"Why Chromebook Pundits Are Out of Touch"

[jj2me]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Alright, who stole the delete key?

...and page up, page down, home, end???

Must've been me. All those keys are on my Acer C710.

Here's an eBay listing showing the keys on the right upper and lower.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by jj2me

Thank you! She's now using Gmail again. You pushed me into looking further into this and discovering that I was trying to solve the wrong problem. The "running out of chances" to get her password reset was what she had told me was the reason she serially acquired new e-mail addresses. Her memory and cognition are not reliable, but I live 3,000 miles from her, so took her story at face value.

Thanks to your questioning, I tried entering one of her old e-mail accounts on a Google password recovery page, and got as far as it asking me if I was her. Excellent! Then I composed a simple search term for her to enter into Google.com that would return that page as the first search result. Called her, and though it took almost an hour just to walk through the simple password reset procedure, she's now up and running.

Her daughter's e-mail is and was the recovery password. A shame her kids just aren't that interested in addressing her quality of life problems.

Thanks again to you and Graham.

Glad I could help!

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by jj2me

Must've been me. All those keys are on my Acer C710.

Here's an eBay listing showing the keys on the right upper and lower.

The C720 has larger keys on the top row. So they removed very useful keys in favor of even easier cryptic alt + commands. Why do something with one keystroke when it can be accomplished with two keystrokes that need to be memorized?

[Graham]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

The C720 has larger keys on the top row. So they removed very useful keys in favor of even easier cryptic alt + commands. Why do something with one keystroke when it can be accomplished with two keystrokes that need to be memorized?

Home and End are the ones I find I miss most.

When web browsing, don't forget that the space bar gives you a page down.

When doing other work on the Chromebook I find I scroll with the trackpad (two fingers up and down) most of the time, and of course I've got a full keyboard hooked up to the Chromebox.

It took me a day or two to stop hitting the power button too, but now I find I don't miss the delete key at all. I just use backspace, with alt-backspace when required.

I also find that I don't miss Caps Lock (which is available with Alt-Search if you do need it). Having the Search key there instead is very handy.

Graham

[frahse]

Originally Posted by Graham

If she has to keep her documents in DropBox then I can't see a way to do it on the Chromebook, because DropBox's search functionality only looks at the names of files and folders. (I'm assuming you're saying that the names appear in the documents rather than in the file names.)

If she was happy to move her files over the Google Drive then to find the documents she would simply type the name in the Drive search box and it would list all documents in which the name appears (frighteningly quickly!). Then she'd need to go into each document in turn to find the passage where it appears.

I don't think there's a way to display the passage from each document in one search.

Graham

Thank you.
I haven't had time to look further into it yet.
It may also be that her descriptions of what she is doing aren't exactly correct.
On the Win7 machine, the drop box is "shared" directly to the machine and is searched by the normal Win7 search routine.
I have to find out what she means by "finding the name embedded in the surrounding text." (I will have to observe this phenomena first hand.)

[Graham]

Originally Posted by frahse

On the Win7 machine, the drop box is "shared" directly to the machine and is searched by the normal Win7 search routine.
I have to find out what she means by "finding the name embedded in the surrounding text." (I will have to observe this phenomena first hand.)

Windows 7's search function is very good, and it gives a couple of lines from the document showing the part of the text where the search result was found.

See:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/w...file-or-folder

The Google Drive web search is quicker, but doesn't have this contextual display of the results, it just gives the matching files.

Graham

[QuantumIguana]

I've gotten used to using the keystroke combinations. I'm also quite glad they got rid of caps lock! It got in the way too much, you mean to hit 'a' and you turn on caps lock instead.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Graham

For anti-virus, the system has defense built in from the ground up, so it is 'included' in that sense - you just don't have the hassle of updates.

While Sregener's idea that virus protection is unnecessary with Macs seems wildly idealistic, I'm inclined to feel skeptical about your comment that Chrome has sufficient "defense built in from the ground up." If you have a moment, would you mind being a bit more specific?

Certainly, I've found the opposite to be true of Android. Using the free antivirus utility ClamXav to scan my MacBook Pro and attached storage media (which I do regularly), I've only ever found viruses in backups and mSD cards from my Android devices. What's more, said viruses have only infected apps downloaded from the Play Store directly. I've encountered those infected files using both Froyo and Jellybean over the past few years. (And here I thought I'd vetted my apps and chosen only safe ones!)

How is Chrome different in that respect? Doesn't it use the Play Store, too?

I'd also like more details on the "sandboxed" aspects of Chrome, since I have friends whose Google accounts were hijacked shortly after they bought Android smartphones.

I hope you'll keep in mind that my questions are not anti-Google, since every smartphone I've owned for the past four years has used the Android OS.

[forsooth]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

While Sregener's idea that virus protection is unnecessary with Macs seems wildly idealistic, I'm inclined to feel skeptical about your comment that Chrome has sufficient "defense built in from the ground up." If you have a moment, would you mind being a bit more specific?

