From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 17:58:32 -0800 (PST)
To: shamrock@netcom.com
Subject: Re: Moderation [Tim,Sandy]
Message-ID: <199702040158.RAA09697@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> writes:
> I believe that Cypherpunks is beyond hope of recovery. In fact, each day
> Cypherpunk (as in cypherpunks@toad.com) lives on, it does damage to the
> cause. Let's kill the list. Once and for all. Let the hard core crypto go
> to Coderpunks, the politics to Cryptography, and the garbage into the void.

What about the leaks?  (rc4.c, Mykotronics dumpster contents, etc)
Where do they go?

You expect Perry to stick his neck out and approve them?  (Perry
Metzger is the moderator of cryptography@c2.net, started recently as a
moderated version of cypherpunks for those who don't know what the
`cryptography' list is).  The existance of cryptography argues against
the need for `cypherpunks' to be moderated.  Why two competing
moderated lists?

Secondly the status of garbage is in the eye of the beholder.  There
are a few posts which are probably considered garbage by near
everyone, but lots of other stuff which really just depends on what
the reader is interested in.

The problem with censorship or moderation is that it waters down the
absolutism of free speech.  Free speech in electronic media, with
cypherpunks type I, and type II remailers, is the closest thing to
truly free speech yet.

A lot of people seem to regard Jim Bell's assasination politics as
suitable material for censoring.  Yet it is pretty crypto relevant.

Sandy's job is pretty hard to do.  For instance I recently posted
this, which ended up in cpunks-flames, due to being in a thread which
contained a mild flame 2 messages back:

: Diffie-Hellman key generation, there are two main ways of generating
: the diffie-hellman prime modulus, method 1:
: 
: 	p = 2q+1
: 
: where q is a prime also.
: 
: And method 2:
: 
: 	p = r.2q+1
: 
: where q is a prime and r is a randomly generated number.
: 
: With method 1, the security parameter is the size of p in bits (or
: size of q, as they are related).
: 
: With method 2, there are two security parameters, size of q and size
: of p in bits.  
: 
: Method 2 has the advantage that key generation is faster as it is
: quicker to generate new random numbers r, than to repeatedly generate
: trial prime q as you have to do in method 1.  However is the security
: weaker in method 2?  What size of p and q do you have to use to get
: the same security as for same size of p in bits as in method 1?  What
: should be the relationship between the size of p and q?

(I freely admit to injecting additional crypto relevance just for the
fun of seeing it be filtered cpunks-flames -- though I was interested
in discussion also).

> I am well aware of the name recognition and reputation capital associated
> with CP, still I believe it best to *kill the list*.

I'd prefer to see various filtering services offered, and the list
retained.

My main objection with the moderation experiment is that the main list
was renamed.

Adam
--
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`