As a fan of the EFF, and security in general, I was pretty excited to hear about the Let’s Encrypt project. Let’s Encrypt is a project sponsored by EFF, University of Michigan, Mozilla, Cisco and Akamai to provide free, signed TLS certificates. While I’ve used StartSSL in the past for free certificates, I’ve found their process a bit cumbersome (although in all fairness, they have done a ton of redesign this year).
A few months ago I noticed a weird issue on the Chromebook where it would reboot hard if I performed a dd operation to write a Linux distro out to USB. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Browsing around the crouton source code for an unrelated project, I came across this section of code that explains the issue. The Chromebook OS has the hunk_task_panic timer set for 2 minutes.
I recently purchased a Spark Core development kit at Micro Center last week. The Spark Core is a cloud development board. Normally I try to avoid any cloud platform that may lock me into a vendor, but as Particle (the company) fully releases source code for the schematics, firmware on the device itself, and a node.js implementation of the server side, it seems like a very safe platform for development.
The ChromeOS has been a great experience so far. One problem, however, is that you generally need to purchase a Chromebook to use it, or go through compiling the ChromeOS from source. A few days ago I came across Neverware’s CloudReady, which provides an freely available (to individuals) ChromeOS experience on generic hardware.
Cloudready, however, does not support dual boot, so it will wipe away anything on the machine. Following some hints from this page I was able to get the CloudReady to install on a Virtualbox VM, without the need to create a USB bootable drive.