From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 22:56:38 +0800
To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: The Interlinked Cypherpunks Lists?
In-Reply-To: <v03007800af9d068330c1@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970512212330.266B-100000@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




> bounce (more precisely: "<cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>... Deferred:
> Connection timed out with rigel.cyberpass.net. Warning: message still
> undelivered after 4 hours").

I too didn`t see some of my articles come through, I`m subscribed to 
cyberpass.net, Your copied traffic appears to have come through now 
though. When I did have trouble sending I pinged cyberpass.net and it was 
up, so I presume it was just a majordomo problem.

> * Is it possible for the interlinked lists to send out announcements of
> list problems to subscriber of all such lists? (Each list owner could do a
> periodic "who cypherpunks" of the other lists, then use this list to send a
> message if a problem comes up. More sophisticated cross-processing could
> eliminate duplicates, etc.)

Yes, I still get a LOT of duplicates, after checking several times that 
I was only subscribed to one list. I`m not running procmail at the moment 
(still playing with linux) and I seem to remember the duplicates nearly 
always have *different* message IDs, is there a procmail recipe to kill 
these?

> * Alternatively, if one of the sites goes down, such as
> "cypherpunks@cyberpass.net" seems to have done, could the other sites
> automagically pick up the task of distributing articles until the site
> comes back up?

This would be an excellent idea, if the sites kept a "who cypherpunks" 
on each other they could do a ping every hour or so to check the site was 
up and if not add the users in the "who" list to their subscriber list.
Is this possible with majordomo or some sort of script, list operators? 

> * How feasible is it to have a single "virtual subscription address" which
> gets traffic from one of the various list sites? (To avoid having to
> subscribe to two or more lists and thus getting duplicates.)

Hmm, this rather kills the idea of a distibuted system which is 
impossible to censor. I know this isn`t really a necessary system as I`m 
sure we all trust the list operators who run the sites, but it is a very 
cypherpunk idea and I rather like seeing it in action.

I can see problems with the current system, most notably the duplicates, 
but if these can be either killfiled on reciept, or even better, tweaking 
of the majordomos can remove them at source, the system will be very 
stable and useable, as it is the duplicates are not too great a problem, 
just an annoying quirk of the system, but it would be nice to see the 
back of them. 

This message is probably off topic as it talks about practical use of 
technology as opposed to ethics and blowing up poloticians, in which case 
I appologise, back to ranting and anarchism ;-)