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"The system is absolutely network-silent except when you actively do something that requires network access, like using the browser. It does not call the mother
by marcodiego 5y ago
"The system is absolutely network-silent except when you actively do something that requires network access, like using the browser. It does not call the mothership, not for updates, not for telemetry, not to let Kim Jong Un know the status of your internal organs. Spoiler, he doesn’t give a fuck about your hentai porn. "
Take that, Microsoft!
- 404mm 5y agoI recall reading a different “review” a few years back and they found it calling back home.
- danielvaughn 5y agoIn a former job, I had to inspect network traffic on my mac. So I install Charles, open it up, and start looking around. I was astounded how much network activity is going on that I had no idea about.
- dannyw 5y agoApple would never write software that scans your files and reports material your XOR USG does not like, without your knowledge.
- glitchc 5y agoThis must be sarcasm.
- jraph 5y agoThis is an instance of "X would never do Y" with Y a quite specific thing. Which I usually take for sarcasm. Here I'm quite sure it is a reference to a quite recent event.
- Iolaum 5y agoYes it is: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/if-you-build-it-they-will-come-apple-has-opened-backdoor-increased-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/if-you-build-it-they-w...
- tankenmate 5y agoPoe's Law in action.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- wikidani 5y agoThere was a linux distro I checked out a few years ago that routed every connection through tor and also asked for permission for every app connecting to the internet and I was similarly astounded by the fact that pretty much everything is sending some sort of data and people knew nothing about
- handrous 5y agoYeah, even Linux is crazy-chatty these days. I miss sniffing packets on a home or small office network and being able to follow what was going on without any filters. Now even on a smallish network, all your "idle" devices are spitting out packets constantly, so with "nothing going on" WireShark scrolls so fast with 20+ different interwoven conversations that it's impossible to follow. And god forbid you have any browser tabs open, since so many chat constantly in the background now. Everyone decided that "telemetry" isn't spying and is totally fine (it obviously fucking is and it absolutely is not, respectively). Plus stuff like Bonjour came along.
- beebeepka 5y agoWhich distro are you talking about?
- reaperducer 5y agoMacs have always had incredible network use, even way back in the dialup days when I started working with them. The software seems to be designed to assume a perfect, exceedingly fat network connection at all times, and that all processes can do what they want with it. In all the years I've been using Macs, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the OS that says, "Oh, the person is sending e-mail over a crappy cellular connection. Maybe now is not the best time to download a multi-gigabyte software update." I don't know what the situation is like on the Windows side, but I've always assumed that Apple bungs gigabit ethernet into the houses and cubicles of all of its developers, and they never have to connect to things in the real world.
- mistrial9 5y agothis needs clarification -- the Operating System under Mac OSX is designed during the Great-TCPIP-Expansion, and is NOT chatty, in fact things that were chatty were slapped down regularly. Since then, the MBAs at Apple Inc have built their "I Phoney" world, and certainly have added stupid chat. The details matter, for those that wish to move forward
- calvano915 5y agoWindows allows the user to mark a connection as limited/metered which supposedly reduces background usage of services like OneDrive and Windows Update. I'm not aware of the degree of impact and what is allowed despite the setting. There is a secondary mechanism to reduce background usage when enabling Battery Saver mode.
- SturgeonsLaw 5y agoWindows updates (and other first and third party downloads) can be downloaded through the background intelligent transfer service (BITS) which uses idle bandwidth, and throttles the download when something else is using the pipe.
- iggldiggl 5y agoThen along came Windows 10 and its so-called Delivery Optimization Service (should rather be called Denial-of-Service service), which spams literally dozens of simultaneous TCP connections for downloading updates and thereby effectively monopolises your whole home's internet connection. (Don't know if this has ever been fixed because I've since kept Delivery Optimization turned off and rely on BITS instead, which does indeed seem to work without causing any bandwidth shortage incidents).
- _adamb 5y agoThis could be true, or it could recognize that it is running in a VM and change its behavior. This is a somewhat common trait of malware meant to throw off security researchers.
- dheera 5y agoWhy are VMs so bad at virtualizing? An ideal VM should be indistinguishable from a real machine. For example a virtualized system running Android should generate fake IMU data, not sit at 0 linear acceleration all the time. And have a real-looking fake IMEI, not a string of 0s.
- LeanderK 5y agoI talked to a security researcher about it a few years ago and as I understood it it's a cat and mouse game. They are trying to mimic real phones but the malware authors always find a new way to tell whether it's fake.
- imwillofficial 5y agoI’m not aware of any steps security researches take to obscure the fact they are running in a VM from malware.
- luch 5y agonow you do : https://github.com/Cisco-Talos/vboxhardening https://github.com/Cisco-Talos/vboxhardening
- imwillofficial 5y agoThank you!
- rwmj 5y agoHi, virt engineer here. Partly because it a very hard problem (in fact, theoretically impossible if you include timing attacks), but mainly because you don't need to emulate the hardware very accurately in order to get common operating systems to run. Getting them to run is all that we're paid to do, and that's a difficult enough job already. One strange aspect of this is that only a narrow range of current OSes run under virtualization. Qemu is great for running, say, current versions of Linux or Windows, but absolutely terrible if you try to run Linux 1.0 or Windows 95 or Solaris/x86 or any uncommon OS. (I tried a few of these several years ago out of curiosity, and none of them would even boot.) The reason is that we don't emulate enough of the corner cases in CPUs and devices to run those operating systems. eg. The SATA device only emulates the commands issued by drivers of modern operating systems, not every single command and dark corner of the real hardware. To be fair there are emulators that try much harder to be cycle accurate, especially the ones designed to run old games. The MisTER is the current king here, but that uses an expensive FPGA and can just about emulate a 486 PC.
- npteljes 5y agoThis is something that black-box testing can never really verify. Behavior could be altered by the VM, by detecting that it's not in NK, be triggered sometime later, after typing an entry from a list, and so on. And it's not like Microsoft gives too much fuck about anyone's hentai porn.
- hulitu 5y agoMicrosoft not, but one of their client maybe.
- nix23 5y agoThe NSA i pretty interested in nudes and hentai.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoHa, since MS is selling ads (e.g. [1], [2]), they really should (/s) profile your por^W media viewing habits, and sell ad space to por^W media providers. "Hey, you enjoy hentai (based on hashes of videos you watched last month, yes, we know you watched cumulatively 15 hours of the stuff, and hours more searching for them on torrent sites), enjoy 15% off of premium subscription to hentaihub, this month only!" [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-later/ https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la... , HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29288052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29288052 [2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-other_settings/how-to-remove-ads-from-start-menu-in-windows-10/30908161-88fc-4b85-9968-b7a3c06d1524 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
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