From: greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 93 22:29:31 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Filter to exclude Detweiler?
Message-ID: <ceuNDc1w164w@ideath.goldenbear.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I've personally come to the conclusion that it's no longer useful to (a) 
attempt to communicate with Detweiler, or (b) pay attention to what he 
writes.

I am, however, opposed to source-filtering him at philosophical and 
practical levels.

I think his bad craziness is evident enough from his postings that anyone 
paying much attention will conclude he's disconnected from external reality; 
it shouldn't take more than a few messages for folks to reach this 
conclusion. (I admit with some chagrin that it took more than a few for me 
to do that.) I think that source filtering is at least a close kin to 
censorship, and I'd vote to steer clear of it.

I also think that attempting to source-filter him may lead to some sort of 
"identity arms race", via remailers, anon-servers, and the like. Such an 
arms race would be distracting, annoying, and lead to further wasted time, 
effort, and energy on the part of people who ought to have better things to 
do. :)

I encourage folks to look into improving technology which would allow for 
destination-filtering, e.g., kill-files and their ilk. (Next-generation 
killfiles - ones which attempt some sort of textual 
interpretation/classification beyond headers - implemented at the 
destination point have the added benefit that the filter target can't easily 
deduce from the list traffic what algorithm/pattern is being used, and 
thereby avoid it.)

For what it's worth, I write the above in spite of the fact that I don't 
have a kill-file in the reader-agent that I read C-punks with, and I pay for 
every minute of transmission time used to receive C-punks, including 
Detweiler's lengthy messages.


--
Greg Broiles
greg@goldenbear.com                     Baked, not fried.