I needed to make a bootable USB. Simple task, right? My aging Windows 10 machine couldn’t upgrade to 11 and Ubuntu seemed like the obvious next step.
Downloading Rufus, the tiny tool everyone recommends, turned out to be less of a utility and more of a trust exercise. Between misleading ads, ambiguous signatures and the creeping dread of running an EXE as administrator, I found myself wondering how something so basic became so fraught?
Click Here to regret everything…
Here’s what I saw when I browsed to rufus.ie:
I’ve redacted the name of the product being advertised. This isn’t really about them and they may very well be legitimate advertisers. Point is, I have no idea if they’re dodgy or not. I’m here to download the Rufus app thanks very much. I’m fortunate enough to have been around long enough to recognise an ad but I wonder how someone else who might be following instructions to “Download Rufus from rufus.ie” would cope.
Wading through the ads, I found the link that probably had the EXE I actually wanted. Hovering my pointer over the link had a reasonable looking URL. I clicked…
At some point during my clicking around, two EXEs were deposited in my “Downloads” folder. It looked like the same EXE but one had “(1)” on the end, so I had probably downloaded it twice. I right-clicked the file and looked for the expected digital signature: Akeo Consulting.
Even now, am I quite certain that this “Akeo Consulting” is the right one? Could one of those dodgy-looking advertisers formed their own company that’s also called Akeo Consulting but in a different place, in order to get a legitimate digital signature onto their own EXE? And this is an executable I’d need to run as administrator, with no restrictions.
At the end of the day, I am complaining about something someone is doing for free. I can already hear the comments that I’m “free to build my own”. I know how much it costs to run a website, especially one that’s probably experiencing a sudden spike in traffic while people find they need to move from Windows 10.
I’m not blaming this project, I’m blaming society. If the Rufus Project had to choose between accepting advertiser money to keep the lights on or shutting down, I’m not going to tell them they should have chosen the latter option. But if this is where we are as a society, we’ve made a mistake along the way.
Credits:
🔨 The Rufus Project, for their (at the end of the day) very useful app.
🤖 Microsoft Copilot for spelling/grammar checking, reviews and rubber-ducking.