We (author of article being quoted here ;-) actually do own ColdFire V4E boards, which were donated by Freescale at some point. Unfortunately they can't be used for the plain m68k port without some substantial work.

While the ColdFire is sufficiently similar to the m68k so that code written to support one processor (at least in userspace) benefits the technical situation for the other, unfortunately they are also sufficiently different that you can't just take binaries for one processor and try to run them on the other.

I /may/ decide to bootstrap a ColdFire port at some point, but it won't be tomorrow.

Please report that. There's a bunch of operators on the #debian channel who regularly kick trolls and people who are not polite. The channel has had a pretty bad reputation in the past, but it's not really deserved anymore these days.

Not in my experience.

Absolutely wrong. Simple example: Debian's been providing a non-free archive, even though there have been several votes to remove it (all of them failed).

That particular bug, as it happens, has been fixed for squeeze. Debian now uses UUIDs rather than /dev/sd* entries to boot, by default, which does not have that problem.

Because Grub1 is horrible.

See http://bugs.debian.org/grub (the open bugreports against grub) and, especially, http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=239111#237 (a particularly telling example) if you don't believe me.

It's a bit of both, really

There's certainly a factor of 'because we can' in there, but it's also a matter of preference. I know plenty of people who prefer the FreeBSD userland, but I also know plenty of people (myself included) who've tried both the FreeBSD and GNU userlands and preferred the latter. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is certainly not for people in the first group.

Also, since many of debian's postinst scripts assume a GNU userland (and are allowed to do so by policy), shipping the FreeBSD userland as default would not have helped the port.

That's not a very useful statement.

Cyphers (*all* cyphers) are based on the *assumption* that it is easy to do one thing, but very hard to do the other; for instance, RSA is based on the assumption that it's easy to multiply one prime number by another, but that it's very hard to factor the resulting product into its two original prime numbers again.

This particular assumption about factoring is based on millenia of mathematical history on the subject; multiplication and factoring has been known since the time of the ancient greeks, but the academic world to this day does not know of a method to factor a product into its original prime numbers other than by multiplying a number of candidate prime numbers by other prime numbers and verifying whether it just happens to be correct.

That being said, for most of those millennia, there hasn't been a very great incentive to make factoring easy. As such, it's not impossible that there actually is a method to quickly factor a product into its prime numbers; and it's not impossible to think that the NSA (or some other organization) has discovered such a method. If they do, they have every (military) reason to keep that a secret. Unfortunately, it's impossible to disprove that possibility; you can't prove that there is no way to do a particular thing (you can only prove that it is, in fact, possible to do something, by actually doing it).

Obviously, the same is true for other crypto algorithms besides RSA.

(Not that I think this is the case, but the possibility certainly exists)