Writing this from a passively cooled (Streacom FC8 Evo) Linux PC with a Russian keyboard.

    # dmidecode 3.6
    Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
    SMBIOS 2.8 present.

    Handle 0x002C, DMI type 27, 15 bytes
    Cooling Device
        Temperature Probe Handle: 0x0029
        Type: <OUT OF SPEC>
        Status: <OUT OF SPEC>
        Cooling Unit Group: 1
        OEM-specific Information: 0x00000000
        Nominal Speed: Unknown Or Non-rotating
        Description: Cooling Dev 1

    Handle 0x002F, DMI type 27, 15 bytes
    Cooling Device
        Temperature Probe Handle: 0x0029
        Type: <OUT OF SPEC>
        Status: <OUT OF SPEC>
        Cooling Unit Group: 1
        OEM-specific Information: 0x00000000
        Nominal Speed: Unknown Or Non-rotating
        Description: Not Specified

    Handle 0x0037, DMI type 27, 15 bytes
    Cooling Device
        Temperature Probe Handle: 0x0036
        Type: Power Supply Fan
        Status: OK
        Cooling Unit Group: 1
        OEM-specific Information: 0x00000000
        Nominal Speed: Unknown Or Non-rotating
        Description: Cooling Dev 1

Sensor data:

    iwlwifi_1-virtual-0
    Adapter: Virtual device
    temp1:        +59.0°C  

    acpitz-acpi-0    # Fake, always reports these temperatures
    Adapter: ACPI interface
    temp1:        +27.8°C  
    temp2:        +29.8°C  

    coretemp-isa-0000
    Adapter: ISA adapter
    Package id 0:  +51.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +92.0°C)
    Core 0:        +51.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +92.0°C)
    Core 1:        +47.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +92.0°C)
    Core 2:        +49.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +92.0°C)
    Core 3:        +49.0°C  (high = +86.0°C, crit = +92.0°C)

Passively cooled PC probably won't work because the board will still have fan headers even if nothing is connected to them.

Genode / SculptOS[0] go this direction. Before starting any process, you craft a view of the hardware resources it will see. Applications come with resource request definitions which you can satisfy by attaching real, virtual, or null resource.

It's a pretty neat system; runs Doom, so we know it's production ready; and the source is meticulously organized.

The docs try to be overly general, IMHO, clouding the core ideas. If you're interested, I recommend just spinning up a VM and mucking about, along with the user guide.

[0]:https://genode.org/download/sculpt

Anti-cheat software vendors would lose as well. I prefer the software I run to know its place, but there are enough people who enjoy multiplayer games that hate cheaters more than they hate what amounts to spyware.

> simply making a normal OS look like a virtual machine

Or perhaps the other way around?

That is making VMs totally unaware they've been virtualised, as I believe IBM's lpars work…

"Simply"

This is a huge, huge, huge amount of work. Even the most obvious things -- like "can you run a VM?" -- can require huge support, in that case even from the hardware, when you want to do them within a VM.

Welcome to mobile development.

Oh please no. That would make using PC and writing apps a chore. There is a reason why nobody really works with mobile OS or Chrome OS.

Isn’t this exactly the idea with Flatpak on Linux and Sandbox on Mac?

> I am yet to see _any_ consumer-oriented motherboard where SMBIOS descriptions have even a passing relationship to the actual hardware.

This seems to be especially true for cheap chineese boxes. If I had a dollar for every time I saw "to be filled in by OEM" strings in "live/production" BIOS images ... i'd be retired :).

Malware has bugs. In fact some viruses have done far more damage than the author intended due to bugs.

There was a substantially effective virus years ago that made it around the world in 90 minutes, and it turns out a bug in its networking code caused it to spread half as fast as it should have. Meaning it should have been everywhere in 45 minutes. You can still do a lot of damage without hitting every machine in existence.

How does Linux find the fans these days? Is it an ACPI/EFI thing now? Nearly all my machines seem to have correct fans/sensors.

Is it the actual malware checking this or some researcher-created malware samples?

Malware is signed surprisingly often these days, you can't rely on malware companies not to sign their binaries anymore. Hacked code signing certificates seem to be all over the place and Microsoft seems very reluctant to revoke trust out of fear of actually breaking their original customers' software.

Same goes for the common vulnerable drivers that malware likes to load so they can get into the kernel. A weird tiny binary making WMI calls may stand out, but a five year old overclocking utility full of vulnerabilities doing the same queries wouldn't.

From the research I've read, this doesn't seem to be about avoiding detection as much as it's about not detonating the real payload on a malware analyst's machine. If the AV flags the binary or the detection trips, the second stage isn't downloaded and the malware that does stuff that makes the news doesn't execute (yet).

The trick is to become a company like "CrowdStrike", get your crappy software that runs at kernel level signed, then you can run all of the "suspicious" calls to sys apis all you want. Forget determining if it’s a VM or not.

Just push untested code/releases on production machines across all of your customers. Then watch the world burn, flights get delayed, critical infrastructure gets hammered, _real_ people get impacted.

_Legitimate_ companies have done more damage to American companies than black hat hackers or state actors can ever dream of.

The folks behind xz util within libzma aspire to cause the amount of damage companies like ClownStrike and SolarWinds have caused.

So, from a security perspective, maybe we should run all software inside a VM then?

Anti virus software just guessing what is and isn’t malware by analysing static calls is actually really annoying. If you’re doing that then why not just make an allow list of trusted software and mark any software not in that list as being malware. It’ll work just about the same.

I surely hope there are no windows XP thermostats.

[dead]

> simulated temperature sensors that actually change in response to CPU load.

Or maybe just increments to absurd numbers or negative values. Or locks up when probed. Either way could be fun.

isn't this what initiatives like Ad Nauseam do?

Also see the effort people go through to fake out minecraft/roblox so they can run via a VM

> (2) What if there were other tables that also helped with that goal? Your patch doesn't include them.

If there's anything I've painfully learned in my career, is to not let perfect get in the way of good enough.

If you don't mind sharing, what's your exact setup? Fanless laptop (having read many of your previous comments - and found them very inspring -, I'm aware of your modest/text-only needs) or something really spartan like a USB-booting OS, etc? Many thanks.

FYI: You need two line breaks to force an actual break on HN, or you need to indent each line by two to force code mode.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is a blog post, not a journal. I don't think he should be policing his language in his own work.

I found that jarring as well. I'm all for mixing in a jovial, even immature tone to keep technical blog posts interesting but at the very least I'd prefer to keep it non-vulgar.

Personal sites are like the last bastions of free speech on the internet, you really want to censor that because it may offend someone who is voluntarily reading it?

Now that would be a big brain play

Our language? Whose language is that, person in the link aggregator comment section of someone else's blog post?

I wouldn't bet on it. A guy in my city has a "SML PP" custom license plate. I'm not sure on the reasoning either.

I would sooner remove posts calling people out for harmless jokes as if they were a moral offense.

No.

[flagged]

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Every once in a while I manage to forget I’m a woman in a space that’s not friendly to women, and then I come across something like this.

Because they think it's funny. Personally, I just found it off-putting and stopped reading.

> what people in this world have become.

When where we different?

Of everything going on at the moment, like senseless wars, countries plagued by mass child abuse or forced organ harvesting, you chose to question the humanity's worth because of a smol pp joke?