[liberationtech] getting past that first turtle

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Hello,

I want to download and play with Liberté Linux, but I have a few 
questions that are of a general enough nature to be of interest for this 
list.  At least that's my hope.

My Abilities: can use GPG cli commands, can install junk I download to a 
thumbdrive, use free software (almost) exclusively

Question 1: Is there a way to get more verification that the info at 
http://dee.su/liberte-install about authentication is correct?  Would it 
help at all if Maxim reposted the info on the list, or would that just 
be false sense of security?

Question 2: What do non-pseudonymous people have to say about Liberté 
Linux?  The only way I know of to judge a project dev'd pseudonymously 
which I don't personally work on is by the variety of non-pseudonymous 
people who have put their reputations on the line to say that the 
project indeed does what it claims.  For example, if it turns out that 
Bitcoin has a backdoor in it, a lot of people (some on this list) would 
take a big reputation hit.  Those people are smart enough and from 
enough different walks of life that if they are all colluding to fool me 
then I'm screwed no matter what so I might as well assume they aren't.

And just to clarify wrt Bitcoin, I'm saying I have a basic understanding 
of how it works technically, and I can extend that understanding through 
trust in a consensus among a variety of experts about the technical 
aspects which I don't understand (as well as picking some aspects 
essentially at random and studying them to compare to what's been said 
of them).  That says nothing of whether I'd actually want to use Bitcoin 
for anything or agree with its economic underpinnings.  That's all I'm 
looking for wrt Liberté Linux-- that it does what it claims to do.  I 
can decide for myself outside the scope of that technical question 
whether or not I want to use/rely on onion routing for web surfing, 
sending messages, etc.

Thanks,
Jonathan