[mcculley]

This is great. That a program can learn about and exploit the CPU on which it is running from unprivileged userspace reminds me of the notion in Charlie Stross' Accelerando of running a timing attack against the universe to learn about the virtual machine in which we are being simulated.

[michaelmior]

It would be even better if there was a web service that would collect these logs for different processors so everyone didn't have to invest the time to run the analysis.

[tux1968]

Well they do mention in the description:

The results of a scan can sometimes be difficult for the tools to automatically classify, and may require manual analysis. For help analyzing your results, feel free to send the ./data/log file to [e-mail]. No personal information, other than the processor make, model, and revision (from /proc/cpuinfo) are included in this log.

[collinmanderson]

It would be nice if there were something like Geekbench where it publicly listed the results from different processors.

[michaelmior]

That's great, but doesn't solve the problem of how long it takes to run a scan.

[qubex]

I'd never heard of Charlie Stross or his Accelerando book. Thanks for mentioning that, it looks right up my hard-sci-fi alley.

[vsviridov]

Then definitely also check out the Quantum Thief trilogy, by Hannu Rajaniemi.

[eridius]

Amusingly, the cover of The Quantum Thief (at least on iBooks) has the following quote:

> "The best first SF novel I've read in years. Hard to admit, but I think he's better at this stuff than I am." -Charles Stross

[moomin]

I remain completely unmoved by HR's output. But I'm most definitely in the minority.

[okreallywtf]

Seconded, in the beginning it almost has a fantasy vibe since what it describes for the most part is so advanced it almost seems magical, but stick with it because it is fantastic.

[moomin]

He actually posts on here from time to time...

He's fairly prolific and very talented. The only one of his books I wouldn't particularly recommend is his first. The sequel's great, though.

Many of his straight up thrillers e.g. Saturn's Children have well realised universes they inhabit.

[pmarreck]

I believe there was also a Rick & Morty episode about this (of course...)

[winter_blue]

You mean the first episode of the third season where Rick breaks out of the virtual reality interrogation room he was in, by simply presenting some data (i.e. equations) that turned out to be code that took control of the system?

[anigbrowl]

Posting spoilers is not clever.

[winter_blue]

Sorry, I should've just mentioned the season & episode number. Or nothing at all.

I would like to delete the comment, but it seems I just passed the 2-hour mark wherein editing/deletion is possible, and I can't remove it.

[anigbrowl]

Oh well, we've all made similar mistakes :)