Ipod classic dual boot loader - is it officially available yet?

[Frankenpod]

I've been using the dual bootloader downloaded from free-my-ipod (as discussed on the head-fi rockbox thread).  It's been working well for a while now.  But now, alarmingly, windows defender has suddenly decided its malware and keeps removing it [i.e. I mean the dual bootloader installer, a modfied rockbox install utility]

I'm not expert enough to know what to make of this, as given the way it works it seems like it wouldn't be entirely surprising if windows defender mistakes its behaviour for that of a trojan downloader...but on the other hand not long ago some actual malware did get, apparently accidentally, posted on that head-fi thread, so I'm not sure whether to believe it or not (malware detectors do seem to suffer hugely from false-positives).

Is there/will there be an official rockbox hosted release of this bootloader?  Thanks.

[[Saint]]

I don't want to answer this in a way that seems like I'm mocking you, but I guess that prefix gets that out of the way, so...

Basically:

"Yes, probably"

With the massive caveat of:

"It will be available some time between now and never"

I wish I could be more specific but the very nature of the project does not allow for specifics.


Regarding the aforementioned malware, I need to take the blame for that one. Though I'll maintain it wasn't specifically my fault. That package was created and uploaded by me, but not shared to head-fi (I don't really want to get into it but you'll never find me in that community, ever).

The hosting provider service is a service I had been using for years prior for urls that I intended to share with a small population and have it nuke itself after 15 days of inactivity. It turns out that due to my browsing habits, and the fact that I think browsing without ad and script blocking is insane, I never actually noticed when they changed to presenting a very highly devious 'download manager' application bundle that is intended to look like the primary direct download, and people were using that.

On my end, I had no idea this even existed as due to ad and script blocking (which I wrongly assumed all reasonably tech savvy people used) I had never seen it, and previously these guys weren't so shifty in their operations. One posits they needed a cash injection, but that is speculative.

To cut a long story short, people went to the url in question and missed the actual direct download url and were getting tricked by the spammy download manager that gets (false) flagged as malware.

Additionally, this may or may not be the case for you. Due to the way RbUtil functions, it would not surprise me in the least if it was false flagged as malware. It would certainly not be the first time, and will certainly not be the last.


[St.]

[Frankenpod]

Thanks.  I half-expected that would be the answer.  Though as the version I have has been working seemingly perfectly (on multiple ipods) for a while, I was also half-hoping it might be 'its very nearly done, just these minor issues to address and it will be hosted here'

It still works, just that now I can't reinstall it or set up any more ipods with it because the latest update for Defender means it now complains about and deletes the isntaller if I try to run it. 

I thought freemyipod (from whence I downloaded it) was a 'safe' site, seems odds are its a false positive, but just can't be certain.

Not sure anti-malware programs even work, really.  Have never had one detect actual malware, but have had multiple occasions of an obviously safe program being declared evil (e.g. main executable of a well-known commercially released program, while still on the CD)

(And yeah I use ad-blockers and script blockers,  Every time I turn adblocking off to be 'nice' to sites I like, there's another story reported about drive-by malware from third-party adverts and I turn it back on again)

[[Saint]]

I thought freemyipod (from whence I downloaded it) was a 'safe' site, seems odds are its a false positive, but just can't be certain.

It is, and you can, but you shouldn't.

Such is the nature of FOSS projects, you don't have to trust us blindly. The code is there, every revision public for both emCORE and Rockbox, our Gerrit instance holds all our pending/staged content.

But, I'm just a guy on the Internet, don't trust me.

The beautiful thing is you don't have to. You have equal opportunity to audit and compile the codebase as everyone else does.


[St.]