5mo ago

Ventoy source code contains some unknown BLOBs, still no word on the issue from the dev after months

github.com [issue]: Remove BLOBs from the source tree · Issue #2795 · ventoy/Ventoy

What happened? Due to the recent XZ-Utils drama I checked the code and I'm appalled. There are more BLOBS than source code. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/tree/3f65f0ef03e4aebcd14f233ca808a4f8946...

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.

Opensource @programming.dev

Blaze @lemmy.zip

4mo ago

Ventoy Update

github.com /ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

15 8

127 comments

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
- 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
- That story was a journey.

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.
  
  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
- it's the opposite, actually: she got harassed because she didn't talk about it when talking about creating a bootable drive.

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?
- 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.
- It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a wget script should solve this.
- that's only a few files out of the 153
  
  153 binaries? where?

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”.

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
- 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 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
  
  It makes them feel good and devalues the quality of discussion. Benefits them, harms others.

Glad it's getting a little more light. Been trying to tell people this for a few years now lol. It's the reason I've stayed away from it since first learning of the tool and looking at the "source code".

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.

As a wise one once said: "Talk is cheap, send patches"
- Little did they know that Patches the Cat bit through their LAN lines and actually increased the cost of their communication.

Wtf is ventoy and why is nobody explaining it
- 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
  
  So like rEFInd but on the same drive?
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Because you can look it up.
- because search engines exist
  
  Wtf is search engines and why is no one explaining it
- https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

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.

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.
  
  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.
  
  When I was working in IT, this would have been a very useful tool for doing some on-site troubleshooting with various tools or for one-off reimaging machines that were missed during a big update or something. Instead, I had a bag of USB sticks with labels on them, which was annoying to use and to maintain.
  
  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.
- https://github.com/thias/glim
- I guess, you could buy a handful of USB sticks...

I never trusted it because I thought it was completely proprietary. Well now I know it basically is.

Time for a fork, then?

Need to compare hashes between a stock ISO and one ~~flashed~~ booted by Ventoy (dd the latter to a file and check)
- Wat? Ventoy doesn't flash isos, it boots from them
  
  Thanks edited

What does BLOB stand for?
- Binary Large OBject
- They even made a movie about it!

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.
- 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.
- I firmly believe there are no backdoors or anything dodgy going on here
  OK but that's hardly reassuring.
  
  Not suspicious at all.
- 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.

I like multiboot. Used it back when I used Windows.
The Ventoy advertisements on Reddit looked too suspicious, so I never checked it out.

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.

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...

I've had too many issues with Ventoy that I'd rather just use fedora media writer or balenaetcher for when that doesn't work. I mean honestly it's a bit gimmicky, even if it's a cool concept. I believe Glim and some other options exist too
- Ugh, balenaetcher messed with my USB pen drive so that I had to jump through hoops to make it usable again. Based on web searches, this was not uncommon at that time. I haven't had issues with ventoy so far. However, maybe I'll just go back to Rufus.

bruh.

going back to using multiple usb

Is there an alternative to Ventoy for booting Windows vhd images from an ntfs partition?

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.

127 comments