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.
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
That story was a journey.
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
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. “Just fork it bro” is never helpful.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”.
I like multiboot. Used it back when I used Windows.
The Ventoy advertisements on Reddit looked too suspicious, so I never checked it out.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 @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] 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
Is there an alternative to Ventoy for booting Windows vhd images from an ntfs partition?
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.
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.
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.
Wtf is ventoy and why is nobody explaining it
Wtf is a BLOB and why is nobody explaining it
Binary Large OBject
Basically any binary file, often objected to in open source repos because of the lack of source and ‘openness’. See also the recent xz backdoor.
Binary data. In the case of lz it was a carefully “corrupted” archive.
I used Ventoy (its still on my USB stick). Its actually a pretty cool concept. Normally without Ventoy, you would flash your Linux distribution on the USB stick. And then you can boot from it, right?
Ventoy instead allows you to have a folder where you put an ISO without flashing it, and then you can boot from it by selecting in the menu. You just need to flash Ventoy once, as the base system, then you can put as many ISO files into that directory. I tested it and have 7 different Linux distributions (ranging from 1 GB to 4 GB variants) on the same USB stick, and I can boot any of them without flashing again. Replacing ISO is extremely easy, just delete it and copy a new one. Filenames does not matter, anything can be found.
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
Basically an OS which let’s you choose another OS to boot into. This way you can chose between multiple OS’s on one USB drive. You drag your ISO files into a USB folder and choose between them on boot.
That sounded like grub until you said ISO file
Yeah basically grub but on a USB stick and with ISO files
This is a bit absurd. I really don’t think this is as serious as some comments say. Also there is a comment from AUR package manager which explains more details. . And even the blobs in the first post there are source and build instructions in their respective folder.
I firmly believe there are no backdoors or anything dodgy going on here
OK but that’s hardly reassuring.
Not suspicious at all.
And even the blobs in the first point there are source and build instructions in their respective folder.
No it is not. It is supposedly the built result based on the instruction provided. If they can just provide that instruction, why not provide the source as well?
The issue thread also highlights the stubbornness and hostility of the project maintainer toward possible contributors.
That linked reply doesn’t explain anything. It just says “bro trust him”. Just because you and the AUR maintainer says its trustful, does not make it clear whats behind the binary blobs. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, if we can’t verify. In my opinion, its absurd calling others absurd for not trusting the word of others.
