From: Jeremey Barrett <jeremey@veriweb.com>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 21:08:52 -0800 (PST)
To: aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk
Subject: Re: "alt.cypherpunks" people?
In-Reply-To: <199702050029.QAA08873@toad.com>
Message-ID: <199702050508.VAA20092@descartes.veriweb.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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> John Gilmore urges action, or piping down... well lets start with
> discussion of whether one possible action is appropriate, and useful
> (piping down is not an option:-):
> 
> What do people think of starting an alt.cypherpunks USENET newsgroup?

As an additional forum, it's not a bad idea, with the exception that it
may draw some people away from the mailing list, and reduce the already-
slim signal on the list.

USENET is less accessible than email, and given the goals of cypherpunks,
the more accessible the medium the better. I have crap news access 99%
of the time, and I imagine a significant portion of the list is in a
similar situation. Also, the tools for news reading are not well-suited
for filtering, either manual or automatic.

>  3. USENET distribution is likely less efficient of overall bandwidth
> 
>  4. News propogation times are often poor (Exeter univ. receives news
>     about a week late) This is a real killer in my view.  I have
>     another news server I can access at the moment, but not everyone
>     may have access to a reasonable news server.
> 
>  5. News access is more complex for some people.  Some alt newsgroups
>     are not carried by some servers.  Perhaps news-to-mail and
>     mail-to-news gateway would solve these problems.

These 3 are fatal IMO. The distribution of cypherpunks would become
much more haphazard and might fail altogether in places. Some people
will be reading long threads days after they are dead.

> Coderpunks is a reasonable list, I'm not sure that it is moderated as
> such, but if you breach etiquette (discussion of politics, even when
> perpetrated by respected cryptographers, or by people discussing the
> implications of breaking DES, rather than the strict coding questions)
> they get Futplex-grams, which I find slightly annoying.
> 
> Cryptography@c2.net is again reasonable, and gained back some of the
> original people who quit cypherpunks over the years due to noise.
> Cryptography is moderated.  (Or is moderated when Perry thinks it
> would benefit from moderation, so that may change).

Agreed. These lists _are_ the alternative to the "open" cypherpunks list.

If a moderated cypherpunks is to be started, great, but it should be
another list, not _the_ cypherpunks list. Moderation, even with the best
intentions, is subjective, and therefore has no place on a list such
as cypherpunks.

If this is really an experiment, at the end of the month the list should
become unmoderated, and a moderated list created. Then we can see how many
people switch in that direction. I imagine it would be a similar number
to those that switched to the unedited list.

> What's left is attempting to stop government restrictions and backdoors,
> and deploying the many complex peices of software for which there exists
> uses and demands.

There is still much to be done. The cypherpunks list has plenty of reason
for being. As is, it 1) is still used as a forum for good discussion, 
despite the noise, and 2) is an invaluable resource for information 
retrieval and dispersal. The list should not be killed or moved IMO, 
and moderation should occur on other lists, not the main one.

- -- 
=-----------------------------------------------------------------------= 
Jeremey Barrett                                  VeriWeb Internet Corp.
Senior Software Engineer                         http://www.veriweb.com/

PGP Key fingerprint =  3B 42 1E D4 4B 17 0D 80  DC 59 6F 59 04 C3 83 64
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