From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 23:22:41 +0800
To: dlv@bwalk.dm.com
Subject: Re: Stronghold
In-Reply-To: <wLPgee5w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
Message-ID: <199710121508.QAA04569@server.test.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




Dimitri Vulis <dlv@bwalk.dm.com> writes:
> Apparently a 'bot was installed on toad.com to discard my
> submissions from the "unedited" list _after my article which
> prompted the C2net threatening lawyer letter did make it through the
> "unedited" list (but was censored from the "flames" list by C2Net).

Your claim has some plausibility, I'll grant.  You were already
singled out for special treatment, in that John Gilmore did
unsubscribe you, and block you from re-subscribing.  We know that much
because he admitted it himself.

Also Attila said something recently about some of his messages being
excluded from the unedited list, and being able to repost them at
night and have them go through.  He said he thought Tim May
experienced similar problems.

This is a serious charge because we were lead to believe that unedited
was completely unedited -- it was supposed to be straight through, and
neither John or Sandy ever admitted to editing unedited, yet according
to these claims it appears that it was being edited.

There are sort of plausible reasons why mail can disappear -- freak
delivery problem (happens now and then), or perhaps flakiness of
toad's majordomo to many changes being made to it.  It is sort of
within the bounds of believeability that these posts could have
disappeared by accident.

Given that multiple people are saying things about unedited being
edited (either by bots or by hand selection) it seems likley that
there was something sneaking going on towards the end, even with the
unedited list.

> At one point, all my submissions to cypherpunks appeared on
> "unedited" and then on "flames" with about a 3-second delay,
> indicating a 'bot at work.  The 'bot was scrubbed when C2net decided
> that my writings were not suitable for auto- forwarding to the
> "flames" list either.

Wow.  That is a somewhat plausible claim also, one it might be
possible to verify from article headers in list archives.

> For about a week, numerous articles by myself, Tim May, et al
> appeared on "unedited" but not on "flames".

I can confirm my belief that this part is true.  Numerous people have
verified this, which ocurred after Sandy faced his engineered
"dilemma" :-)

> My Jan 30th announcement that C2Net filtered out of the flames list
> _did show up on the unedited list. However my following articles,
> like the one quoting C2Net's threatening lawyer letter (which I cc'd
> to numerous people, including JYA, who, not surprisingly, declined
> to put it on his archive) 

I'd be interested to hear John Young confirm or deny this.  He if I
recall correctly was also critical of C2's handling of the affair, and
I would have thought that with his normal 'tude to censorship of
documents, he would've put it up.  So what happened John?

> did _not appear on the "unedited" list. Nevertheless at least one
> lying C2Net shill from Hewlett Packard claims that my articles
> appearing on the unedited list on January 30th prove that I wasn't
> being filtered from "unedited" one week later.

Some thing's just can't be proven.  That logic clearly doesn't flow.

> Another lying C2net shill, Jason E. Durbin, a technical writer for Oracle,
> just wrote in news.admin.net-abuse.policy:
> 
> [Dimitri bashing by Jason Durbin]
> 
> "No banishment occured" - more bizarre lies from C2Net and their supporters.

Yup, that one is incorrect -- we've established that because John
Gilmore admitted to unsubscribing you, and blocking you from
re-subscribing.

> Oh, and I don't recall sending binaries to this list either.

No, can't say I recall you sending binaries either.

> This reminds me of the claim by Rich Graves, another C2Net/Cygnus
> shill, that I'm sending "hundreds" of articles a day to this mailing
> list.

Not hundreds, I agree.  However there were a few rather long ones
about "dandruff covered Armenians" :-), something involving some
claimed historic ethnic cleansing.

> You may recall that the same C2net/Oracle shill Jason Durbin has
> been following up on my Usenet articles in sci.crypt,
> comp.unix.questions, etc with lies and libel: claiming, e.g., that I
> "lie about my credentials", that I don't even have a master's
> degree, etc. Is C2Net paying Jason Durbin to badmouth my academic
> credentials?

Your credentials are independently verifiable.  I have seen claims by
people who have said that they had satisfied themself of your
credentials by calling the university you got your PhD from.  I have
not done this myself, but I take your word for it.  

However another aspect to this argument over credentials is a comment
that arose when another person with a PhD who used the title "Dr" in
his From line subscribed to the list.  That person was Fred Cohen.
His above average education in having his PhD didn't seem to reflect
in his posts, and several people commented on this fact.  It seems to
be that listing qualifications in From fields is asking for rude
comments, or it seems to attract criticism :-)

I can say I like the practice.

Was a time on this list when there were quite a number of people who
had PhD's.  Jim Gilogly does I think, Atilla T Hun, no doubt lots of
others, several past or present list members are post grad students
studying for PhD's (and no doubt being distracted from their PhD
topics by reading cpunks).

I won't bother discussing my academic qualifications; it doesn't
really seem necessary to discuss them on list.

People's comments have value independently of their qualifications.
It can be largely orthogonal to their paper qualifications.  A lot of
people in the computer field got their qualifications in other fields.
Paul Kocher for instance if you look at his resume seems to have a BSc
in Biology or something, however this clearly doesn't get in his way,
as he does pretty high level crypto consulting (RSADSI, Netscape,
etc).

Anyway, perhaps it's time for a repost of the potted sequence of
events I constructed of the events as I was able to verify them at the
time.  Uh... dig dig, I'll find it in a bit.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

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