From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 94 07:51:42 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Detweiler abuse again
In-Reply-To: <9402150656.AA28719@tsx-11.MIT.EDU>
Message-ID: <9402151547.AA22138@ah.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


It's February, and time for the Second Annual Hughes v. Ts'o "Imminent
Death of Usenet Predicted" Debate.

For those of you not around this time last year (that's most of you),
Ted and I did this already.

>"This practice of people wandering about outside without bullet-proof
>vests is profoundly broken for the long run.  This property also
>requires a 100% completely distributed responsibility of citizens not to
>go on a shooting spree."

I could take this analogy seriously if I thought that posting
off-topic to usenet were as serious as death.

Let's try equating speech to speech, OK?

How about the disruptive homeless barging into conversations on the
street?  They are, like it or not, already anonymous insofar as many
social relationships go.  One can't really shun them as a technique of
peer pressure, that's adding one insult to, well, years of insult.

If the street were usenet, there would be no way to escape the
disruption.  Usenet is completely open to all who wish to speak, with
no exceptions.  In the end, if complaining doesn't work, there is no
recourse but to leave usenet.

Cypherpunks is a mailing list.

>In the
>meantime, there's a certain thing known as community responsibility,
>which rabid individualists may or may not choose to recognize.

[...]

>In the short run, there's such a thing as net.responsibility (for those
>remailer operators capable of feeling internal guilt on this issue).

A summary: I advised that only those should post who can to take the
heat.  One barrier to that is feeling guilt.

Ted is trying to instill guilt.  The reference to "rabid
individualists" is an implicit threat of societal rejection of a
madman embodied as a free speaker.  And "net.responsibility" refers to
whatever guilt you already have.  Ted says "there's such a thing" to
those who do not perceive it in themselves, and who may let the act of
looking for it become the act of creating it.

Let me be clear.  I think that instilling guilt sucks.  I don't want
it around me.

I desire the public forum.  I desire anonymous speech.  I desire
pseudonymous persons.  Usenet does not allow these simultaneously,
therefore it is broken for me.  Therefore I desire usenet as it is
constituted now to die, and as much as I desire that, I also desire a
new public forum to exist.

Questions of timing therefore resolve into questions of tactics.  We
are making sure that anonymity is part of usenet; that will break it
sooner or later.

>Lance is, unfortunately, pointing out some huge, gaping holes in the
>current architecture of the Cypherpunks remailers.  It would be good if
>they were fixed ASAP.

Unfortunately??

LD is out *best adman*.

The holes are not in anonymity, but in the forum.  We should be fixing
the forum to allow technologically-strengthened anonymity.

Eric