4 ms·

Boot Camp is a secret weapon? It costs $70? I'm confused. Could they not get a free VM and then download an image from modern.ie?

by talmand 13y ago

LarrySDonald 13y ago
You'd imagine so. It wouldn't be legal though since modern.ie is for testing purposes only. Though I highly doubt anyone much would care if someone ran vitualbox and a copy of XP/Vista or something. I suppose in a sense it becomes a bit of a worry if you run too lightweight on the VM which after all will have to contain your banking credentials (sort of the opposite of firing up a VM when you're doing something that feels too sketchy to run on the main system).
rsfinn 13y ago
The original article is confusing. Boot Camp is of course free, but only permits rebooting a Mac into Windows. For $70 one could purchase VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, and run Windows side by side with OS X. The author of the Washington Post piece does not make this clear. Calling Boot Camp a "secret weapon" suggests that most people aren't aware that Apple computers can run Windows. This may be true in the wider world, although any Apple employee in a retail store could inform customers otherwise. Expecting a writer not focused on technology to discuss gratis tools like VirtualBox and modern.ie is probably asking too much (although these would be well within the reach of Hacker News readers).
lifthrasiir 13y ago
Many native "security" solutions required by websites, e.g. anti-keyloggers and antiviruses, would block the VM. They also tend to trigger weird problems in the VM, e.g. some of them makes the entire desktop fail to respond to any events. (What?)
- talmand 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, how would the security applications know that it was being run on a VM? Why would they care? That suggests they believe no one has a legitimate reason to run Windows in a VM.
  - cnvogel 13y ago
    On Detection: There are a few things that leak presence of a virtual machine to running code (even in userspace). There are the easy signs, e.g. that the virtualbox guest kernel-modules or utility programs for clipboard exchange are running. Or that your harddisk controller has a PCI ID identifying it as a Oracle Virtualbox AHCI device. But on a hardware-virtualized machine there are also numerous inconsistencies to be observed which are not influencing the correct execution of "normal" code, but leak the existance of the hypervisor to the guest OS (and sometimes even to non-privileged user-code in the guest OS). Google for "Red Pill VM detection", unfortunately currently invisiblethings.org (the site of the author) seems to be unavailable.
- beagle3 13y ago
  Should be easy to foil their detection with e.g. a patch to QEMU (or just running QEMU in full system emulation mode with accelerator - x3 or so slower, but ... would serve the purpose). Would this be illegal under SK law?

Boot Camp is a secret weapon? It costs $70? I'm confused. Could they not get a free VM and then download an image from modern.ie?

by talmand 13y ago

Boot Camp is a secret weapon? It costs $70? I'm confused. Could they not get a free VM and then download an image from modern.ie?

LarrySDonald 13y ago

You'd imagine so. It wouldn't be legal though since modern.ie is for testing purposes only. Though I highly doubt anyone much would care if someone ran vitualbox and a copy of XP/Vista or something. I suppose in a sense it becomes a bit of a worry if you run too lightweight on the VM which after all will have to contain your banking credentials (sort of the opposite of firing up a VM when you're doing something that feels too sketchy to run on the main system).

rsfinn 13y ago

The original article is confusing. Boot Camp is of course free, but only permits rebooting a Mac into Windows. For $70 one could purchase VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, and run Windows side by side with OS X. The author of the Washington Post piece does not make this clear. Calling Boot Camp a "secret weapon" suggests that most people aren't aware that Apple computers can run Windows. This may be true in the wider world, although any Apple employee in a retail store could inform customers otherwise. Expecting a writer not focused on technology to discuss gratis tools like VirtualBox and modern.ie is probably asking too much (although these would be well within the reach of Hacker News readers).

lifthrasiir 13y ago

Many native "security" solutions required by websites, e.g. anti-keyloggers and antiviruses, would block the VM. They also tend to trigger weird problems in the VM, e.g. some of them makes the entire desktop fail to respond to any events. (What?)

talmand 13y ago
Out of curiosity, how would the security applications know that it was being run on a VM? Why would they care? That suggests they believe no one has a legitimate reason to run Windows in a VM.
- cnvogel 13y ago
  On Detection: There are a few things that leak presence of a virtual machine to running code (even in userspace). There are the easy signs, e.g. that the virtualbox guest kernel-modules or utility programs for clipboard exchange are running. Or that your harddisk controller has a PCI ID identifying it as a Oracle Virtualbox AHCI device. But on a hardware-virtualized machine there are also numerous inconsistencies to be observed which are not influencing the correct execution of "normal" code, but leak the existance of the hypervisor to the guest OS (and sometimes even to non-privileged user-code in the guest OS). Google for "Red Pill VM detection", unfortunately currently invisiblethings.org (the site of the author) seems to be unavailable.
beagle3 13y ago
Should be easy to foil their detection with e.g. a patch to QEMU (or just running QEMU in full system emulation mode with accelerator - x3 or so slower, but ... would serve the purpose). Would this be illegal under SK law?