From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 16:26:08 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Moderation experiment and moderator liability
Message-ID: <199702170026.QAA09134@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



There appears to be a bit of a hush up surrounding the circumstances
of the pause in the moderation experiment and subsequent change of
moderation policy.

To clear the air, I think it would be kind of nice if the full story
were told, so I'll gather here a history as I understand it.
Information from my archives (those I have), and from asking around in
email.

I realise that some of the actions that I am claiming of participants
in this sequence of events seem hard to believe given their high
reputation capital.  I was myself initially dubious on the strength of
the reputation capital of those being critisized.

However the below is the sequence of events as close as I can
determine.

I welcome being proven wrong on any points.


Events:

1. Dimitri Vulis posted a lot of off topic posts over a period of time

2. Dimitri reposted a couple of 50k Serdar Argic revisionist articles 

3. Dimitri challenged John Gilmore to shut him up

4. John unsubscribed Dimitri, and modified majordomo@toad.com to
siltently ignore Dimitri's attempts to resubscribe.  Dimitri could
still post, and presumably read cypherpunks with a different email
address or via an archive.  It was a token unsubscription only.

5. When Dimitri figured out what John had done, he made many posts
denigrating John as a censor

6. Much discussion ensued critisizing John for blocking Dimitri

7. Over Christmas some joker subscribed cypherpunks@toad.com to a load
of sports mailing lists, Hugh Daniels and John cleaned up the mess

8. Followed a long thread on hardening lists against spam attacks

9. John made a post to the list announcing that the list would be
moderated for one month from Jan 11 as an experiment, and included
Sandy Sandfort's proposed moderatation policy and offer to act as
moderator.  It appeared that the moderation experiment was Sandy's
suggestion, and that John had agreed to go along with it.

10. Some discussion both pro and con of moderation, and the technical
, free speech, and legal aspects followed

11. Moderation started Jan 19, the main list became the moderated list

12. Lots of people complained about the moderation, some defended it
Tim May quietly unsubscribed

13. Some people complained about inconsistency in moderation -- some
articles which went to flames were not flamish, but made by posters
with low reputation capital, or were following up to posts which were
flamish.

14. After a while some people commented on Tim's absence, and sent him
mail asking what happened.  Tim posted an article explaining that he
had left because of the imposed moderation without discussion.

15. John followed up with a post defending the moderation experiment,
and arguing for it's popularity (he claimed as evidence the number of
posters who had not taken the trouble to move to the unedited list).

16. Dimitri posted an article where he claimed that there was a
security flaw in Stronghold.  Stronghold is C2Nets commercial version
of the freeware Apache SSL web server.  Sandy is employed by C2Net.

17. Sandy dropped the posting entirely -- it went to neither
cypherpunks (edited), nor cypherpunks-flames.  He considered that
forwarding the posting would have made him legally liable.  Sandy is a
lawyer by profession.  He did not explain this situation on the list.

18. Tim May had by now subscribed to cypherpunks-flames, and posted
several follow-ups to Dimitri's posting, discussing the issue of
Dimitri's post being dropped, and stated that Dimitri's posting was
not flamish, and should not have been dropped in his opinion.  Tim's
postings were also silently dropped, going to neither of cypherpunks
(edited), and cypherpunks-flames.

19. Sandy made an announcement that he was ending his participation in
the moderation experiment.  Still no explanation of why posts were
dropped, or even admission that they were.

20. The two moderated cypherpunks lists (cypherpunks and
cypherpunks-flames) went dead for some time.

21. Tim received a warning from C2Net's lawyers that if he did not
desist from mentioning that Dimitri had posted an article criticising
a C2Net product that he would be sued!

22. John posted a statement where he explained Sandy's sudden
announcement of ending his particpation.  John explained that Sandy
had "hit a pothole in the moderation experiment when Mr. Nemesis
submitted a posting containing nothing but libelous statements about
Sandy's employer".  Sandy did not drop Johns posting even though it
covered the same topics that had resulted in Tim's posts being
dropped, and resulted in Tim receiving legal threats from C2Net.  In
the same post John said that he had come to the conclusion that he was
no longer willing to host the cypherpunks list.  In this post John
announced that Sandy had been persuaded to continue to moderate for
the remainder of the moderation period, and gave the new policy.  The
changes were that anything other than crypto discussion and discussion
of forming a new cypherpunks list would go to flames, and anything
that Sandy thought was libelous would be dropped silently.

23. Sandy posted a statement affirming that he would continue to
moderate, and that if any cypherpunks wished to discuss his prior
moderation policy and performance as a moderator that they do it on
new lists which they create themselves.


(If Sandy's current moderation criteria mean that he feels obliged to
forward this post to cypherpunks-flames as off-topic, or even to
silently drop it from both moderated lists, so be it.  I will simply
repost it later, when the moderation experiment is over on one of the
new lists.  In the event of myself receiving legal threats, I shall
simply post it via a remailer, or rely on someone else to do so.  C2
does not appear to be running any remailers at the moment, otherwise I
would use a remailer hosted at c2.net as the exit node in the remailer
chain.)


The positive outcome of all this has been to make the cypherpunks list
more resilient to legal attack.  The new distributed list seems to be
progressing well, and will be less liable to attack.  Filtering
services continue, as they should.  And alt.cypherpunks has been
created as a forum ultimately resistant to legal attack.

Also I should say that I would hope that no one holds any long term
animosity towards any of the players in this episode, many of the
people have been very prolific in their work to further online privacy
and freedom, and I hope that we can all put this chapter behind us.


Now more fun things...

Anyone checked out the DES breaking project?

Over on 

	http://fh28.fa.umist.ac.uk/des/ 

are details of mailing lists where people are organising breaking
RSADSIs DES challenge.  For the RC5/32/12/6 (48 bit RC5) break which
took 13 days, it seems there were a peak of 5000 machines involved.
At this rate it will take 8 months to break DES.

Adam
--
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