I had no idea this issue had been identified. While I find this tool very useful, the project is seeming rather questionable to me now.
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I cannot fathom what in this issue description gives rise to your concern. It’s worded very calmly, clearly explaining why the author thinks these BLOBs shouldn’t be there, expressing an understanding that it’s not a top priority and even closing with a thank you.
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Is this not rude:
I checked the code and I’m appalled. There are more BLOBs than source code
No. The commenter is voicing their own feelings and explains why they have them. There is neither blaming nor rudeness here.
And this:
I understand that removing BLOBs isn’t a priority over new and shiny features. But due to recent events, this should be rethought.
It would have been nice if you had explained why you think this is rude. The author expresses understanding that the maintainers’ priorities don’t align with the author’s. This seems to be an uncontroversial statement to me.
Then the author explains (I agree, it’s more a hint than an explanation) why they think the priorities should be changed. In my view their argument is sound. Again, there is no blaming or rudeness here.
They should have opened with a complement
I assume you mean “compliment”.
I’ve often heard of the “sandwich technique” – start with a compliment, then voice criticism, end with another positive thing. I find this is an appropriate procedure when voicing open feedback, that is, good things and bad things. However, this is a Github issue. Its whole point is to point out a perceived problem, not to give the maintainers a pat on the back or thank them.
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maybe everyone here is just a rude little shit.
Or maybe you’re just a snowflake that can’t handle criticism.
Actually you can and should Gordon Ramsey all over it. It is the duty of audience members to express how they feel honestly about the artwork.
Open Source can and do understand that and open source software becomes better for it.
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I mean the author has simply ignored this issue. If you look into it there are a few that people simply do not know how to generate, so without the maintainer it’s impossible to make a PR solving this.
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I mean, people are allowed to have opinions. They may not be good opinions but thats the glory of opinions. You can Gordon Ramsey someone’s codebase, and someone else can Gordon Ramsey their comment, as you just did.
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Hm, so now people suddenly notice and care about this? lol
First I’m hearing of it and I’m starting to question my security given I installed my OS using it.
I never trusted it because I thought it was completely proprietary. Well now I know it basically is.
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Thank you for sharing this. I remember using Ventoy quite often back when I was still on Windows. I’ll be sticking with the good old
ddcommand.I love double d
Good ol’ disk destroyer
Any alternatives to this tool? I’ve used it a lot lately because I was testing out live OSes before installing one to the hard drive, but otherwise I don’t need it on a daily basis.
but otherwise I don’t need it on a daily basis.
I’ll be real, this is part of why I didn’t understand Ventoy. I keep a bunch of large, fast thumbdrives around blank and available. When I need/want to put an OS on there, I do it when I need it, and then I’m always installing the most current version of the install. It takes under 5 minutes, at best.
I used to try to keep various installs on thumbdrives… but it would be two years down the line by the time I needed to use it again and by that time it’s literally pointless to be using two year old installation media.
Ventoy wasn’t a foolproof solution but it really did beat the hell out of using 6 different USB drives. Most USB “pen drives” don’t make labeling easy and without labeling I’m just plugging them in one by one till I find the one I want.
I remember various different concepts of USB flash drives with integrated LCDs that would display a label and the remaining capacity. Then they vanished and the only thing left were the Lexar Echo drives. Until a few years ago, when they have been pulled from the markets. Probably, because they didn’t work with the now default GPT and its many different partition types.
IODD makes some. I had the older HDD version that stopped working after it got dropped, so now I use this one:
https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-SSD-drive-with-mini-USB-30-with-secure-256-bit-encryption
As someone with few USBs available, Ventoy takes me 2 minutes to flash, several minutes to copy a set of ISOs, and then any time I need it, it takes 0 minutes to have a working USB with some arbitrary ISO. Sure, it’s not up to date, but I don’t need it to be if I need to recover an install or use some random tool.
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Part of the point behind Ventoy is that you don’t need to prepare the USB to be bootable. You can just copy/paste the whole iso into Ventoy and it will be bootable. New release comes out? Just copy it onto your USB drive. Don’t even need to remove the old version of you don’t want to.
