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Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

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Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#131

Post by gfodor »

sciurus wrote: post #129
gfodor wrote: post #21

this is insanely awesome. as it stands right now, yes its "just ssh". But open up the developer toolbar and you'll notice this thing is rendering HTML inside of webkit. It doesn't take a genius to see this is a few baby steps from making it possible to render arbitrary graphics in the shell. edit: I might go out on a limb here and say this project is something that is going to be looked at as a real inflection point…

You think having a terminal in a browser is amazing because it will let you run browser applications in a terminal?

Uh, kinda. "Browser applications" is a bit misleading though. Imagine starting a Clojure REPL and having it graph things right there as you hack. Or having iconography or image previews when you run ls. Or being able to see mathematical notation while you're inside of BC. Or having a commandline interface to Wolfram|Alpha output.

The TermKit reply in this thread should be sufficient to see why this will be very cool.

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#132

Post by teraflop »

abraham wrote: post #115
maratd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome OS? Your Android phone? Windows? I can't work on a Windows machine without installing SecureCRT or Putty. One less thing to install and tweak.

I don't think it will run on Chrome OS.

Nope, it runs fine on my Cr-48. In fact, as of Chrome OS 20, the native xterm seems to have been replaced with the version from this extension, running in its own tab.

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#133

Post by teraflop »

nextparadigms wrote: post #121
bzbarsky wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That _Chrome_. The questions is whether this app runs there, since it's using NaCl, which is not exactly portable across hardware architectures.

I think Nacl is portable. But it wouldn't run on Android right now anyway since the Chrome browser on Android doesn't have access to the Chrome webstore and extensions.

NaCL is not portable, unless you happen to be running the same architecture that the software was compiled for. You might be thinking of PNaCL which is still very experimental: http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#134

Post by kibwen »

no-espam wrote: post #67
luser001 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you save yourself the trouble of configuring this extension? What sorts of configs have you had to do for Putty?

Setting unicode, changing backspace, setting xterm-256 as the TERM variable, etc ... PuTTy configuration is unintuitive when you first try to configure it. There's a well known page dedicated to configuring PuTTy properly on Windows.

I haven't tested this extensively myself, but have you looked at ExtraPuTTY?

http://www.extraputty.com/features.html

Seems like one of its goals is to make it easier to move PuTTY configurations from one machine to another.

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#135

Post by kibwen »

dangrossman wrote: post #20
ig1 wrote: post #13

Has anyone code reviewed this to make sure it's not stealing credentials, etc. ?

Beyond that, you must trust the author, since Chrome may auto-update the extension to a future version that could steal credentials.

I, er, meant to upvote this, but hit the wrong arrow. :\ Consider this a moral upvote.

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#136

Post by baddox »

VikingCoder wrote: post #102
baddox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your bank account recovery link gets emailed to your Gmail account, you have more to worry about if Google decides to abuse your information.

I often fail at being polite to people online, and people like you are the reason. Trust me when I tell you this: Google will never steal money from your bank account, by using a password recovery link that you had emailed to your GMail account. Does that really need to be said? Do you really need CONVINCING of this?

You misunderstand. I am pointing out that if you are consciously giving Google potential access to your bank account, it's odd to be concerned about Google having other information that is far less sensitive. It's like worrying about your white carpet because the robber holding a gun to your head has muddy boots.

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#137

Post by rginda »

comex wrote: post #103

I'm not very impressed... although it's partly implemented in HTML (only partly - even though modern JavaScript engines should be more than capable of handling SSH, the implementation is just OpenSSH in Native Client), this is no citizen of the web, and never can be, as trusting an app to connect directly to arbitrary ports and handle all your SSH connections fundamentally subverts the web's security model. Benefits…

I fixed a terminal "hang" just after the 0.7.9 version was released: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/assets... This may be what you're seeing in 'bb'.

