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Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by petilon on Thursday May 09, 2019 @11:45AM (#19869280)
This breaks the security benefits of Chromebooks. One of the advantages of Chromebooks is that hackers can't persuade naive users to download and run binaries.

Previously a company could issue Chromebooks to all employees and know that employees can't run arbitrary binaries on their Chromebooks.

Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by peterwwillis on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:21PM (#19869620)
> hackers can't persuade naive users to download and run binaries.

Hmm...

Chrome Has a Malware Problem, and Google Needs to Fix It (https://www.tomsguide.com/us/chrome-extension-security-probl...)

Chrome Extension Malware Has Evolved (https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-extension-malware/)

How Malware Keeps Sneaking Past Google Play's Defenses (https://www.wired.com/story/google-play-store-malware/)

New Android Malware Infected 2 Million Google Play Store Users (https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/android-malware-playstore....)

Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by cbolton on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:10PM (#19869507)
Companies can disable the support for Linux apps, and the security measures taken to isolate Linux apps from Chrome OS are excellent (Linux apps are running in an unprivileged container inside a VM that has a stripped down kernel).

There's definitely an increased attack surface inside the VM, but that's kind of unavoidable if you want to have a development environment (what this is marketed for). At least Chrome OS offers a secure way to isolate your development environment from your email/banking/etc processes.

Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by petilon on Friday May 10, 2019 @12:34AM (#19875070)
Previously the CEO only had to ask, are all of my employees using ChromeBooks? Now he also has to ask, are those ChromeBooks all configured for security? It used to be a simple question, which could be answered at a glance. The new question is an order of magnitude harder to answer.
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by cbolton on Friday May 10, 2019 @01:43AM (#19875368)
Not that hard since it's a simple switch by the administrator in the company device policy: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/1375678?hl=en (See "Virtual Machines")

Such a step was already necessary to disable Android apps.

Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by carlosdp on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:09PM (#19869501)
I don't think it does. Linux is run in an isolated VM and debian is run in a container exposed to the user. The only filesystem interactions between ChromeOS and Linux are via Fuse and can only be transferred between environments from the ChromeOS side.
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by mav3rick on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:08PM (#19869491)
It runs in a VM for precisely this reason. Look into the design docs and see how every piece is further locked down using minijail.
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by rptr_87 on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @06:45PM (#19914558)
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by 0xCMP on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:07PM (#19869486)
It's all sandboxed and I'm sure they can disable the feature being there to increase security
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by Fice on Thursday May 09, 2019 @09:31PM (#19874284)
Users are not protected from malware distributed via Chrome Web Store and Google Play. This "security" is intended not to protect users, but to protect proprietary apps and data from users, the true motive is DRM rather than security.
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by chrisdfrey on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:12PM (#19869543)
Debian runs in a VM and different apps run in separate containers.
Re:All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward by esrauch on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:33PM (#19869730)
Presumably they can still set that as a device policy.