[Quexos]

Which happens to be an URL belonging to the Kobo company. Hence it is a "trusted" source (it is what I meant by "official"), regardless of Kobo not wanting this to be simply "found" on their website as I naively tried to when going there.

Originally Posted by DNSB

As you notice the links all point to download.kobobooks.com/firmwares as the first part of the link with the hardware version (kobo3, kobo4 or kobo5), a release subdirectory and then the update zip file name which makes them relatively easy to locate.

You guys are VERY computer savvy and as most computer savvy people you assume everyone knows as much.
Thank you for your advanced method of ensuring a file has not been tampered with, but the md5 checksum ??? No idea what that is.
008e0c5ad9b98aecb17f831059e446e2 ? what a cute little string of gibberish (for non savvies like me) but I have no idea where to check that. As far as I can tell, I don't remember a file somewhere that says "please check here Md5" when downloading any program or patch or anything where inside there would be that string of funny letters and numbers.

Don't get me wrong, you guys have been very helpful most of the time and that is really great and I am thankful for that but sometimes it's hard to follow for the rest of us. (Maybe it's just me cause others seem to follow without much problem)
Besides I got a reader to read and thanks to the malevolence of companies like Kobo that do not want to give us customers what we want, (And in this case, actively work to make sure independent sources as that Russian person can help us as little as possible by releasing the obviously malevolent and otherwise unnecessary 2.8.1B) we end up spending more time tweaking or fine-tuning our devices than using them for their intended purpose.
A strange irony if there ever was one.

EDIT: Lol what a joke on me. After I wrote this post, I checked that 2.8.1B download for which I have no use and by simple curiosity and there I just find a file called "manifestmd5sum" I swear to god this is the first time I notice such a file in a download.
Anyways, I don't see how this file guarantees no tampering since it can easily be edited (I opened it by adding .txt) So if I wanted to tamper with it, I'd just add the clean md5 code by editing it.

Originally Posted by jackie_w

@Quexos - the md5 checksum from my saved original 2.8.1 zip file is the same as DNSB's. Also the exact filesize is 85,577,947 bytes. You should be safe if both these values match bartbrat's version.