225

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point, password rotation is considered an insecure practice because it causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password. But I've seen so many companies that still insist on it.

I'm the IT guy for a new non-profit. We aren't separated yet from the company that created us, but we're in the process of separating. I get to decide all this fun stuff. I had a very brief talk with the IT team for the larger parent company when I started and explained this stupid password rotation thing, as I came from a security background, they wanted nothing of it. Set in their ways. For the new non-profit that…

NIST agrees, as if their update a few years ago.

> Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#242

Post by sbf501 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

Who uses a physical workstation anymore? (Besides artists.)

OP is suggesting a complete remote desktop for Office applications, like Video Conferencing. Ironically, for all the crap X takes, it could actually pull this off. Moreso for Wayland. I'm surprised there isn't a graphics client/server model out there as good as X after ~40 years. But I think the problem is too much layering: trying to put a VM in the cloud as an office desktop requires way too much bandwidth & latency through a remote desktop without a client/server graphics mode. The tools are there, they just aren't being used because they are missing a security layer.

I haven't used a physical workstation at my desk since 1999, and I was a designer/architect at Intel for decades. Everything was done via VNC. Back then it was called "distributed computing" with AFS, so it was a "proto-cloud". And before that I used a sun workstation to telnet into beefier computers. This was AIX/SunOS/LInux based.

Granted, I was not videoconferencing, but there's no reason why the desktop needs to be rendered in the VM (including the video stream!!!), then encoded, then decoded, then rendered again. It's just dumb.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#243

Post by greedo » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:28 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #163

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be attributed to them. Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge themselves into the halls of power and then start making decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that much. I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a way they themselves did not.

Isn't that just a characteristic of how they're evaluated? Any security error is the CISO's fault, "heads must roll", etc Given that, they're likely to give you what you are asking from them: a brick with no functionality which will do nothing. You can't do anything with Brick, but Brick has zero outstanding CVEs

CISO often stands for Chief Sacrificial Officer...

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#244

Post by leoh » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:29 PM UTC

sbf501 wrote: post #242

Who uses a physical workstation anymore? (Besides artists.) OP is suggesting a complete remote desktop for Office applications, like Video Conferencing. Ironically, for all the crap X takes, it could actually pull this off. Moreso for Wayland. I'm surprised there isn't a graphics client/server model out there as good as X after ~40 years. But I think the problem is too much layering: trying to put a VM in the cloud a…

X for wire protocol is truly awful compared to chrome Remote Desktop. I’ve been eager to use it and have played with all manner of settings, but it’s very slow pretty much no matter what. Apparently it sends many more frame updates — ie is very network and compute heavy compared to other modern protocols that send rolling images.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#245

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #157

jiggawatts wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a "Citrix consultant" for about two decades. I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people, and within minutes they would start ranting about how bad Citrix is. I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from customers before a procedure. Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to this: The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn't use Citrix OR uses it from…

I recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be attributed to them. Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge themselves into the halls of power and then start making decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that much. I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a way they themselves did not.

[deleted]

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#246

Post by leoh » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:32 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #119

Been working remotely for 6 years. My vm is in New York and I live in rural France. I connect over a 4g connection. I have a 24" monitor. The stuff is seamless. I mean it. I hate lagging, I hate stuff that doesn't work. But this does work. Really well.

Who do you purchase your VM from? What are the specs/cost?

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#247

Post by BeFlatXIII » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:32 PM UTC

> aren’t as good as you think

Who thought they were any good in the first place?

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#248

Post by NotHereNotThere » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

hasel wrote: post #160

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #69

With cloud gaming you can stream 4K games at 60FPS, with clarity and quality for fast moving objects. Why does remote desktop still shit itself when I move around MS Word with a few pictures? I know a tier 1 financial company that offer 100k / year developers a slow VM and from there you have to log into another VM. The VMs are dual core, 8GB. I watch in horror as each keypress takes more than a second. The amount of…

What’s the input latency like in those cloud games?

From a former Stadia user; latency was never an issue or noticeable with a 4K stream. And I've played quite a bit of fast paced shooters in the platform.

The experience is extremely dependent on location, bandwidth, local setup and availability of close services (in my case, the closest DC was <15ms away according to Stadia telemetry).

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#249

Post by als0 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

selykg wrote: post #225

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point, password rotation is considered an insecure practice because it causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password. But I've seen so many companies that still insist on it.

I'm the IT guy for a new non-profit. We aren't separated yet from the company that created us, but we're in the process of separating. I get to decide all this fun stuff. I had a very brief talk with the IT team for the larger parent company when I started and explained this stupid password rotation thing, as I came from a security background, they wanted nothing of it. Set in their ways. For the new non-profit that…

Aside from password rotation being a very questionable practice, it actually can cause productivity loss. In a big organisation like mine it can take up to 48 hours for a password change to synchronise across all the internal services. There's also the issue where some endpoint software still uses the old password behind the scenes and fails to log in too many times - causing your account to be locked. I guess you can see my frustration coming through.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#250

Post by MarkSweep » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:35 PM UTC

qw wrote: post #191

8organicbits wrote: post #17

> Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud. I'd mention SSH port forwarding in this section. For webdev you'll want to run your server on the remote host and use the local web browser. SSH port forwarding works great for…

Jetbrains has support for remote development environments. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising. https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/

I can confirm that using JetBrains Gateway to run IntelliJ is more pleasant than using Chrome Remote Desktop, X11 forwarding, JetBrains projector, or Xpra.