Google Desktop For Linux Released

Google Desktop for Linux was released recently.  It doesn't seem to be in the Gentoo portage tree yet, but there's a working ebuild for it here.

It's been indexing for 24 hours or so.  It'll be a few more days before I can try it out properly.

This should be a useful tool for onsite pentests when you don't have an Internet connection.  Google is a much-missed friend in such situations.  I'm hoping that I can get it to index the gigabytes of advisory and exploit information I've accumulated over the years, but never found a satisfactory way of searching.  It should it'll make Internet-less pentests less painful.

On a security-related note, I was pleased to note that google desktop runs as a non-priv user (i.e. you), so there's no danger of it indexing your shadow file or other sensitive files that aren't readable by normal users.  You also give it a whitelist of directories to index, so it should go rummaging anywhere you don't want it to.

Also the file permissions seemed sensible with no obvious way for other users to read or write to your Google-Desktop related files. 


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