A12 – Advancing Network Transparency on the Desktop

arcan-fe.com

33 points·todsacerdoti··6 comments

Author of the article referenced, not AMA but go ahead -- there is about ~3+ years of research going into this one, excluding the crash recovery bits that is a prerequisite (https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-comp...). Now it's part of my bread and butter -- literally, external funds secured.

"externally funds secured." As a research project, or a potential commercial product?

part of the latter, since we can wrap arcan, x11 and wayland clients this way, in a world of remote work -- well.

This look very interesting. How would you describe and what does A12 do? It looks like a desktop being able to move apps between devices technology.

One protocol for remote casting both single-application and composited desktops with:

1. free (bsd) implementation

2. all the remote use cases of x11, rdp(vnc), ssh (not as a suisse army knife netcat with encryption, the interactive thing for text clients), spice, rdp (not usb/printer), ...

3. at about ~300LoC pre-auth attack surface and less than 4000loc implementation, sandboxable down to read/write syscalls

4. preserves original type (passthrough rather than recompression, native formats for vector content, ...) and identity (tray icon with a popup child, ...)

5. compression/packing based on content type

6. covers both audio/video/exotic input devices (accessibility, games, ...) and (soon) 3d/vr

That can runtime 'jump'/redirect (nearly) seamlessly between devices and change the look and feel to match that of the viewer with special provisions for VM like metadata (clipboard) and input bindings.

How does this compare with NoMachine?

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