From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 16:24:29 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: List Robustness
In-Reply-To: <v0310280bb092291ceb73@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19971117190222.00688de4@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 10:26 PM 11/14/1997 -0600, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>I do not think that it is entirely impossible either, but the likely
>scenario is that the government may first try to harass us and attempt
>the criminal charges only after some time.
>
>In any case, the present structure of cypherpunks list is entirely
>unacceptable. We have only three working nodes. This is bad since all
>of these nodes reside in the US and can be taken out easily.

Cypherpunks-e@htp.com is in Japan, though I don't know if it only gets feeds
off of ssz or also off algebra and cyberpass.  And the archive's in Singapore.
Also, there are a bunch of Usenet mirrors, mostly local newsgroups.

Just to balance Singapore, it'd be nice to have an archive in Amsterdam :-)
Or in Virtual Tonga, or Niue.   Then there's the mirror at Ft. Meade :-)

At some point, though, it's difficult not to have reinvented Usenet.
Tim reiterates that Usenet really is distributed, robust, and uncensorable.
But the real Usenet has different failure modes - social ones:
> I used to try to copy many of my posts to alt.cypherpunks shortly after it
> was created, right after the the Great February End of Toad.com, but in
> recent months I haven'te bothered (mainly because no interesting
> communication was occurring in the alt.cypherpunks arena).
Usenet is a _great_ place to run Blacknet, because background noise is your friend,
and the uncensorability depends on piggybacking on the firehose.
It's a tougher place to run a cypherpunks list, which has enough problems
with signal-to-noise ratio as a mailing list, where majordomo filters out
the totally non-RTFM-capable users, without being an attractive nuisance for
crossposts from rec.politics.guns or alt.2600.flame.your.mama.
To some extent, running a sub-Usenet, or a robomoderated newsgroup which
kills crossposts from all but a select few groups, can help this.
But sci.crypt.research gets very little signal these days either, though no noise.




				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639