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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I would be in favor of a VM that is indistinguishable from a non-VM host. Is there any project that helps bring such functionality to, say, VirtualBox?

Not because I encourage cheating, but because I should never have to install proprietary software on my personal machine to take an exam. I will however on occasion grudingly be okay with installing closed-source software inside of a VM.

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Malware often tries to do the same "am I running in a VM" checks to evade researchers' attempts to analyse it, and of course people want VMs in general to become indistinguishable from physical machines, so you're in good company.

Looks like there's one here: https://github.com/hfiref0x/VBoxHardenedLoader/blob/master/B...

Alternately, it seems that QEMU on linux does a pretty good job as well.

Do you have any proprietary code running on your machine, or would you just not install any to take an exam?

I run Linux and I don't believe I have any closed-source code on my machine at the moment that's not inside of a VM except for NVIDIA drivers.

I usually use VMs if I need to run anything closed source.

You don't need to be entirely vegan about closed-source to care about this issue though; there is a notion of a person trusting certain companies' closed source code over others. That is a thing. For example I would probably trust something like Photoshop slightly more than some random exam company's outsourced exam app.

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