Earlier quoted context omitted.
you can detect `curl | bash` server-side and serve a different payload for those (compared to curl -O file, wget etc), hence its an effectively undetectable attack vector. Executables on the other hand can be inspected and prodded, so the likelihood of something going amiss and consequently security agencies finding out about it is significantly higher. neither of those is secure of course, we're just discussing diff…
> you can detect `curl | bash` server-side Oh wow, ok. So if anything, manually do `curl` and `sh` separately?
but i'Ve also gotta say that random binary download over web is also incredibly rare - usually its either a combination of both (the curl|bash ending in a random binary being downloaded) or the user actually installing via a packagemanager like apt, zypper, yum, dnf etc - and those packagemanagers generally do audit the main repositories, so theyre basically as secure as you can get in those contexts.
but of course, everyone has their own thread model and i dont work in security (●'◡'●)