The Boxee box got unveiled today. I personally think the design of the box sucks – but I still want it. You too can have one in Q2 2010
Boxee Box unveiled, arriving Q2 2010
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When I read the announcement today my first thought was “cool” – that’s good for everybody.
My next thought was of privacy and the implications of Google knowing absolutely everything I do online (as if they don’t already).
Here’s how this technology works… So DNS is what translates www.google.com into the IP address 74.125.45.100. It’s one of the underlying protocols that makes the internets work.
Why is that scary? If you bypass your ISP settings and setup Google Public DNS, Google becomes your gateway to the web.
This means every request you make to any website on the internet will pass through Google’s servers.
Are you ready for that? They’ll know when you go to Amazon.com or Facebook or Twitter. And since Google controls a vast market share of online advertising – you will start seeing advertising based on the websites you visit (p.s. you do already).
Here’s what Google says about the privacy of the Google Public DNS project…
We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.
What do you think about Google Public DNS? Better for the web as a whole? Or is this scary skynet stuff?
We’ll see….
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We talked about the Google Chrome OS launch a couple weeks ago and am finally getting around to reviewing it… I had troubles installing Google Chrome OS as a virtual machine in Windows but am now running it just fine – aside from a few crashes.
If you want to know what I think about Chrome OS right away… It’s meh.
First off – I got my Google Chrome OS Image from gdgt and am using VMWare’s VMPlayer to run the virtual machine. Some of my crashes may be the result of running it as a Virtual Machine so I won’t discount that in my Chrome OS experience.
So what is Chrome OS? Well, honestly … it’s just Google’s Chrome Browser, as you can see above. The only real difference is the dasboard (second image above) that links to web pages. Nothing special here.
And yep – that’s it! I was expecting something more exciting but it really is just the browser. Don’t get me wrong – I live in the browser but there are so many other things you realize you do when you are limited to just a browser. This is what Sergey wants – to keep it simple.
But this is too simple and really only fits the netbook market. There is no way I could run Google Chrome OS as my main operating system on my workstation or laptop. I could see running this on a netbook where you pretty much only need a browser.
As is – this will never compete directly with Windows and OSX. In this current iteration it’s only usable on netbooks. I was hoping for something revolutionary but got something overly simple. I expected to spend a couple hours reviewing it but it only took 10 minutes.
It’s a browser people – that’s it.
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First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.
Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we’re going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.
via Official Google Blog: Releasing the Chromium OS open source project
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