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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

The "findings" you are describing are characteristic of security-conscious users suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

This is not an isolated incident. The "badBIOS" incident reported by Dragos Ruiu a few years ago ([1]) had many of the same characteristics as what you are reporting:

• Vague symptoms, affecting all computers (and, often, even non-computer devices) owned by the individual

• Inability to isolate the agent involved

• Belief that widely publicized exploits or discoveries are involved, often in the absence of any evidence (e.g, DirtyCOW here, ultrasonic networking in Dragos' case)

Please seek psychiatric help.

[1]: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609622/security/4-reasons-...

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If you're going to respond empathetically to someone who you think needs help, it's important to distinguish that from a personal attack. This comment doesn't do that—indeed it almost seems like you're invoking "psychiatric help" as ammunition in an argument, which would be bannable offence here.

It's almost a moot point. Given the underlying pathology, any attempt at all to discredit this type of delusion* will necessarily be seen as a part of the conspiracy, and hence as an attack. No amount of empathy will help.

But I certainly see what you mean; I was probably too quick to use that stock phrase. My intent here wasn't to argue, because I know that's impossible; it was more to identify the pathology to others. Would my comment have been fine without the last line? (I'm assuming that you were the one to flag it.)

*: and I mean that in the psychiatric sense, not as an insult

I think you'd need both to drop the last line and reword the first line, because otherwise it's too easy to read as invoking a psychiatric category as snark.

There's probably a way of making this point that's fine, but it would require pre-emptively distinguishing your comment from the obvious misinterpretations. Which is tedious, but such is the way communication on a large forum needs to work, or else people just react and attack.

Except I have isolated the code and can reproduce it on demand, and have the photo's & video's as evidence so nice try.

However having just read this https://www.facebook.com/dragosr/posts/10151655183445588 I can see he has explained much of what I was witnessing on some systems as well.

Cant rule out a modern day version of one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel considering the Windows MSR partition I have copies of which effectively stripes the Windows Partition as well.

Some people are desperate to keep this quiet though, so perhaps suggesting what you have is your way to introduce doubt into an argument which is after all a valid debating technique.

With all due respect, everything you said sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory. If you have isolated this case, write a blog post of how to reproduce it, post said photos & videos, so people might at least take their time to read it. I'm sure with all the experts here on HN somebody would provide an explanation. There are hell lots of processes happening at modern system boot time, if it does something you don't understand, it doesn't necessarily mean malware.

" The OS's seem to actively hide the malware if you use a hex editor to scan the drive or infected files, so over time, some of that open source code has become compromised"

This part, in particular, I find hard to believe. You can inspect open source system and compile everything yourself. Did you try to reproduce this behavior on minimal systems (i.e. BeagleBone) or QEMU?

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