There are two schools of thought on cloud-based services. The first is that the most secure place to store your apps and data are in the cloud where you won't lose anything if your computer crashes or gets stolen or if your house burns down, taking all of your backup hard drives with it. The second is that one of the least secure things you can do is to let a big company like Google (or Mozy) handle all of your data — where it can fall into the hands of hackers, or even worse, marketers.
Wherever you fall on the spectrum, we know Google's stance. The company is a strong advocate of web-based services, whether you believe in the altruistic security defense or just that the more stuff you store online the more Google can anonymously analyze your data and personalize your experience (and sell some data to advertisers).
A few months ago Google showed how its Chrome operating system made the Cr-48 notebook and any upcoming Chrome OS notebooks virtually interchangeable. If one notebook is destroyed, you can pick up exactly where you left off just by logging into your Google account on another.
Now Google is taking another step, and effectively daring hackers to find a way to exploit the operating system to get at user data (presumably so the company can fix any security holes).
The company is offering a $20,000 bounty on exploits at this year's Pwn2Own event. Since the OS is pretty tightly locked down so that essentially it only runs a web browser.
Sure, $20,000 isn't that much to Google… but it's a pretty good incentive for hackers to kick the tires, which should help make the OS even more secure.
via Download Squad
Google: Hack Chrome OS, please is a post from: Liliputing
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