Makes things much easier in the tech world for having a single USB with 50+ bootable tools and installers on there like with MediCat (which uses Ventoy as a base).
Only thing I’ve had issues with booting from Ventoy is the ProxMox install iso. Everything else has worked first try.
I guess, you could buy a handful of USB sticks…
All my laziness about not checking it out has come to fruition. Now I simply don’t have to, because this is sketch as fuck until it is handled.
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. “Just fork it bro” is never helpful.
I agree that comments like that are unhelpful/unnecessary, but how is that “for their own benefit”? Other than the actual devs themselves using that as a way to just ignore issues, I do not follow
Seriously this. Any comment about a complicated system that starts with “just” can be ignored 99% of the time.
Also, there are 4k forks of Ventoy already. Obviously forking it isn’t helping. Actual work needs to be done.
For me the problem is more in GPL violation: they distribute blobs under GPL3, user made a request of the source code by creating an issue, but they ignored that request. It is not only about “you have to fix it” versus “just fork it” imo.
Licence doesn’t apply to the creator.
He already owns the copyright, he doesn’t need a licence, he doesn’t need to adhere to the gpl
The binaries in question are various GNU and FOSS tools from elsewhere, not part of the Ventoy project itself. So no, the Ventoy author does not own the copyright of the tools in question.
Even then, he’s still allowed to provide binary blobs. He doesn’t have to provide it as source code. If that was the case, we’d all have to build from source and package managers like apt, dnf and flatpak wouldn’t exist.
All he has to do is make the source code available, i.e. just link back to the original Github Repo.
Hey guys open source is great you can look at all the code and therefore there are no security backdoors etc. Also here are a bunch of pre-compiled blobs in the repo, don’t worry about those, but they are required to run the program.
The fact that people know there are pre-compiled blobs in open source means they have an informed reason to avoid the software!
Right, the fact that it’s open is the reason this came to light, and we’re having this discussion
Exactly. Acting like this is an “ah-ha, see?!!” moment when this is exactly what open source is designed for. That’s like saying global warming is a hoax because “oh look it’s snowing”.
Well, it is an “ah-ha, see!” moment, because it shows the benefit of open source.
Its more like pointing at the absence of a glacier on a mountaintop and saying “yep, see, climate change does exist”
This isn’t a knock against opensource programming, but there shouldn’t ever be precompiled blobs in the repo unless they are the official builds for the various OS’s and if you want to build from source, the pre-compiled blobs shouldn’t be part of that, otherwise you can’t really claim you are opensource.
Yes, and that’s what is being called out here. But your original comment makes it sound like you are advocating for closed source software and that somehow open source software is bad.
This is the system working as intended. When potential issues arise, it’s openly discussed and ideally resolved. And if not, trust is lost and people will stop using it.
I too wish the developer would respond, but I don’t think this is the catastrophe people are making it out to be. One comment seems to explain why these binaries are included:
Because ventoy supports shim, and by extension secure boot, these files needs to come from a signed Linux distro. In this case they are taken from Fedora releases, and OpenSUSE apparently, as they publish shim binaries and grub binaries signed by their certificate.
If the hashes match the files from the Fedora or OpenSUSE releases, then does this really matter?
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Is that any different from no one checking the code every update?
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That’s ok if we are talking about malware publicly shown in the published source code… but there’s also the possibility of a private source-code patch with malware that it’s secretly being applied when building the binaries for distribution.
This is why it’s important for builds to be reproducible, any third party should be able to build their own binary from clean source code and be able to obtain the exact same binary with the same hash. If the hashes match, then you have a proof of the binary being clean.
The problem is not near enough projects support reproducible builds, and many that do aren’t being regularly verified, at least publicly.
that’s what automation is for - nobody is going to manually check them, but anyone is able to automatically set something up to check their hashes in change… the fact that it’s possible that anyone is doing that now that it’s a known issue perhaps makes it less problematic as an attack vector
That is true, but also nobody is doing it. Just like nobody is verifying Signal’s “reproducible builds”.
are you sure?
there could be thousands just waiting for a failure to come out and say “HEY THIS IS DODGY”
that’s only a few files out of the 153
It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a
wgetscript should solve this.On the contrary: that just goes to show what a fucking catastrophe for software freedom “Secure[sic] Boot” is.
