From: ecarp@netcom.com (Ed Carp)
Date: Thu, 12 May 94 10:42:43 PDT
To: mmarkley@microsoft.com (Mike Markley)
Subject: Re: Cypherpunks Goals: Bad debate drives out good debate
In-Reply-To: <9405121633.AA10150@netmail2.microsoft.com>
Message-ID: <199405121742.KAA21666@netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> | How about auto-moderation?  I came up with this idea a while back for
> | automatically moderating mailing lists.  Here's how it works:
> |
> | A newsgroup is set up as moderated, and the posts are emailed to the
> | moderator (as usual).  The "moderator" is a mail-to-news gateway that
> | posts the articles if the author isn't on the disapproved list, and
> | also automatically cancels articles that don't have the right "approved"
> | header and aren't digitally signed by the moderator.
> |
> | If a person becomes a nuisance, people send their votes in to the
> | moderator-robot, and it tallies the votes. If within XXX days more thumbs
> | down votes are received than thumbs up votes, the person is placed on the
> | disapproved list.
> |
> | The main advantage is, it's fast and easy to set up.  Comments?
> 
> Sounds like a very easy scheme to break. Say I suddenly decide that I 
> don't like your posts or Tim Mays posts. I can get you kicked off by 
> using anonymous accounts to say that you're a nuisance. It seems to me 

It's not as easy as you might think.  How many anonymous accounts can you get?
There are only so many anon servers, and for each anon account you have to have
a different real account, all it buys you is your vote registers twice
instead of once.  And anonymous votes can always be blocked - since just the
vote tallies are sent out, you don't really buy anything by being anonymous.

> that leaving the list open is better than trying to control it. An 
> example of the danger of automation has already been shown on this 
> list. Last week someone unsubscribed everybody using the automatic 
> features of the remailer. I'd rather have access to all of the posts 
> and make my own decisions about the contents rather than have a 
> potential for one aggrevated individual take out some meaningful 
> content because of a personal vendetta.

Then that's your decision to make, but others have a different view.  I,
for one, don't want to see a bunch of inane posts from XYZ, so I put
them in my filter file to be discarded.  That will work for individuals,
but to prevent the list from being flooded by malicious users, it seems
that some sort of control would be appropriate.  Nothing would stop someone
from emailing uuencoded core dumps to the list, of course, but the first
time they did it, I think that enough people would be pissed off that they'd
vote to throw them off.  Not that they couldn't receive, they just can't
post.

As I mentioned before, but want to make clear to you, no one individual
would be able to carry out a personal vendetta against another unless
they had a means to obtain many, many accounts and generate anonymous
accounts for each of them.  And, as I said before, anonymous votes could
be just thrown away.
-- 
Ed Carp, N7EKG/VE3		ecarp@netcom.com		519/824-3307
Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.3a public key		an88744@anon.penet.fi
If you want magic, let go of your armor.  Magic is so much stronger than
steel!        -- Richard Bach, "The Bridge Across Forever"