What is the blackdog USB linux sever?

It is a very small embedded linux computer that is about
the size of a deck of cards. It has 64 MB of RAM and either
256 or 512 MB of flash-card disk. Plug it in to the USB slot
of a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer and it allows you to
take control of the mouse, keyboard, and monitor so that you
are actually using the blackdog as your computer (it just
routes network traffic through the host's network connections).
Pull the thing out of the USB connector, move to another computer,
it boots in 2 secods and you can resume whatever you were doing
where you left off*. You can work securely even if the computer
you're using has a keyboard logger **.

* Seamless resume of projects is actually a "work in progress".

** Sorta true... true if you only use the biometric sensor built
into the blackdog and NEVER type in a password.

How does it work?

When you plug it in it pretends to be a CD. If you have auto-launch
set up on your Windows box (it is on by default for MS and Apple products)
then a little app is detected and automatically starts up a little
X server and network DHCP router, run by the host and which handles
all applications on the screen and routing the network traffic.

Once the host's daemon is running the blackdog then pretends to be
a network device and asks for an IP address, and the daemon provides
one so there is a little private subnet between the blackdog and the
host, and the host routes network requests through its real ethernet
gateway/network. The blackdog makes all of its files available via
samba and can launche terminals, games, browser, office tool, whatever is
installed on the blackdog.

Complete security is possible because the blackdog encrypts all of
its internal network traffic between it and the host with ssh, and
the blackdog can be configured to verify your identity by using the
thumb-print sensor rather than typing in your password. So as long
as you don't do anything on some remote server that requires you
to enter a password via the keyboard even a keystroke logger
can't grab your authentication key.

blackdog is based on debian so apt-get goodness is a feature.
Just about any debian package can be installed without recompile
because it has an x86 emulator (blackdog sports a PowerPC chip)
that can be installed. However, there are also tools for building
deb packages from source for the blackdog, so they expect a
bunch of user-built packages to proliferate.

So it is a mobile computer that can force any desktop
computer to be its thin server.

What can it be used for? One angle they are hoping to fill
is as a "dongle" for licenced software. The proprietary-ware
would be installed on the blackdog and would be licenced to
an individual, authenticated via thumbprint. The individual
could then access the closed source software wherever he or
she is, as long as they carry the dongle with them. To use
the rescricted code they just need to plug the gadget into
a USB port on the computer they are using. This would be a
way for software vendors to prevent password/keycode sharing
between colleagues.