From: paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 12:42:58 -0800 (PST)
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
Message-ID: <199702062042.MAA29640@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this
> month.  I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are
> conclusive.  There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today;
> 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list.  Forty people
> cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted
> to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email
> message.  Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.

As I, and a number of other list members, have said: Why did you not 
rename the lists so that cypherpunks@toad.com was uncensored???
You and I know perfectly well that probably 1250 of those addresses 
are people who don`t know the censorship is taking place, don`t read 
the list (defunct accounts), don`t know how to change their 
subscription, are too lazy to care either way etc... I would guess 
there are less than 100 that have considered the issues and decided 
to subscribe to the censored list.

> If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both
> ways, or six different ways.  Name it this, or name it that.  I'm not;
> all I want is something that works.  The cypherpunks list was unusable
> for this kind of discussion, only a month ago.  It's usable now.

No, it was usable to those with time and patience or the rather 
rudimentary knowledge necessary to set up filters. Now all we are 
doing is relegating a list that was once subscribed to by intelligent 
and well educated people into a playground for the inept. I`m not 
being elitist but if we can`t expect a member of this list who 
actually uses it for discussion to know how to set up filters then he 
might as well unsubscribe.
 

> Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is
> now suggesting.  "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful
> option.  Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete
> suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track.  They
> involved a lot more work than the previous setup.  I told him if he
> was willing to do the work, we could try it.  As Dale suggests, I
> wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and
> passing judgement on the postings.  Sandy was, for a month.

You should indeed have shut down the list. The problem being not that 
you choose to run a censored list but that you have associated the 
name cypherpunks with it and in doing so you have destroyed the 
reputation that the name cypherpunks once had.

> Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very
> gratifying.

Paternalism is the root of all statism.


  Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"