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Re: Truth matters when writing software and selecting leaders


From: Martin
Subject: Re: Truth matters when writing software and selecting leaders
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2021 19:09:39 +0000

On 4/13/21 8:20 PM, Jean Louis wrote:
* Martin <smartin@disroot.org> [2021-04-13 20:41]:
Live-bootstrap (still under early development state at the moment) is a pure
bare metal project aiming to be used before involving any OS. Kernel blobs
are out of scope for them, because linux-kernel in general is not capable to
operate on 8bit processor with 300bytes of ROM and a single 4bits of RAM -
the hardware requirements for hex0 you can build from scratch i.e.:
https://www.nand2tetris.org/ . But yes if you really want you could also
setup it on some over-complicated hypocritical Cloud environment based
on
Microsoft Windows Guest Virtual Machines powered by Guix linux-libre KVM
Hosts (another not fixable freedom bug in "free software"^tm).
Do I understand it well:

- there must be some computer with a chip that is programmed by which
   method? Maybe physical switches? Then the chip spit the first binary
   which is used to create programming languags?

- or is there maybe some editor, so when small 8 bit CPU starts, user
   can enter some information and file is generated?
Basically it's about reinventing the wheel https://web.archive.org/web/20120127144927/http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/research/pubs/books/papers/133.pdf . But nowadays we have many different computer architectures, designs, tools, development boards, fpga implementations, virtual machines, blockchain technologies, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instruction_set_architectures . You have a full freedom of choosing your best CPU and how to speak with it. For now most of the attention is focused on the mainstream x86, arm and RISCV hardware but it could be also ported to any other exotic arch, i.e.: https://b1391bd6-da3d-477d-8c01-38cdf774495a.filesusr.com/ugd/56440f_96cbb9c6b8b84760a04c369453b62908.pdf
I don't think someone would like to repeat the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal even though
some
corrupted VW cars are still on the streets.
You said it there in a good example. People driving will not
necessarily get informed of security issues.
Drivers in this context are not the main target of this VW scandal. It's just a top global politics and their dirty games with CO2 emission speculative trading, which is basically a brute-force way to enforce additional tax for the car manufactures and any other big industries. Btw. it looks like the recent SolarWinds big scandal could be also prevented by bootstrappability and reproducible-builds: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06020
as that is exactly how Telegram is doing it, but currently FSF
endorses distributions with software that interacts with Skype,
Telegram, Twitter, etc. On the other hand campaign is there, money is
paid for decentralization of Internet, but FSF endorsed distributions
still partially work to centralize Internet.
It's the main reason why I started to write in this thread. In my opinion FSF needs some serious internal refactoring, fresh global view of all the current and possible future threats and a serious new strategy how to effectively counter-measure it.





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