From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 16:51:32 -0800 (PST)
To: sandfort@crl.com (Sandy Sandfort)
Subject: Re: Dr. Vulis is not on cypherpunks any more
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.961102153652.8716A-100000@crl.crl.com>
Message-ID: <199611030050.QAA00717@slack.lne.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Sandy Sandfort writes:
> 
> 
> Rich,
> 
> On Sat, 2 Nov 1996, Rich Burroughs wrote:
> 
> > Are people on this list not sophisticated enough to be capable
> > of filtering his posts if they don't like to read them?
> 
> The short answer is, No.  More specifically, we constantly have
> a stream of new readers sampling Cypherpunks.  Some are 
> technically sophisticated; some are not.  In either case, new
> readers do not have the historical perspective not to fall for
> Dimitri's big lies.  Nor do they have any way of know what an
> abberation his sort of behavior is on this list.  "So this is
> what Cypherpunks are like," would be a sad, but understandable
> misinterpretation of what we're all about.  What John did was 
> appropriate.


When I joined the list three or so years ago, L. Detwiller was
the contemporary equivalent of Vulis.  The intro message mailed to
new subscribers explained the situation with Detwiller and asked
new subscribers to not respond to his bait.  It seemed to
work pretty well- Detwiller's posts were pretty much ignored.
Eventually he started taking his meds again, or got tired of
being ignored, and started posting relatively understandable stuff.
Not everyone agrees with him, which is fine, but he stopped
talking about 'tentacles' and accusing random list members of
bizarre conspiracies.

The problem with 'blocking' someone from a list is that it
isn't effective.  Even without remailers, it's trivial to forge
mail well enough to get past any 'blocking' measure that
could be put in place.  It's also easy to subscribe under a new name.

The other, more serious problem is that it to some extent 'proves'
that cryptoanarchy "doesn't work".  "Look", some will say, "the Cypherpunks
anarchy doesn't even work on their own list and they had to _censor_
someone".  Yea, I know that the list isn't really anarchy (although
it's pretty close these days) and Vulis hasn't really been censored-
he's free to spew his trash, just not here.  But it'll look that way
to a lot of people.

I think in the end that filtering at the user end is the only (current)
effective way to deal with people like Vulis.  He went in to my kill file
almost immediately, as did a number of people who seemed to do little
recently except post rebuttal/arguments to him.  After all, it's my time
that I'm spending reading this list and I'm not going to waste
it on crap like flame wars with Vulis.

-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03  92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF