A Physical Key for an Intangible OS

I've always liked the idea of a bootable USB to house an install of Linux that I could just... bring to a random computer somewhere, start it up, and work on files on the go. Unfortunately people start to give you funny looks if you use an unrecognized OS on their machine at the library or a computer lab. So I find them rather hard to find use cases for.

However, most people are fine with whatever you can run in a browser. So when I saw AetherOS pop up, I got really interested.

Aether OS is a personal operating environment that runs in a browser. The idea is that your 'computer' — your files, your tools, your setup — lives at a URL. You open it anywhere, and there it is.

The obvious friction is the getting-there part. I don't know about you, but I have a horrid memory for URLs, especially when adding something new to my workflow. So I've had a hard time with "what's that thing called", having to Google "ATProtocol OS browser" or the like, finding a news article for a link... It's a lot of steps.

Enter the Flipper Zero and the BadUSB scripts that let it emulate a keyboard. Plug it into any machine and it can type — fast, reliably, at whatever pace the target can handle. I got one as a fun experiment to tinker with and one of my first thoughts were "can I run a computer off this?" Obviously, once you get to know the device, you realize "No. No it cannot." The Flipper Zero doesn't have nearly enough memory for that. But, if a BadUSB script can get me to a website...

The launcher scripts in this repo do one thing: run the script for your platform and Aether OS opens in the default browser. The whole interaction takes a few seconds and leaves no strange files on the host machine.

It's really silly. I could just learn the URL. But there's something very fun about connecting a physical device to logging into an online browser. In a perfect world, I'll find a way to make the script also handle the login process, so I'm not juggling a password vault as well. But that's a later phase. For now, it's a fun way to test BadUSB on something useful to me.

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