So, like i said ? Do others have a use for something like this ? I do, but I cant use it.
Google is the kind of company to face the legal ramifications from Apple, if there were / are any, for doing this type of thing. The simple act of Google releasing this says alot.
Yes. I can now access my computers remotely and securely from my iPhone. Having sftp-server on the phone gives me filesystem access -- either via GUI drag-n-drop FUSE drivers or sftp clients or from CLI via sftp or ssh -- from
any OS. That includes classic Mac OS and Linux, too. It also opens the gate for SSH tunneling as well, which can help in those scenarios of being on a public Wi-Fi network and still wanting to securely connect to email or computers.
Having sftp-server has greatly simplified the process of tossing ringtones on, and various other functions. Having a Terminal right on the iPhone is nice to have direct filesystem access from the phone and managing processes and implementing scripts. In short, with these and future developments it's finally become a mobile computer rather than a sandboxed device.
Even if you can't ssh out of the network, it's still nice to be able to ssh into computers within the network for diagnostic reasons. I've already used my phone to connect to my MacBook and kill a runaway process when it took a dump. Incidentally it was Finder when my iPhone's IP changed ...
Also, Google is not releasing this. Google has no affiliation with this. It's hosted on their open source code hosting page. If you read the TOS for Google Code, it states:
You understand that all information, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, messages or other materials ("Content") are the sole responsibility of the person from which such Content originated.
Sure, Apple can try to force Google to pull down the page -- not quite sure why they would, but I suppose they could -- but in that unlikely scenario, it'd move to SourceForge, BerliOS, or any other source hosting pages. They're not exactly breaking IP by releasing applications that utilize Apple's API whether or not that API is published.
EDIT: Looks like the threads were merged, because I didn't see half of these posts when I started this post a long while ago.
whateverandever covered the Google thing already.
