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>in fact if you're going to do malware stuff like this, why even ask?

Just a guess, but probably plausible deniability reasons for when they're inevitably brought to court.

there is no plausable deniability if it does something different in a VM. that takes active coding to set up, there is no reason anyone would ever have any code that has this effect.

There are PLENTY of reasons to code your application to act differently based on environment... while many of them may be bad, not all of them are.

Some abuse this to make speed tools run faster, ala Graphic Card tests that run faster when it detects NVidia/AMD... some abuse it to skirt protections in VMs...

Do we need to ban torrents because a lot of torrents are illicit materials? Ban bitcoins, because some people use it for drugs? Ban tor?

I was only referring to the "why even ask?" part of your post. They most likely ask during the installation for liability purposes.

VM behavior or not, asking or not, I've hoped they get in legal trouble for this as soon as I knew about it, but of course, IANAL.

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