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To this day, I don't know what it was meant for (lemmy.ca)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There was a movement years ago to get folks putting their operating system and configuration on a thumb drive, and then make computers more of a generic commodity. You could stick your drive into any computer, boot from it, and you're good to go. I was kind of sad that that never really went anywhere, though I'm sure it was a cyber security nightmare scenario.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I remember that. Definitely not great from a security standpoint, since once you've booted your own OS you can do nearly anything you want with the computer, like patch the firmware to automatically install a rootkit when the system boots.
Not terribly likely, but since a lot of public computers are in libraries and are used by people without home computers to do things like their taxes or online banking, a nasty compromise would hit a lot of people who wouldn't know their identities were stolen for quite a while.
The fix makes it a lot harder for computers to change operating systems dynamically like that, which is a bit of a loss, but ultimately worth it I think.

What I'm picturing would be a lot more like a static file format for sharing that information, without either device having the ability to actually "change" the other directly.