From: remail@tamsun.tamu.edu
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 93 15:15:24 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: `Stalled' Progress
Message-ID: <9308172215.AA18632@tamsun.tamu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At  2:36 AM 8/16/93 +0000, an12070@anon.penet.fi wrote:
>building up all these things on student accounts is
>commendable but a foundation of quicksand in the long run. 

Quicksand is fine if you use pontoons. We *are* a guerrilla operation,
aren't we? Let me pay homage to those who have endured the risk of offering
their student accounts for use as remailers, etc. We need more like you. I
could get some bootleg student accounts, but I think the annoyance factor
might outweigh the benefit of more resouces. And, as my anonymous posting
implies, I'm not entirely sure I want to be out of the closet as a
cypherpunk yet.

>rumor has it
>even soda.berkeley.edu ftp site (perhaps the most critical cypherpunk
>element other than the mailing list) is being run off a student
>account. 

This is indeed our great vulnerable point. We should attempt to
decentralize it (at least have more backup). UNIX gurus- if I put PGP in my
home directory, how do I make it available netwide? Does my sysadmin

Another possibility - spring some real cash and get cycles and ftp support
on netcom or something like it. How much would it cost?

Is it cycles, space and access we need, money, or just someone to take charge?

Once we got digital cash working, things have a better chance to become
self-supporting and less at the mercy of university system administrators.

How difficult would it be to get some resources (cycles, disk space, code)
from Chaum's company Digicash? We could do an academic research project
studying the feasibility of trade over internet, funded primarily by
in-kind donations. Can we piggy-back on the netcash effort? 

>* the `i thought you were doing that' factor. 

Is this really a problem? I'm always pleasantly surprised when something
gets done, even if I'm working on it.
>
>* to a large degree, despite the commandment `cypherpunks write code',
>the `cypherpunks' have always gained their cohesion more from political
>ideology than implementing tangible systems. 

I don't know about anyone else, but the tangibility did it for me. I used
to be fatalistic about privacy etc. The tangible achievements of the
cypherpunks have given me hope that there *is* a soft underbelly on that
beast. Not that ideology isn't fun!