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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Now we just have to wait until that method gets abused enough by devs and microsoft ends up spoofing that too.

There's an ultimate future-proof solution, though: just generate, in a loop, a series of assemblies that each purport compatibility with Windows ABI vX.Y.Z; spawn those in a separate process; and get them to return what version of Windows they perceive. Once the number stops going up, that's the version you're on.

No real way to get around that without misinforming fresh, valid applications.

> just generate, in a loop, a series of assemblies that each purport compatibility with Windows ABI vX.Y.Z

The Microsoft developers already thought of that trick. What you declare is not compatibility with "Windows ABI vX.Y.Z"; you declare compatibility with an UUID which represents that Windows version. That is, if you're compatible with Windows 8 you say "I'm compatible with 4a2f28e3-53b9-4441-ba9c-d69d4a4a6e38", if you're compatible with Windows 8.1 you say "I'm compatible with 1f676c76-80e1-4239-95bb-83d0f6d0da78", and so on. Since you cannot predict the UUID for future Windows versions, you cannot pretend to be compatible with them.

> Since you cannot predict the UUID for future Windows versions, you cannot pretend to be compatible with them.

Until a clueless product manager tells you to just iterate through all possible UUIDs to check :)

If I had a dollar every time I had to explain this to a PM or a CISO (!!)...

Is there any API you can go through to get the UUID of the current ABI, all the ones seen by the system, or all of the ones for each windows ABI without network access?

Trivially, you grab the UUIDs from a server somewhere. A smarter trick is to get these UUIDs from the system you're running on.

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