In #2795 there are some discuss about the BLOBs in Ventoy. For a long time, I devoted my limited spare time to adding new features and fixing bugs and didn't get around to considering this. It shou...
To me, what matters is what guarantees they offer and/or plan to offer, not some subjective and fleeting idea of people online having expectation of at what speed things need to be done.
Can someone do it faster? then do it (and do it in the open, so anyway Ventoy can benefit too and essentially you’ll be contributing!)… but if you jump and start using a fork that has not done already the work and given the guarantees Ventoy is planning to give, then you are placing your trust in a much much worse and shaky ground. I’m sure a lot of people would use your malware if you presented it as a WIP Ventoy fork marketed as safer when it really isn’t.
To me, what matters is what guarantees they offer and/or plan to offer,
Let’s indeed hope that they back it up with action. Better late than never. Though, I wonder what “guarantee” you’re referring to.
FWIW, slightly over a month ago, someone started working on a solution. The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think this is related to the return of Ventoy’s maintainer. But I digress…
Let’s indeed hope that they back it up with action. Better late than never. Though, I wonder what “guarantee” you’re referring to.
Any “action” that does not result in guarantees isn’t helpful to solve this. So again, what I care about is guarantees.
For example, one way to “guarantee” that there’s no code that’s unaccounted for would be to achieve reproducible builds that can be rebuilt and obtain always the same binary bit-by-bit. So if the binary blob resulting from compiling from clean source matches the one offered then that’s proof that the distributed binary was built cleanly and there was no malware being slipped through.
The issue is that this wouldn’t just be a Ventoy problem, but also an upstream problem, since all projects Ventoy depends on would need to be, themselves, reproducible. So this wouldn’t be an easy task, or even a task that Ventoy should do on their own, imho.
FWIW, slightly over a month ago, someone started working on a solution.
I definitely wouldn’t trust that either until there’s guarantees. Again, I only care about what guarantees are offered. It’s not about who is the one managing the github account and/or what subjective reputation that random anonymous person might have.
The problem isn’t the existence of precompiled binary blobs either, so removing the binaries is not solving the issue. The problem is in the traceability and what guarantees we have that the final collection of compiled binary blobs that ultimately is offered for download (and we do need binary blobs for download ultimately) is actually corresponding to libre/open source releases without potentially malicious code.
The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think this is related to the return of Ventoy’s maintainer. But I digress…
I don’t think the maintainer went away. I’ve seen successfully maintained projects with much slower pace than this, specially projects for which stability is important. Last Bash commit was in 2024 and I wouldn’t say it’s unmaintained. Ventoy had a release 3 months ago.
Also, would it be bad if that was what triggered the interest to work on it? I mean, the post straight away mentions the github issue where that fork was advertised, and it implies that it’s in that issue where they noticed that people have started to care about the blobs. So it could well be that they saw there’s people who care enough to spend their time working for it (ie. they even made a fork), so why not open the doors for them? It does not have to always be drama.
Assuming you’re finally done with your edits[1] (the transition from 0 -> 1 likes is the only thing I’m going off of), I think your comment is overall just a work of art; attempting to add anything on/to it feels like tarnishing it. Though, a major correction is due: The “the return of Ventoy’s maintainer”-remark was meant to convey their return to the issue. I didn’t want to imply that they left the project and returned. Though I totally understand the confusion; my apologies*. Furthermore, my striped remark was actually somewhat meant as a joke - I hoped that blatantly stating “The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think” was enough of a hint for that - but I totally get where the misunderstanding is coming from.
Anyhow, if anything, I hope that we’ll be met with a solution that’s compliant with your suggested solution (or better if possible). Nonetheless, I would like to voice my appreciation for this lovely interaction! Thank you!
Btw, I absolutely loved to witness the diligence you put into your craft. Thank you for the effort! It also reminds me of the times I do something similar. Though, fam, don’t forget to think about yourself; you’re important to us 💙! ↩︎
To me, what matters is what guarantees they offer and/or plan to offer, not some subjective and fleeting idea of people online having expectation of at what speed things need to be done.
Can someone do it faster? then do it (and do it in the open, so anyway Ventoy can benefit too and essentially you’ll be contributing!)… but if you jump and start using a fork that has not done already the work and given the guarantees Ventoy is planning to give, then you are placing your trust in a much much worse and shaky ground. I’m sure a lot of people would use your malware if you presented it as a WIP Ventoy fork marketed as safer when it really isn’t.
Let’s indeed hope that they back it up with action. Better late than never. Though, I wonder what “guarantee” you’re referring to.
FWIW, slightly over a month ago, someone started working on a solution.
The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think this is related to the return of Ventoy’s maintainer. But I digress…Any “action” that does not result in guarantees isn’t helpful to solve this. So again, what I care about is guarantees.
For example, one way to “guarantee” that there’s no code that’s unaccounted for would be to achieve reproducible builds that can be rebuilt and obtain always the same binary bit-by-bit. So if the binary blob resulting from compiling from clean source matches the one offered then that’s proof that the distributed binary was built cleanly and there was no malware being slipped through.
The issue is that this wouldn’t just be a Ventoy problem, but also an upstream problem, since all projects Ventoy depends on would need to be, themselves, reproducible. So this wouldn’t be an easy task, or even a task that Ventoy should do on their own, imho.
I definitely wouldn’t trust that either until there’s guarantees. Again, I only care about what guarantees are offered. It’s not about who is the one managing the github account and/or what subjective reputation that random anonymous person might have.
The problem isn’t the existence of precompiled binary blobs either, so removing the binaries is not solving the issue. The problem is in the traceability and what guarantees we have that the final collection of compiled binary blobs that ultimately is offered for download (and we do need binary blobs for download ultimately) is actually corresponding to libre/open source releases without potentially malicious code.
I don’t think the maintainer went away. I’ve seen successfully maintained projects with much slower pace than this, specially projects for which stability is important. Last Bash commit was in 2024 and I wouldn’t say it’s unmaintained. Ventoy had a release 3 months ago.
Also, would it be bad if that was what triggered the interest to work on it? I mean, the post straight away mentions the github issue where that fork was advertised, and it implies that it’s in that issue where they noticed that people have started to care about the blobs. So it could well be that they saw there’s people who care enough to spend their time working for it (ie. they even made a fork), so why not open the doors for them? It does not have to always be drama.
Assuming you’re finally done with your edits[1] (the transition from 0 -> 1 likes is the only thing I’m going off of), I think your comment is overall just a work of art; attempting to add anything on/to it feels like tarnishing it. Though, a major correction is due: The “the return of Ventoy’s maintainer”-remark was meant to convey their return to the issue. I didn’t want to imply that they left the project and returned. Though I totally understand the confusion; my apologies*. Furthermore, my striped remark was actually somewhat meant as a joke - I hoped that blatantly stating “The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think” was enough of a hint for that - but I totally get where the misunderstanding is coming from.
Anyhow, if anything, I hope that we’ll be met with a solution that’s compliant with your suggested solution (or better if possible). Nonetheless, I would like to voice my appreciation for this lovely interaction! Thank you!
Btw, I absolutely loved to witness the diligence you put into your craft. Thank you for the effort! It also reminds me of the times I do something similar. Though, fam, don’t forget to think about yourself; you’re important to us 💙! ↩︎