this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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I remember a story where people asked about blobs included in Ventoy and there were no comments from the devs, leading to suspicion.

At the time it wasn't clear to me if there was any substance to the story or if it was the usual Internet exaggeration, so I resolved to ignore it for the time being and saved a reminder to look into it after a while.

Now my reminder fired off and I looked around, but couldn't find how the story ended... do you know?

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] mumblerfish 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That screenshot is from another site. An account named longpanda has also appeared on lemmy and had their post/replies removed because of impersonation suspicions.

I think it is wise to take extra care on this issue on what you read and trust.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Afaik that particular post is on the official Ventoy forum. Probably legit

The Lemmy one was fake

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

That is the owners account from the official forum, which is known to be real. The Lemmy account was a fake that copied their name from that account.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago

I'm in a similar boat to you; whether the blobs constitute a security threat seems to still be up in the air. I read through the issue thread on github a few months back and it seemed the vast majority of the blobs were built by scripts contained in the repository, but some weren't documented well, leading to uncertainty.

The comment by Long0x0 on Aug 05 lists a lot of the blob files.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Looks like contributor is busy with work. Always the risk with open source. If things aren't raised in a reasonable manner, I can imagine the temptation is to follow it up with a middle finger.

Many seemed to care about it enough to bash it, but not enough to create and maintain a fork. They just want to boss it over the maintainer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Agreed: now that I'm looking at the whole thing, this looks like a story where the FOSS community left much to be desired.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not fixed yet. People either quit, let their threat model allow Ventoy's shellscripts to git-commit bins, or built it from source (i.e. PKGBUILD or ebuild).

[–] slazer2au 7 points 1 week ago

I thought one of them did comment about it and it was something like the uefi drivers taken from Fedora or something.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Blobs aren’t really a concern as they reference the sources which produce the same binaries, but there are suspicions of compromise due to the Lemmy comments mentioned in the thread. The official accounts’ comments alleviate some of that, though.