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In The Future

By Douglas Chick
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An Emerging Trend  William Nett

One of the biggest trends in Linux and UNIX today, seems to be the development of 'LIVE' CDs... wherein the complete OS is contained on a CD and yes sometimes a DVD. All the user has to do is boot from the removable media, and in a few short moments, they have a fully functional Operating System! If I were to say that Closed Source doesn't do this yet, I'd be wrong... seems BSD is hopping on this band-wagon as well.

This is a huge step in trusted and reliable computing, imagine your computer's contents being contained on a non-writable CD? THIS is the answer to the thin-client, which has been ridiculed for being such a bandwidth hog. Currently, there are approximately 161 different distributions of 'Live' Linux CDs, yes, BSD is included, and please don't flame me that BSD is UNIX...I know already! Although most of these 'Live' CDs do require the availability of a Hard Drive for use of 'Swap-Space' or 'Virtual-Memory', their functions vary from plain desktops to firewalls and downright hacking/forensics distros. This is one niche' that Microsoft hasn't even begun to explore.

Think about it, you get to work, pick up your current CD, and boot from it. Your distro is configured via your USB dongle or smart card to store important documents on a remote server with a password that's transparent to you, or maybe it won't even need a dongle? User-customized 'Live CDs' generated by your IT department... modular computing and authentication! The way I see it, the average CD stores between 640-700 megabytes of data... if you have an office of 100 computers, that's 64 - 70 Gigabytes of data that does not have to suffer network congestion. When your workers all check out at the end of the day, your office space is assecure as a government 'clean-room'. Users don't even know what their passwords are... even if it's *hgf0w$3pde3, That'll keep a cracker busy for a while. If it changes every week, the hacker will have better odds of winning the lottery or getting into the NSA.

Hackers would have nearly a zero chance of poisoning your CD's, and your anti-virus software could focus on a single target with maximum efficiency. However this system is not yet perfect... so what do what we need? A central development office to generate such CDs, customized with the applications which the specific user requires. If a user requires a new application, then they submit a request to the IT department for the addition of the application to their CD or DVD. In the future, users won't enter passwords, their cards and removable media will provide that for them... this eliminates the Kevin Mitnick social engineering angle. If their CDs or DVDs are stored at the company, then their Smart-Card ID will be useless... it'll only provide half of the required equation. Just imagine walking into a workspace of 100 PCs all of which are as dumb and impregnable as a WYSE terminal with no keyboard? Way to go TUX, and kudos to Linus.

Of course this is all Asimov-like thinking, but none-the-less, it's possible... and one has to wonder, what does Microsoft have to offer to compete with this? Again, there are currently 161 different distros of 'Live' linux/UNIX OS's but I don't see a single Microsoft version.