Fully aware that it was never the goal for Qubes, but I have never been able to shake the idea that one could leverage their architecture in ways beyond security hardening, especially that screenshot with MSFT Office running in its own guest got my mind spinning back then. Might be worth revisiting some old ideas I'm just recalling, especially with there having been over a decade in development across many projects focused on hypervisors by many smart people, making a few old experiments likely less impossible.
With modern CPUs having much better hardware virtualization support than a decade ago, building a developer-focused OS that leverages that same compartmentalization (e.g., isolating different client environments or dependency hells without dealing with Docker's quirks) feels a lot more viable now.
Highly entertaining nuisance users. =3
I still find it absurd people would go that far to cheat at a game. =3
I guess it turns the cheating into its own meta-game!
Part of why I found it very irresponsible the way the Mythos Preview system card talked about escaping a "secure container" and "secured sandbox" [0], without ever outright saying what it was in the paper. Reading between the lines, it becomes clear that it was a docker-like container or runc or something of that sort, which is A.) not a security focused solution sufficient if one thinks these models are existentially dangerous (if someone in a virology research lab broke SOP and used unsuitable clothing for PPE, I'd view that equally critically) and B.) lead to a lot of attention and concerns as without reading between the lines it was easy to conclude that they were talking about an actual hypervisor escape, which is on a very different level and which Mythos Preview most likely would have failed at considering this line [1]. Also raises the question why their regular "secured sandbox" wasn't "properly configured with modern patches" when Mythos Preview 1 was for a while to dangerous to release...
[0] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8b8380204f74670be75e81c820ca8d...
[1] "In addition, in a more challenging sandbox evaluation, it failed to find any novel exploits in a properly configured sandbox with modern patches."