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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:17:19
Adam Back (aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk)
Mon, 23 Nov 1998 19:23:49 GMT
Jim Gillogly writes:
> Given the negative experience with moderation (perceived as
> censorship) on the cypherpunks list, it might be useful to have
> some mechanism to check rejections -- perhaps a web site that
> has a two-week rolling dustbin of rejected articles, where people
> could see what has been dumped and compare it with their own
> preferences. Seems to me that could be automated in a fairly
> straightforward manner.
Most straight forward way for automating ability to check what is
being rejected and what not, is for Perry to subscribe to CodherPlunks
and forward things he finds interesting to perry's-filtered-CodherPlunks.
Several other people have commented with the same opinion.
However, it doesn't seem that this is what Perry intends to do. From
what he has said it seems that he wants to start an `all new'
CodherPlunks list.
As I said in my earlier post, I consider this to be a negative because
it fragments list membership, which makes smaller lists, which makes
it less likely that someone on list will be able or have energy to
answer a given query on key schedules for foo block cipher.
Personally I can't see the whole effort is worth it -- the traffic is
so low, and the level of sp*m neglible that the whole endeavour is a
waste of time. I'd rather Perry spent more time hacking on IPSEC
code.
On Perry's comment that he plans to remove political discussion -- I
think this also is a negative, cypherpunk agenda is a political
endeavor.
In the begining there was cypherpunks. Code was written, hacks and
pranks were pulled, dumpsters were dived, and strong political points
made thereby. There was noise, sure, but with the number of motivated
subscribers, and the talent pool things happened. There were even
filtered versions of the list for those too busy to hit the 'd' key
all by themselves. (The filtered versions still exist btw).
As always much ado was made about the effort of hitting the 'd' key,
and the resulting posts caused more need to hit the 'd' key in
themselves than the offending sp*m ever did.
Neglecting the existance of several fine filtered versions of the list
Perry proceeded to create `cryptography' a better cypherpunks with
less noise. Many of the talented list members moved to this more
civilised environment their 'd' keys having wore clean out. So much
of the signal emigrated.
Then there was CodherPlunks, another cypherpunks spin off. This one was
focussed on coding. None of that political overthrowing the state
through deployment of crypto stuff. Again some more people emigrated.
Then there was the disastrous moderated cypherpunks list experiment.
I tend to think all this list splitting just fragments the community
of interested contributors.
So now to follow crypto developments one needs to subscribe to (my
current collection):
cypherpunks (breaking news usually here first)
cryptography (some more technical types contribute here)
CodherPlunks (coding issues)
remailer-operators (occasional remailer tech discussions)
mix-l (mixmaster tech list)
ukcrypto (uk crypto politics list)
dbs (ecash tech list)
eternity (eternity tech list)
freeswan (John Gilmore's free linux s/wan project)
then there's the news groups:
sci.crypt
comp.pgp.*
plus the IETF crypto related lists:
open-pgp (IETF OpenPGP list)
smime (IETF s/mime list)
tls (IETF tls list)
pkix (IETF PKIX list)
did I miss any?
Bob Hettinga also I think has a couple of other crypto lists where he
forwards all manner of crypto related things.
My contribution to the too many lists syndrome was eternity list.
However I forward interesting stuff both ways with cypherpunks, so you
won't miss much eternity stuff if you are already on cypherpunks.
eternity is not moderated, but has cypherpunks filtered down to
eternity related stuff only added in manually.
So I view the above as plenty of lists.
But hey Perry is going to do it anyway, so I guess that'll be just one
more entry in a procmail file, and another even lower traffic list.
Perhaps Perry could be persuaded to consider CodherPlunks traffic as a
submission for perry's-filtered-CodherPlunks or whatever it gets called.
Adam
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:17:19