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Extended FAQ it IT

ArchiBot edited this page Nov 16, 2023 · 25 revisions

FAQ Estesa

La nostra FAQ estesa copre le domande un po' meno comuni e le risposte che potresti avere. Per questioni piΓΉ comuni, sei invece pregato di visitare la nostra FAQ di base.


Chi ha creato ASF?

ASF Γ¨ stato creato da Archi a Ottobre 2015. Nel caso te lo stessi chiedendo, sono come te un utente di Steam. Oltre a giocare a giochi, amo anche mettere in uso le mie abilitΓ  e determinazione, che puoi esplorare ora. Nessuna grande azienda Γ¨ coinvolta qui, nessun team di sviluppatori e nessun budget di $1M per coprire tutto questo; solo io, a correggere cose che non sono rotte.

Tuttavia, ASF Γ¨ un progetto open-source e non so come dire che non sono dietro tutto ciΓ² che vedete qui. Abbiamo alcuni altri progetti di ASF in via di sviluppo quasi esclusivamente da altri sviluppatori. Anche il progetto principale di ASF ha molti collaboratori che mi hanno aiutato a far succedere tutto questo. On top of that, there are several third-party services supporting ASF development, especially GitHub, JetBrains and Crowdin. Non si possono anche dimenticare tutte i meravigliosi strumenti e le librerie che hanno reso possibile ASF, come Rider che usiamo come IDE (adoriamo le aggiunte di ReSharper) e specialmente SteamKit2 senza cui ASF non esisterebbe in primo luogo. ASF also wouldn't be where it is today without my sponsors and various donators, supporting me in everything that I'm doing here.

Grazie a tutti per l'aiuto nello sviluppo di ASF! You're awesome ❀️.


PerchΓ© ASF Γ¨ stato creato in primo luogo?

ASF was created with primary purpose of being fully automated Steam farming tool for Linux, without a need of any external dependencies (such as Steam client). Difatti, rimane ancora il suo obiettivo e punto focale principale, perchΓ© il mio concetto di ASF non Γ¨ cambiato da allora e lo uso ancora allo stesso modo di come lo usavo nel 2015. Di certo, ci sono stati davvero molti cambiamenti da allora, e sono felice di vedere quanto ASF sia progredito, principalmente grazie ai suoi utenti, perchΓ© non programmerei mai nemmeno metΓ  delle funzionalitΓ  se fossi totalmente solo.

It's nice to note that ASF was never made to compete with other, similar programs, especially Idle Master, because ASF was never designed to be a desktop/user app, and it still isn't today. Se analizzi lo scopo principale di ASF sopra descritto, vedrai come Idle Master Γ¨ l'esatto opposto di tutto questo. While you can most definitely find similar to ASF programs today, nothing was good enough for me back then (and still isn't today), so I created my own software, the way I wanted it. Nel tempo gli utenti sono passati ad ASF principalmente per la sua robustezza, stabilitΓ  e sicurezza, ma anche per tutte le funzionalitΓ  che ho sviluppato in tutti questi anni. Oggi, ASF Γ¨ meglio che mai.


OK, dov'Γ¨ il trucco? Cosa guadagni dalla condivisione di ASF?

Nessun trucco, ho creato ASF per me stesso e l'ho condiviso con il resto della community nella speranza che diventasse utile. Esattamente la stessa cosa è successa nel 1991, quando Linus Torvalds condivise il suo primo kernel di Linux con il resto del mondo. Nessun malware nascosto, mining di dati, mining di criptovalute o ogni altra attività che genererebbe alcun beneficio finanziario per me. Il progetto di ASF è supportato interamente da donazioni facoltative inviate da utenti felici come te. Puoi usare ASF esattamente al mio stesso modo, e se ti piace, puoi sempre offrirmi un caffè, mostrandomi la tua gratitudine per ciò che sto facendo.

Uso ASF anche come un perfetto esempio di un moderno progetto in C# che colpisce sempre alla perfezione e ha le migliori pratiche, che sia con la tecnologia, la gestione del progetto o il codice stesso. È la mia definizione di "cose fatte bene", quindi se per caso riesci a imparare qualcosa di utile dal mio progetto, allora questo mi renderà solo più felice.