While this is true, it only requires the shim and grub to be copied for another distro.
From other comments there are a lot more blobs than just these two.
It sounds like most, if not all, come from upstream projects.
Would be nice if the dev can respond and confirm that…
I think they did say that in the older thread. But for proper security, you shouldn’t have to trust them. You should have build tools that will re-fetch everything to create an identical build. That gives a clear chain of custody, which proves that morning has been tampered with.
It’s a useful tool, but there is a security concern for anything not fully open source. You will have to weigh your risk factors, I doubt that it’s any problem for most consumers or distro hoppers.
Best to keep an eye in case any new contributers arrive suddenly…
After I saw that issue, I attempted to build Ventoy from source. After making numerous modifications and getting only the first couple components built, I got tired of it and quit. I’ve made some modifications to glim and use that instead, although it’s still not as easy as Ventoy. But I don’t trust Ventoy if I can’t build it myself.
Further, when @vkc@linuxmom.net made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them. That pushed me from not trusting Ventoy to actively distrusting it.
Further, when @vkc@linuxmom.net made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them.
What the fuck is happening to the world? Are we regressing or were we always this regressed and we’ve just given powerful tools to fucking chowderheads?
There’s a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots. Compare the Ventoy-bros against the Elon-bros, and you’ll see a similar pattern of behavior.
I don’t personally understand it, since development is still sometimes seen as “work for weirdo nerds,” so you’d think they would understand what it feels like to be rejected or bullied, but here we are. They manage to stay under the radar, because there’s usually no reason to discuss politics or philosophy when you’re debugging code.
There’s a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots.
right, the hackernews set…
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted, hackernews is an awful site of smug, dumb software “engineer” tech bros with some of the worst takes on anything that isn’t explicitly about how to code
It’s the other way around I think. We are progressing. More voices are heard which “should” be a good thing. Right? Right…?
/s
I remember this thread! Before I saw this comment, I had already gone to look it up again:
Here’s the initial post of Verionica’s video on booting from ISO files: https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/112905487325961707
And here’s the post on 'The Ventoy conspiracy": https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/112906968594601449
I was bored at work one day. I decided to put a nyan cat easteregg my companies app. If at the loading progress bar screen you typed NYAN it would turn the progress bar into a rainbow being created by a little nyan cat while playing the nyan cat song. The mp3 doubled our build size. No one batted an eye cause no one paid attention much.
Fast forward 5 years later at a differentjob, I get a phone call from the old boss. Do you happen to know anything about this nyan cat file we found?
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Years and years ago I worked on a project where the logo was the outline of a head and an inward swirl for the brain.
For the website, if you held your mouse over it for 9 seconds, it would spin and flush. No one ever found that one that I know of.
Should’ve included that in your FE analytics.
10/10
Aaaand thats why all commits should be signed with your pgp key
It sounds like they weren’t using any form of version control, so that’s definitely on them at this point
What makes you say that? To me, it sounds like that’s what they do have cause they tracked the change back to him. The commit message obviously said nothing about the file.
Ah I could see that. I took it as them not knowing where the file came from at all, so they’re just asking all the devs who would have had access at that point, which is why it was “hey do you know anything about this file?” and not “is there a specific reason you committed this file to the build?”
You think they’d call up devs who left them just to ask if they happen to know about a random file?
You think they’d call up devs who left them just to ask if they happen to know about a random file?
I mean, that’s what op said happened. Literally with the verbiage of “file we found” and not “file you committed”
I did mean random devs, not the dev they tracked down that made the change.
That story was a journey.
Is BLOB an acronym?
Nope, but it has become a backronym https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage#Origins
Cool thanks :)
I just wish it had a real alternative. GRUB on USB doesnt support as much distros or windows.
Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.
Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I’m thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.
