this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Is this real and safe? Why is Microsoft letting it be hosted on their own platform?
I looked at the code but the "single file version" is 10377 lines of Batch. They want me to do the power shell equivalent of
curl abc.com | bash
. The official website looks legit but I have no idea if this is safe or how they're doing it.I dunno if that particular one is safe or not, but running a webpage as a script is asking for it.
Could be swapped to something else at any moment, and what you see if you browse to it may not be what is returned if you use the command line...
Downloading the script and checking if it's the same script as the one on github is definitely better. Or running the curl but on raw.githubusercontent.com adress, because then you can be pretty sure it's not something else than you see.
These are the most well-known activation scripts that many people trust. They are well documented and often recommended, with more than one contributor. Written in powershell, I believe that if they were malicious, some of the 46k people who starred the repo or 4.8k people who forked it would notice. That being said, you can only be sure if you read the code, which is luckily not that difficult in the powershell script case. I personally trust them, definitely more than I trust Microsoft itself :D