Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Microsoft just announced that three different versions of the free Linux operating system — Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora — are coming to the Windows Store, the app market in Windows 10.
It sounds weird, but it makes perfect sense. In early 2016, Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), a way for developers to use full versions of Linux within Windows 10 itself.
Putting aside the historical ramifications here — Microsoft spent the 90s unsuccessfully trying to stamp out Linux, a free alternative to Windows — it was a move intended to bait programmers into using Windows 10.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-store-gets-ubuntu-suse-fedora-linux-2017-5
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:05PM (1 child)
What does uname -a report under Ubuntu on Windows?
Occurred to me I would like to be able to check if running under windows so applications could report that their security is insecure for purposes of ensuring conversations are not intentionally logged by unauthorized third parties. (M$/NSA)
That is actually something worth submitting to security conscious open source projects that run on both Windows and Linux. If running on Windows 7-10 and using pidgin+otr for instance, it should send a warning during initial private conversation handshake that the user is running an operating system that may be logging you even if neither end is.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:50PM
I think uname won't give it away. But the finer details of syscalls and timing response probably will or simple low level calls /dev/io /dev/mem or ip_raw etc.. Another approach is to try to grab some hardware resource that Microsoft also want and then push by testing that not only is the operation permitted at open() but it will also work when operation are commenced and returned.