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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
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Microsoft Store Gets Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora Linux
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:25PM (8 children)
There is a reason why many *nix users are willing to use a MS VM. The VM can be jailed, quite nicely, and examined. All traffic can be intercepted, easily, and examined. Or, traffic can be stopped cold, if that's what you want. With a MS VM on Linux, Microsoft is tamed, and secure, or at least as secure as you want/need it to be.
So, Microsoft is providing a "subsystem" for Linux. Awesome. As AC asks, what does uname -a report? Does the Linux know that it is inside of a VM, or is it ignorant of that fact? I won't even ask about Microsoft monitoring. All that telemetry is "good" for you, because it ensures everything runs correctly, right?
"Subsystem". Alright, we won't call it a hypervisor, or any of the other more common names. But, bottom line, Microsoft will control Linux. Which means, it ain't really Linux.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday May 14 2017, @05:46PM (3 children)
The NSA will also have a nice built-in keylogger and accompanying "telemetry".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @11:36AM (2 children)
The NSA will also have a nice built-in keylogger and accompanying "telemetry".
You guys are all behaving as though the Linux project is not compromised and feeding data to the NSA. Unless you're using one of a very few distributions that have refused insecure by design software products such as systemd (and so many more, I could start a sidebar just to list them) and insecure by design practices such as automatic updates, chances are your linux box is watching you anyway.
Here's a clue. If you are anywhere near a box, large or small that has eyes, ears and a chattery connection to billions of other similar boxes, assume such boxes are watching you, listening to you and talking to each other about it. If you assume your operating system is secure because so and so is a great guy and somebody had the time on their hands to go through a gazillion lines of code and make sure there is nothing malicious in the linux kernel or any of the user space, you are deluding yourself. All popular systems are compromised and it is so by design.
Lots of people got rich building a fantastic surveillance system for even richer people to use to watch us and I'm busy using that surveillance system to talk about that surveillance system. Would you expect anything else from the post-modern pre-apocalyptic era?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday May 15 2017, @09:56PM (1 child)
This can be easily verified with an appropriate router that lets you inspect the data going back and forth.
People made the same claim about MacOS/OSX/whateverkidscallitthesedays, and someone went ahead and did an actual test. When they disabled Siri, iCloud, error reporting, and all the other cloudy bits, OSX didn't send so much as a single bit back to Apple, or anywhere else for that matter, that the user didn't didn't specifically ask for.
The Linux ecosystem may not be as iron fisted as Apple, but I'm inclined to believe that such an experiment would have a similar result.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @12:15PM
disabled Siri, iCloud, error reporting
um.... yeah these so called features and their alikes on other systems are the trojan horses. this is how your information is getting to the NSA, et. al. automatic updates is how they open and close backdoors in your system. this stuff is obvious to anybody who has been using computers since before the shit soup that passes for an operating system these days
can we have a a bug duh for the dunces
thanks
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday May 14 2017, @07:13PM (1 child)
Most likely it doesn't even know it's not Linux but a syscall layer on top of the Windows kernel which looks like Linux. GNU/Lindows sounds more appropriate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @11:38AM
Agreed, it is not Linux, it is the GNU userland running on top of windows by faking a linux interface to system calls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @10:23PM
Yup. A FOSS OS inside a proprietary VM under a proprietary OS??
That's doing it exactly backwards.
Avoid the NSA backdoors in Windoze during your main OS activities by using Linux as your main/host OS.
If you have a Windoze-only app that you simply can't break away from, put -that- stuff in a VM running under Linux.
The Telemetry thing is greatly reduced this way.
As an AC way down the (meta)thread notes (and Roy Schestowitz said the other day), this is the first E in E,E,E.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @07:48AM
It's not a VM, it's a subsystem on top of the NT kernel, like the Win32 subsystem and the earlier Posix and OS/2 subsystems. The subsystem provides Linux system calls and translates them to NT system calls.
It's more comparable to Wine, which provides Win32 system calls and translates them to Linux system calls.
If uname returns "Linux" for the kernel name, rather than "NT", it's lying. But this is Microsoft we are talking about, so I'd be surprised if they are not lying.