The difficulty interrupting something like 'yes' is a known issue. We need to add some flow control to deal with cases where the network overwhelms the UI. This also makes hterm appear slow when cat'ing /usr/share/dict/words, and running aafire. A fix is in the works.

Yes, as you mention, automatic updates are something you already accept with Chrome. It also seems to be the way Firefox is heading. And Android and iOS apps. Anyone is free to build a version locally if they really want to stick with a particular version.

The webstore may require an account, but the source is open. You're welcome to build it yourself. Or, create a throw-away account and download the CRX, then install it in your "real" account.

Of course the current version is buggy, it says that right in the web store description! I've been working on it for a few months now, but it's difficult to get everything right in a terminal without a lot of users. I fixed an issue after the 0.7.9 release that may be what you're describing, but I can't know for sure without more details.

FWIW, as the FAQ says, the terminal emulator and the NaCl SSH client are essentially two codebases. Maybe you could impress people by creating a good-web-citizen version of the SSH command and combine it with hterm.

That would most definitely require an HTML-to-SSH relay in the middle (which hterm supports). Then you'd have to trust that though, at which point you have to decide where you really want your potentially untrustworthy code to live.

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#138

Post by kijin »

jsnell wrote: post #89
sequoia wrote: post #50

I opened chrome to check this out, but it wants me to "sign in" to install the extension. For me this is a bridge too far: I don't care to tell google about every single extension/application (extensplication?) I'm using. Like many people, I'm trying to step back from google/facebook snooping, and this would be a solid step toward such big brothering. I suppose next they'll see what email providers I use and whom I c…

You need to be signed in so that the extensions/apps/games can be properly synced to your other Chrome installations. The philosophy of ChromeOS seems to be for absolutely everything to get synced from the cloud. The login can't be optional since it'd be an incredibly shitty UX to have apps installed from the store sometimes sync to your new machine and sometimes not.

> The login can't be optional since it'd be an incredibly shitty UX

The login can be optional if Google chooses to make it so. If I don't want to log in and therefore endure a shitty UX, let me have that shitty UX, thank you very much! It's not like I need all the same apps in all my devices anyway. For example, I might not need this SSH app in a device that can run a proper OpenSSH client.

And that's exactly the problem that some of us have with the /Chrome(OS)?/ philosophy. It's either their way or highway, with no options in between. (That's not necessarily bad for everyone, though. There are alternatives like Firefox for those who don't like Chrome.)

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#139

Post by sciurus »

gfodor wrote: post #131
sciurus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think having a terminal in a browser is amazing because it will let you run browser applications in a terminal?

Uh, kinda. "Browser applications" is a bit misleading though. Imagine starting a Clojure REPL and having it graph things right there as you hack. Or having iconography or image previews when you run ls. Or being able to see mathematical notation while you're inside of BC. Or having a commandline interface to Wolfram|Alpha output. The TermKit reply in this thread should be sufficient to see why this will be very cool.

People already write these kinds of applications today [0], they just don't run in a terminal. I could ask what benefit there is to expanding a terminal's capabilities so they can run there, but then we would just end up rehashing the arguments from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2559734

[0] E.G. http://fishsoup.net/software/reinteract/

Re: Secure Shell chrome (killer) app

#140

Post by plorkyeran »

baddox wrote: post #136
VikingCoder wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often fail at being polite to people online, and people like you are the reason. Trust me when I tell you this: Google will never steal money from your bank account, by using a password recovery link that you had emailed to your GMail account. Does that really need to be said? Do you really need CONVINCING of this?

You misunderstand. I am pointing out that if you are consciously giving Google potential access to your bank account, it's odd to be concerned about Google having other information that is far less sensitive. It's like worrying about your white carpet because the robber holding a gun to your head has muddy boots.

Using recovery links emailed to users to access their bank accounts and gather information would open up Google to all sorts of legal trouble even if they do nothing but look. As class-action lawsuits are generally not very good for business, I consider this much less of a concern than legal methods of gathering information, even when the potential information gained from the legal methods is less sensitive.
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