Right after launching ASF I've lost all my accounts/items/friends/(...)!

Statistically speaking, regardless how sad it is, it's guaranteed that shortly after launching ASF there will be at least one guy who will die in a car accident. The difference is that nobody sane will blame ASF for causing it, but for some reason there are people who will accuse ASF of the same just because it happened to their Steam accounts instead. Of course we can understand the reasoning for that, after all ASF operates within Steam platform, so naturally people will accuse ASF of everything that happened to their Steam-related property regardless of lack of any evidence that the software they ran is even remotely connected with that whatsoever.

ASF, as stated in FAQ as well as question above, is free of malware, spyware, data mining and any other potentially unwanted activity, especially submission of your sensitive Steam details or taking over your digital property. If something like this has happened to you, we can only say that we're sorry for your loss and recommend you to contact Steam support which hopefully will assist you in the recovery process - because we're not responsible for what happened to you in any way and our conscience is clear. If you believe otherwise, that's your decision, it's pointless to elaborate further, if the above resources providing objective and verifiable ways to confirm our statement didn't convince you, then it's not like anything we write here will anyway.

However, the above doesn't mean that your actions done without a common sense with ASF can't contribute to a security issue. For example, you could disregard our security guidelines, expose ASF's IPC interface to the whole internet, and then be surprised that somebody got in and robbed you out of all items. People do it all the time, they think that if there is no domain or any connection to their IP address then nobody will for sure find out their ASF instance. Right as you read it, there are thousands if not more fully-automated bots crawling through the web, including random IP addresses, searching for vulnerabilities to discover, and ASF as a quite popular program is also a target of those. We already had enough of people that got "hacked" through their own stupidity like that, so try to learn from their mistakes and be smarter instead of joining them.

Same goes for security of your PC. Yes, having malware on your PC ruins every single security aspect of ASF, as it can read sensitive details from ASF config files or process memory and even influence the program to do stuff that it wouldn't do otherwise. No, the last crack you've obtained from doubtful source was not a "false positive" as somebody has told you, it's one of the most effective ways to gain control over somebody's PC, the guy will infect himself and he'll even follow the instructions how to, fascinating.

Is using ASF completely safe and free of all risks then? No, we'd be bunch of hypocrites stating so, as every software has its security-oriented problems. Contrary to what a lot of companies are doing, we're trying to be as transparent as possible in our security advisories and as soon as we find out even a hypothetical situation where ASF could contribute in any way to a potentially unwanted from security perspective situation, we announce it immediately. This is what happened with CVE-2021-32794 for example, even though ASF didn't have any security flaw per-se, but rather a bug that could lead to user accidentally creating one.

As of today, there are no known, unpatched security flaws in ASF, and as the program is used by more and more people out of which both white hats as well as black hats analyze its source code, the overall trust factor only increases with time, as the number of security flaws to find out is finite, and ASF as a program that focuses first and foremost on its security, definitely isn't making it easy for finding one. Regardless of our best intentions, we still recommend to stay cool-headed and always be wary of potential security threats, ones coming from ASF usage as well.


How do I verify that the downloaded files are genuine?

As part of our releases on GitHub, we utilize a very similar verification process as the one used by Debian. In every official release, in addition to zip build assets, you can find SHA512SUMS and SHA512SUMS.sign files. Download them for verification purposes together with the zip files of your choice.

Firstly, you should use SHA512SUMS file in order to verify that SHA-512 checksum of the selected zip files matches the one we calculated ourselves. On Linux, you can use sha512sum utility for that purpose.

$ sha512sum -c --ignore-missing SHA512SUMS
ASF-linux-x64.zip: OK

On Windows, we can do that from powershell, although you have to manually verify with SHA512SUMS:

PS > Get-Content SHA512SUMS | Select-String -Pattern ASF-linux-x64.zip

f605e573cc5e044dd6fadbc44f6643829d11360a2c6e4915b0c0b8f5227bc2a257568a014d3a2c0612fa73907641d0cea455138d2e5a97186a0b417abad45ed9  ASF-linux-x64.zip


PS > Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA512 -Path ASF-linux-x64.zip

Algoritmo       Hash                                                                   Percorso
---------       ----                                                                   ----
SHA512          F605E573CC5E044DD6FADBC44F6643829D11360A2C6E4915B0C0B8F5227BC2A2575... ASF-linux-x64.zip

This way we ensured that whatever was written to SHA512SUMS matches the resulting files and they weren't tampered with. However, it doesn't prove yet that SHA512SUMS file you checked against really comes from us. For that, we'll use SHA512SUMS.sign file, which holds digital PGP signature proving the authenticity of SHA512SUMS. We can use gpg utility for that purpose, both on Linux and Windows (change gpg command into gpg.exe on Windows).

$ gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Mon 02 Aug 2021 00:34:18 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF
gpg: Can't check signature: No public key

As you can see, the file indeed holds a valid signature, but of unknown origin. You'll need to import ArchiBot's public key that we sign the SHA-512 sums with for full validation.

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JustArchi-ArchiBot/JustArchi-ArchiBot/main/ArchiBot_public.asc -o ArchiBot_public.asc
$ gpg --import ArchiBot_public.asc
gpg: /home/archi/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key A3D181DF2D554CCF: public key "ArchiBot <ArchiBot@JustArchi.net>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1

Finally, you can verify the SHA512SUMS file again:

$ gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Mon 02 Aug 2021 00:34:18 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF
gpg: Good signature from "ArchiBot <ArchiBot@JustArchi.net>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 224D A6DB 47A3 935B DCC3  BE17 A3D1 81DF 2D55 4CCF

This has verified that the SHA512SUMS.sign holds a valid signature of our 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF key for SHA512SUMS file that you've verified against.

You could be wondering where the last warning comes from. You've successfully imported our key, but didn't decide to trust it just yet. While this is not mandatory, we can cover it as well. Normally this includes verifying through different channel (e.g. phone call, SMS) that the key is valid, then signing the key with your own to trust it. For this example, you can consider this wiki entry as such (very weak) different channel, since the original key comes from ArchiBot's profile. In any case we'll assume that you have enough of confidence as it is.

Firstly, generate private key for yourself, if you don't have one just yet. We'll use --quick-gen-key as a quick example.

$ gpg --batch --passphrase '' --quick-gen-key "$(whoami)"
gpg: /home/archi/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key E4E763905FAD148B marked as ultimately trusted
gpg: directory '/home/archi/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d' created
gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/home/archi/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d/8E5D685F423A584569686675E4E763905FAD148B.rev'

Now you can sign our key with yours in order to trust it:

$ gpg --sign-key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF

pub  ed25519/A3D181DF2D554CCF
     created: 2021-05-22  expires: never       usage: SC
     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
sub  cv25519/E527A892E05B2F38
     created: 2021-05-22  expires: never       usage: E
[ unknown] (1). ArchiBot <ArchiBot@JustArchi.net>


pub  ed25519/A3D181DF2D554CCF
     created: 2021-05-22  expires: never       usage: SC
     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
 Primary key fingerprint: 224D A6DB 47A3 935B DCC3  BE17 A3D1 81DF 2D55 4CCF

     ArchiBot <ArchiBot@JustArchi.net>

Are you sure that you want to sign this key with your
key "archi" (E4E763905FAD148B)

Really sign? (y/N) y

And done, after trusting our key, gpg should no longer display the warning when verifying:

$ gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Mon 02 Aug 2021 00:34:18 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF
gpg: Good signature from "ArchiBot <ArchiBot@JustArchi.net>" [full]

Notice the [unknown] trust indicator changing into [full] once you signed our key with yours.

Congratulations, you've verified that nobody has tampered with the release you've downloaded! πŸ‘


It's April the 1st and the ASF language changed into something strange, what is going on?

CONGRATULASHUNS ON DISCOVERIN R APRIL FOOLS EASTR EGG! If you didn't set custom CurrentCulture option, then ASF on April the 1st will actually use LOLcat language instead of your system language. Se per qualche motivo vorresti disabilitare questo comportamento, puoi semplicemente impostare CurrentCulture al locale che vorresti piuttosto usare. Bello da notare anche che puoi abilitare incondizionatamente il nostro easter egg, impostando il tuo valore CurrentCulture a qps-Ploc.

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