How to talk to skeptics?

[Daniel Shahaf]

Martin via rb-general wrote on Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 01:09:37 +0000:
> In my opinion the biggest problem is that we are not able to audit and
> verify any hardware implementation for this work so it cannot be
> trusted at all. Controlling hardware is essential and it cannot be
> replaced by virtualization unless it's based on some innovative
> blockchain PoW-like crypto agnostic miners. Without at least one
> wokring fully libre and formally verifiable hardware reference we are
> doomed to fail.

We did write about that once:

https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2019/04/01/reproducible-builds-twain-Intel-8086-audit-and-Berne-Convention-patches/

Cheers,

Daniel
(Don't miss the bold red text at the top.)

> Moreover the very first linux was bootstrapped by
> MINIX, the very first MINIX was bootstrapped by UNIX and ironically it
> looks like UNIX was somehow bootstrapped by itself in 1970 (it's a
> commercial not reproducible by design product anyway ;). After so many
> years all kind of Free and Open-Source Software is still literally
> prisoned by vendor-locked hardware, its obfuscated binary seeds and
> problematic build environments(i.e. to bootstrap linux from hex0 in
> practice you need to run it on linux anyway
> https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap ). The long term
> perspectives for Bootstrappable and Reproducible builds doesn't look
> optimistic neither:
> https://gist.github.com/DavidBuchanan314/a15e93eeaaad977a0fec3a6232c0b8ae
> (sooner or later other checksums will be breaked as well).
> 
> Cheers!  Martin