scratchandgame

(for anyone who do not know, bc is a "arbitrary-precision arithmetic language". its syntax is similar to C)

Gavin Howard's bc (bc-gh) is adopted by busybox, toybox, FreeBSD, Android, macOS for its robustness and superior performance. It is also shipped with Gentoo Linux; LFS also use bc-gh.

Even though bc-gh is more robust and updated, Linux distros other than Gentoo and Fedora do not package it it. bc-gh is not available on Arch (available on AUR), Debian and perhaps all of its derivative. The reason seems to be a licensing reason: bc-gh is under the BSD license.

bc-gh is clearly superior to GNU bc, Gavin Howard's benchmark show that bc-gh is faster than GNU bc in most case, while bc-gh actually do more work than GNU bc.

Today I tested GNU bc and bc-gh. I let they do this operation: (1024*1024)^(1024*1024). GNU bc give me the answer in five minutes, bc-gh give me the answer in two minutes.

GNU bc do not have a repository. All development happen in private, and we can't make sure it is still maintained. The latest version is 1.07 from 2017. bc-gh have a public repository and it is actively maintained.

So it is clear that other Linux distro not adopting bc-gh is purely licensing reason. They reject software not under the GPL license, even if they are more robust and more performant.

We need a campaign to raise awareness about superior software alternatives. We need to stop Linux distro for not adopting superior and updated softwares for licensing reasons.

(This is probably my last words, since I’m now a danger to the security of China :) )

I think everyone in privacy communities have heard about an infamous joker named “TheAnonymouseJoker” who spread comments against the GrapheneOS project. This article clarifies his motivation for writing those things, from a person works in the same industry as him.

I analyzed the content of TheAnonymouseJoker’s post, beside spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS, he also praise Chinese hardware, Chinese phone, and:

98% Chinese people approve of their Chinese government.

Which is the only thing I found correct.

So we know that TheAnonymouseJoker is working for the China government. This is already said by some people.

But why he has to spread misinformation about GrapheneOS, interfere with the personnel of this project?

We know, GrapheneOS is used by “journalists”, people who “fight for free speech”, “fight for human rights”. These “journalists” can only say bad things about socialist countries (for example, whenever its Fall, they will write a post: “Hanoi’s fall is beautiful, but foul!”, this is same for China, those “journalist” even argue on how bad Beijing is and why it should not be China’s capital). You see, those “journalists” are very smart when they are generating misinformation, but they are not smart enough (and don’t have their time) to do a research on what phone and software they should choose. TheAnonymouseJoker found this weakness, he crazily tries to spread misinformation about GrapheneOS, to make those stupid “journalists” stay away from a secure operating system, use CalyxOS and whatever insecure “degoogled” phone, backdoored Chinese phones, and that’s good for China’s security since the “journalists” phones will lose control or explode whenever the government want…

Sun Tzu already said: If the enemy is united, separate them. If we cannot attack the enemy with our army, separate them and attack the pieces.

TheAnonymouseJoker’s other posts, guides are trashes, we don’t need to care about them here.

Praising for Chinese hardware? Yeah in Viet Nam, we have campaigns to support Vietnamese goods. Should be same for China. Every people doing cyberwarfaces praise for local goods.

Writing is hard, I want to say more but I can’t currently puke out words. You can ask questions, this might make me puke words I haven’t puked here. I will not reply to TheAnonymouseJoker’s comment, since I already know what he will say. Below is the view of Vietnamese people on the “journalists”:

I think you guys have already heard about people who “fight for free speech”, “fight for human rights”, or “journalists”, “fight for civil society”, “fight against Internet censorship”. Those people mostly target socialist states: my Viet Nam, China, … and Muslim states. Basically any state that do not under the control of USA. They spread misinformation about how human rights are violated, how the Internet is censored. For China they even argue about why Beijing should not be the capital (!) They don’t have words about how the country is developed, they only have words for bad things about the country. For example, in the Fall, they can only write how Ha Noi is foul. From then on, they considered themselves “social critics” (!)

As a person living in Viet Nam, I can confirm that most people here rejects the “journalists”. “Most people” means adults with jobs, they don’t care or they are against the “journalists”, they teach their children to keep away from those “social critics”. They know who are “social critics” and they are disgusted with them. Students who haven’t found what they can do to effectively stop those journalist often do personal attack/trolls on the Facebook page of “journalists”. For example, they ask the cringe Viet Tan organization: “Today is 30/4, are you happy?” "I have video about “cong an danh dan” (when writting without diacritics, Viet Tan thought “cong an danh dan” was đánh dân - “police hitting people”) and then they send a video about a police playing piano (đánh đàn)

When covid 19 appeared, many Vietnamese working in USA and Europes have to escape those countries and fly to Viet Nam. Now we all know where is human rights. Definitely not USA. Not europe. I guess the situation is same for Chinese people. Don’t have any information on this.

Distributions like RHEL and Debian freeze packages, you will have to use old package when the newer is available. I think these distributions is just for highly mission-critical system, they have to run software smoothly, no breakage. Most personal computer don't need that stability.

Can anyone explain more about what a stable distributions mean?

People here's take about why free software ("open source") should be preferred, in my opinion (basically the OpenBSD's opinion) is flawed.

You said "open source" is "good" because it permits having eyes on ("auditing") and make sure there isn't malware.

This is NOT the most important benefit. But it is flawed because, you guys don't even have the knowledge to do coding. You guys are activist/"journalists" working for CIA. So you cannot audit the software yourselves.

Or "open source" but with a bad code style, how can you make sure the code doesn't have backdoors? But I think hilarious journalists that is only smart enough to post fake news about how down is the Russia and China economy can't even write bad code.

"open source" is good, firstly, because it permits auditing the source code and find the bugs, replace flawed/bad code with safer alternative (for example, the advantage of an open-source C software when porting to OpenBSD is they can replace every occurrence of strcat/strcpy with safer strlcat/strlcpy), sandbox it (on OpenBSD, with pledge and unveil), do privileges separation and revocation, etc.

And I think "you can make sure there isn't malware/backdoors" is the second benefit, NEVER THE FIRST.

Conclusion: Do not blindly trust what is "open source" when you can't even do code auditing.