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by eeZi 3303 days ago
Hah, that's a funny thread. I've heard that Google is using Chromebooks for engineers with production access.

Makes a lot of sense sense since Chrome OS is much easier to secure than a normal Linux distribution.
1 comments
candiodari 3303 days ago
That sounds insane. Do you have any proof ?

Google also has goobuntu, which I'm being is what's provided to engineers.

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dgacmu 3303 days ago
You can choose what kind of laptop you want. ChromeOS is one of the options, and security (+ trivial exchange-ability) is one of the selling points for using a Chromebook.

I tried it for a while, but I'm too used to the Mac to have made the switch more easily, so I moved back. But I know quite a few folks who use and love them. Opinions, as I'm sure you can guess, vary widely. It was surprisingly not-bad, even for a diehard mac user, and that was on a model from two years ago.

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candiodari 3303 days ago
I wonder about that. Can you use a mac laptop to write software for the Google infrastructure ?

That seems unlikely, if only for the security implications (would apply to any laptop of course, nothing to do with macos or chromeos)

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dgacmu 3302 days ago
Yes. Remember, there's not really "the Google infrastructure" as some separate component. With a few exceptions, it's all One Big Repository (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... ).

Google is a very large engineering organization, and (my opinion here, but one shared by others) recognizes that there's a lot of diversity in what engineers like for their workflow. There's obviously a set of standards for what you can choose from as far as laptops (since the company is buying them), but it's pretty broad.

Here's a Quora answer that goes into more detail: https://www.quora.com/What-computer-or-laptop-do-software-en...

You can read more about Google's security model in a USENIX ;login article from last year: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

(source: The above cited sources, plus I'm part-time at Google.)

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puzzle 3303 days ago
Niels Provos himself is a Chromebook user (not sure if he needs to access production these days...) and he talks about locking down privileged access to Chromebooks with security keys:

https://mikecborg.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/securing-clouds/ (search for all occurrences of 'chromebook')

https://youtu.be/O-JXFQezWOc?t=35m0s

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