Certainly, I've found the opposite to be true of Android. Using the free antivirus utility ClamXav to scan my MacBook Pro and attached storage media (which I do regularly), I've only ever found viruses in backups and mSD cards from my Android devices. What's more, said viruses have only infected apps downloaded from the Play Store directly. I've encountered those infected files using both Froyo and Jellybean over the past few years. (And here I thought I'd vetted my apps and chosen only safe ones!)

How is Chrome different in that respect? Doesn't it use the Play Store, too?

I'd also like more details on the "sandboxed" aspects of Chrome, since I have friends whose Google accounts were hijacked shortly after they bought Android smartphones.

I hope you'll keep in mind that my questions are not anti-Google, since every smartphone I've owned for the past four years has used the Android OS.

Assume part of answer is Chrome updated every new load.

Also assume Google has best list bad sites and viruses.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

While Sregener's idea that virus protection is unnecessary with Macs seems wildly idealistic, I'm inclined to feel skeptical about your comment that Chrome has sufficient "defense built in from the ground up." If you have a moment, would you mind being a bit more specific?

This video from 2009 explains the principles:



The key protections after sandboxing are the separation of root code and user data, and the verified boot process, where the system code is checked each time it reboots, and if the checksums don't match a clean version is installed.

For an overview of the full range of features, see:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/...urity-overview

More recently, Google have introduced Native Client apps, and these also have sandboxing and verification security:

https://developers.google.com/native...eventBreakouts

No system can ever be 100% safe, so Google have an aggressive policy of rewarding hackers to find exploits. This helps mitigate yet more of the risk, allowing Google to close down issues before they get exploited.

I think it would therefore be reasonable to say that the remaining risk is smaller than the risk you'd still have with a Windows machine that was fully protected by security software. This has been borne out in the various 'hackathons' and 'pwn2own' competitions where ChromeOS has not yet been fully breached while the other operating systems have fallen.

Graham

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

How is Chrome different in that respect? Doesn't it use the Play Store, too?

ChromeOS doesn't currently use the Play Store, it has its own Web Store.

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I'd also like more details on the "sandboxed" aspects of Chrome, since I have friends whose Google accounts were hijacked shortly after they bought Android smartphones.

Like any system if someone gets hold of your account name and password they can get in to your data. Turning on two step authentication in Android would help (note to self... must do that!)

Changing your Google password regularly is also advisable.

Graham

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Certainly, I've found the opposite to be true of Android. Using the free antivirus utility ClamXav to scan my MacBook Pro and attached storage media (which I do regularly), I've only ever found viruses in backups and mSD cards from my Android devices.

According to their website, ClamXav is written for OS X and can spot both Mac and Windows threats, but I can't see a mention of Android. Is it possible that its simply mis-reporting code intended for Android as a virus as it's not recognised?

Graham

[Prestidigitweeze]

Graham:

Thanks for your detailed and well-researched answers to my questions. The trouble you took to be extensive is very much appreciated.

Originally Posted by Graham

According to their website, ClamXav is written for OS X and can spot both Mac and Windows threats, but I can't see a mention of Android. Is it possible that its simply mis-reporting code intended for Android as a virus as it's not recognised?

Graham

The interesting thing about the reported viruses is that none of them affected any of Google's own internal apps.

Two of the afflicted apps were the only ones I've ever downloaded that spammed my notification bar with ads, so you can see why I was inclined to take ClamXav at its word. I don't think anyone would disagree that Apple vets their app store submissions to a rather invasive degree while, thankfully, Google does not (even allowing a Cyanogenmod installer for an entire month!). And while that provides a wonderful example of Google's support of independent developers, it doesn't indicate the best strategy for avoiding viruses or security breaches (at least as I understand them).

Like any system if someone gets hold of your account name and password they can get in to your data. Turning on two step authentication in Android would help (note to self... must do that!)

Good point about the second step!

While I'm aware that name and password theft is a universal issue, one of my friends is so careful that I wondered if she'd been observed remotely by a third party while submitting her name and password, or if someone might have managed to get into the file tree where she stored her passwords list.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Two of the afflicted apps were the only ones I've ever downloaded that spammed my notification bar with ads, so you can see why I was inclined to take ClamXav at its word.

Was that the Android notification bar? If so, good work for ClamXav for spotting them when scanning from the Mac, but I wouldn't class that behaviour as being a virus - in the sense of a self-replicating threat to your data. Serving up ads is permissible in Android, if annoying, so those apps fall under the 'adware' or 'malware' banner.

If the apps continued to serve you ads after you tried to uninstall them, that would be truly bad behaviour.

Graham

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Graham

Was that the Android notification bar?

Yes, it was the Android notification bar. The apps existed as backups of files on microSD cards used in my Android smartphones.

If so, good work for ClamXav for spotting them when scanning from the Mac, but I wouldn't class that behaviour as being a virus - in the sense of a self-replicating threat to your data.

What I meant to say was that the apps (and/or their attendant files) which ClamXav spotted were exhibiting suspicious behavior already. It isn't that I saw evidence of viral behavior, but rather that apps which spam the user in unusually invasive ways (the notification bar, the lockscreen, etc.) seem more likely to be infected because the persons who created them were interested in transgressing the boundaries of considerate/acceptable behavior, and viruses are a few steps further in that questionable direction.