Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
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7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Welcome!
Trusting an application means trusting every developer who has contributed to its codebase. The XZ attack showed that it just takes one pushy contributor to completely expose an attack surface.
The only thing you can really trust is applications that you build yourself and can personally vet the source for. No one does that of course, so we place some trust in authorized developers (e.g. archlinux-keyring) who have been vetted by their various organisations. With Github, no such vetting occurs, it's just some guy/girl hosting their code.
I have to admit I don't know much about the security that Obtainium uses. I'm hoping everything is TLS certified to make MITM difficult, but I don't know those details. All I do know is that you're getting binaries hosted by someone on github who might have zero cred in FOSS circles.