this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
169 points (98.3% liked)

Selfhosted

60887 readers
787 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.

  8. AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I set up a quick demonstration to show risks of curl|bash and how a bad-actor could potentially hide a malicious script that appears safe.

It's nothing new or groundbreaking, but I figure it never hurts to have another reminder.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 5 months ago

Firstly, it is much, much easier to compromise the website hosting than the binary itself, usually. Distributed binaries are usually signed by multiple keys from multiple servers, resulting in them being highly resistant to tampering. Reproducible builds (two users compiling a program get the same output) make it trivial to detect tampering as well.

Yeah this is a fair call.

But at the same time, I have little confidence in my ability to spot these bugs.

This is the key thing for me. I am not likely to spot any issues even if they were there! I'd only be scanning for external connections or obviously malicious code, which I do when I don't have as much trust in the source.

As a sidenote, docker doesn’t recommend their install script anymore.

Yeah I used it as an example because there are very few times I ever remember piping to bash, but that's probably the most common one I have done in the past.