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Good question. I guess people thought naively that .sfv files were enough, but of course that's not true.
Some .nfo files contain md5s for things, but that would be easily changeable.
It would have to be a cryptographic checksum, using something like GPG/PGP with a distributed fingerprint to be any good.
I've seen one or two over the years, but not as many as you'd expect for people that should be worried about security and image.
I've noticed some scene game/software releases have blake3 hashes now. That doesn't account for everything else, but I'd say it's a good step.
93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
Uh... If they messed with the iso, they could very easily mess with the NFO
Yes, I mentioned that - but trusted public sources, who often post on places like Reddit or personal websites run out of the US and the like, can post NFOs but can't post the actual game. If you knew the correct checksum, you could then turn around and grab the game from an untrusted source.
Distributing the game itself is the dangerous part (in terms of making the copyright pinkertons come after you) so it's better if it can be done as anonymously as possible, but that conflicts with the need to have it distributed by someone trusted. Putting the checksum in the nfo, which is widely reposted by trusted sources, would help avoid this problem.
93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
The SFV file contains checksums.
What is a .sfv file some mention here?