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.
I was bored at work one day. I decided to put a nyan cat easter egg in my company’s 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 (inconspicuously renamed without the extension) doubled our build size. No one batted an eye cause no one paid attention to the build size much.
Fast forward 5 years later, at a different job, 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.
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?”
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.
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”.
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.
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.
it’s the opposite, actually: she got harassed because she didn’t talk about it when talking about creating a bootable drive.
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
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.
Removed by mod
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. “Just fork it bro” is never helpful.
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.
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.
It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a
wgetscript should solve this.If the hashes match the files from the Fedora or OpenSUSE releases, then does this really matter?
It matters because nobody is going to check the hashes for all of the files match whenever there’s a change so the maintainer can just replace them with whatever he wants.
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”
What does BLOB stand for?
Binary Large OBject
Only kind of. That’s a backronym.
Wtf is ventoy and why is nobody explaining it
because search engines exist
Wtf is search engines and why is no one explaining it
Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.
Google, probably
shh…it’s a spyware and adware!
Wtf is a BLOB and why is nobody explaining it
Because you can look it up.
As a wise one once said: “Talk is cheap, send patches”
Anyone who wants to fix this can help fix it, but people are just making demands of an unpaid maintainer. The devs can run this project the way they want to. If you don’t like it, don’t use Ventoy.
The people comparing this to the xz exploit are out of line. xz was a library that was deeply embedded in a lot of software. Ventoy is an IT tool used to boot live OSes. Not even remotely the same attack surface.
Blobs in the source tree are not ideal, but people need to pick their battles.
