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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming this is free-as-in-beer software? Because the default distribution mechanism for free-as-in-speech software is Github, these days.

Can't you add it to the Windows/Mac/Ubuntu App Store, though? There seems to be lots of free apps on there...

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Some developers like to establish a relationship directly with their users, not pay (in dollars, or advertising) a middle-man like GitHub, GitLab, or an App Store.

You could simply host the binary on GitHub and GitLab and have the link on your website point directly to it. The user would never know, so you'd get the best of both worlds. You develop a direct relationship with your users without paying anything forward to GitHub or GitLab.

With that said, hosting the binary on those platforms won't necessarily help as Google can flag individual repos according to some other comments here.

Every indication I've read is that simply linking to the binary download, even if it's offsite, will be enough to flag the page hosting the link. So I would have to link to an alternate site hosting the link, and risk that page being blocked instead, and then I'm right back where I started.

I would, if at all possible, prefer to find a solution to this problem so that I can directly host my software.

If you prefer to directly host it then you will have to wait (and hope that no one files a complaint about your domain).

At some point your domain will have a sufficient score and it will not show the warnings to users.

How long that will take is, however, outside of my knowledge and it would be nice to have some official reference about it; as it stands I agree with you that it feels like begging to a benevolent dictator.

The point is that these warning still appear for executable downloads from Github (at least they did a few years ago when I independently thought of this as a workaround) - my guess is that Microsoft and Google are using some kind of unique'ish binary fingerprint, such as Imphash or SSDEEP (in conjunction with other signals, such as domain age, digital signature etc)

My domain is fourteen years old and has a DA score of 53. I don't see it ever improving much from there.

The score for serving binaries would be a different metric than for SEO.

OK, I get this.

But look at it from the other point of view: how does a non-technical user determine if a binary download is malicious?

And how, then, does Google/Microsoft/Apple protect those users from their ignorance?

Given that the internet is full of people attempting to get non-technical users to download malicious software, often my mimicking exactly the sort of site the OP has created, then is it really practical to insist that Google/Microsoft/Apple allow the OP's site to download software to a user's machine freely?

The advantage of the middle-man is that it acts as a trust agent (not necessarily well, of course). If you download a malicious binary from an App Store, that is the App Store's fault for letting it on there in the first place.

Sure, you need some kind of middle-man as a trust agent, but Google/Microsoft/Apple are not the only possible trust-agents, and their model is inherently biased towards certain useful software production models.

Let's say I keep bees as a hobby, and I write some small piece of software that tracks and calculates something to do with honey production. I post it to my favourite bee-keeping forum, other people try it and like it, and when a new bee-keeper joins the forum they're often advised by forum regulars to try my software out too.

That kind of software can be a huge help to people, but it's not a good fit for an appstore because it's never going to turn a profit, and at least on Apple's store (with the $99/year publishing fee) it'll drain money quite predictably and regularly.

A bee-keeping forum will never be trusted by as many people as Google/Microsoft/Apple, but the people who do trust it probably trust it a lot more.

> Because the default distribution mechanism for free-as-in-speech software is Github, these days.

I surmise that this mostly impacts non-free platforms, where compiling software from source used to be quite non-trivial so it was common to just download binaries. These days you can probably get LLVM to work everywhere, though.

Each user compiling a binary is a lot of waste, have you compiled a large project like Chrome or Unreal Engine ? If you are even able to compile it successfully it takes hours on a recent i5.

A few years back at my work we were digitally sign our binaries, so I don't think non free platforms are affected at all since it is not expensive to buy a certificate , only hobby/personal projects will be affected.

Also a signed binary does not mean there are no viruses or other bad things inside, so I am wondering if we want to identify the source of the binary can we find a technical solution so you can have your website and binary with the same key then you know that binary X is from X.com people, for some reason a few years back this certificates for signing were not cheap.

> Each user compiling a binary is a lot of waste

It's not "waste" if it's needed to establish trust.

> A few years back at my work we were digitally sign our binaries,

Just publishing hashes for the (reproducible) unsigned binaries over a secure channel (such as HTTPS as verified by Let's Encrypt) will give you the exact same security. Digital signatures embedded in executables add no security whatsoever, and make reproducibility harder. Just don't do it.

I think it is technically possible to sign a binary and have reproducebility for the people who care, you might need a different binary/package then the current ones but it is technically possible.

We had to sign our applications to prevent scary warnings to appear and then we would have to train our users to ignore that.

The worst part is that a malicious signed binary could just download the malicious parts afterwards. Signing isn't really an answer for google.

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