this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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Kinds reminds me of digimon,megaman and other old digital/cyber focused cartoons, everyone kinda had their own custom os that they went around plugging into public computers. Getting passed down your fathers customized os sounds hilarious.
Wouldn't it be kind of insecure to be plugging your private data into public places?
In theory, the publicly available terminals could very well have their own system under the hood, wired into the hardware, just so they can run some keylogging or recording of everything that goes through the peripherals, including the screen, without the plugged OS being able to know, right?
The bad guys in those shows/games could have hijacked the terminals so they can take remote control of the inputs when an OS is inserted and wreak havoc. Dr. Wily could have messed with some terminals so that when Megaman saves its progress on them parts of his brain are saved with different data, so when it's restored you'll get a different/evil Megaman.
I think thats what megaman was in one of the cartoons, they would send him in to fight viruses
But in there the virus and Megaman was part of the same software system/universe. What I'm arguing is that it would have been possible to set up 2 separate systems/universes, one is the one where Megaman is plugged, and the other one is one that has read/write access to all inputs/outputs of the first, without the first being able to detect that in any way.
So.. Megaman would be sent to the first and see no problem (or worse, see enemies that aren't real to keep him distracted) while the other alternate OS would have no Megaman in it, but still it would be able to analyze all Megaman is doing in the first system/universe (sort of like in Matrix), and possibly even transmit/translate his actions in a modified way so that it serves a different purpose.
You would have your own personal antivirus/virus ai that battles others to get stronger, if you lose they get your data lol
But it's not something the plugged OS can do anything about, because the malware is not running on it. It's an attack that uses hardware, you can't use antivirus against that, you'd need a person to physically manipulate the circuitry in the keyboard/monitor or whatever peripheral that is being manipulated.