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Got me thinking whether an application can detect if its running on a virtualized OS.

Found this : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/154163/detect-virtualized...

Whether something like this exists for our virtualized environment, we have to find out.

The point with any "blue pill / red pill" technology/experiment is that you can design it because you have "outside knowledge", you are outside the VM and know how the VM and the physical processor works. The knowledge required to detect of something is running as a simulation comes from outside the simulation. Even if by "miracle" you were to get this "outside knowledge", you wouldn't know whether it is real knowledge or something spitting a random result. You'd need to be "outside" to know that what you thought it was "spooky outside knowledge" actually was. Even in Matrix, the red pill is made via knowledge from outside The Matrix :) Think, how would Neo know if the outside the matrix experience weren't just an "acid trip"? He wouldn't, were it not for the "bending the laws of physics" phenomena that could be experienced by others too, but they were only possible because The Matrix was programmed to allow them in special circumstances, but you could still classify them as "science so advanced you can't distinguish it from magic" if you as a movie viewer didn't have the "outside knowledge".

Historically speaking "outside knowledge" is what we call as religion.

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