Payloads

A payload is a program you send to a jailbroken Prospero-generation machine for it to run. Prosperous describes them, verifies them, and delivers them - it does not ship any.

Why none are bundled

Payload binaries are never shipped, only described. What Prosperous carries is a manifest: names, URLs, checksums and what each thing is for. The binaries stay where their authors put them.

That keeps two questions separate. "Where did this come from" is answered by the manifest, which is text you can read. "Is this the thing it claims to be" is answered by a digest, checked before anything is executed with kernel-adjacent privileges.

pros payloads

shows what is described, what can be trusted, and what is already on the target.

Fetching, and why a checksum comes first

pros send --name living-room <payload>

A payload with no usable checksum is refused before anything is downloaded. There is no point spending your bandwidth on a file that could not be checked when it arrived, and a download that cannot be verified is not a smaller problem than one that fails verification - it is the same problem, discovered later.

Nothing that fails its digest is kept.

If you want to watch the verification:

OOPS_LOG=debug pros send --name living-room <payload>

A mismatch is logged with both digests - the one expected and the one found - because "checksum failed" without them tells you nothing about whether you have the wrong file or a corrupted download.

Staging and delivery

Fetching puts a verified file in the staging directory. Sending hands it to the loader on the target and runs it.

Those are separate steps because they fail for unrelated reasons: a fetch fails because of the network or a bad digest, a send fails because the loader is not running. Collapsing them would produce one error message covering two remedies.

The window's payload view offers the same, and will fetch into a folder you name - a window that shows you a folder and offers to fill it must fill that folder. A file verified into some other directory is on disk, correct, and invisible, which is indistinguishable from the download never having happened.

Supervising

pros supervise --name living-room <payload>

Keeps a probe alive on the target while something else drives it. This is what obSCEne uses when it wants a console to answer questions rather than run a program to completion.

What Prosperous will not do

It does not modify a payload. What is sent is byte-for-byte what was verified.

It does not decide a payload is safe. A digest says a file is the one the manifest describes. Whether the manifest describes something you should run on your console is your call, and no amount of checksumming answers it.