An integrity check is better than nothing, but yes it says nothing about its authenticity.
An integrity check where both what you're checking and the hash you're checking against is literally not better than nothing if you're trying to prevent downloading compromised software. It'd flag corrupted downloads at least, so that's cool, but for security purposes the hash for a artifact has to be served OOB.
It’s not better than nothing - it’s arguably worse.
You can use this site
https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html
And all the files are here
https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/16.x/x86/release/
Under a HTTPS connection. I am not at a terminal to check the cert with OpenSSL.
I don’t see any way to check the hash OOB
Also this same thing came up a few years ago
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/reli...