Re: The Importance of Filtering

[Phil Karn <karn@unix.ka9q.ampr.org>]

>I sympathize with the concerns of Phil Karn and others, but let me
>give a warning about this. The Extropians list, when I was on it, had
>about the same volume at its peak that we now have, about 50-100
>messages a day. Much debate about S/N ensued, much talk about charging
>a fee for posting, about setting up quotas, about about official
>reputation markets. At least 20% of all list traffic in some weeks was
>devoted to kvetching about this problem.

This is not what I asked for. I already have a pretty good filter:
it's called "grep". Plus a few friends have volunteered to forward the
occasional worthwhile article to me by private email. All I wanted was
an alternate transmission mechanism - complete archives on demand by
anonymous FTP rather than automatically by email. Is this so
difficult?

Even if I used Eudora regularly (which I don't), the problem wouldn't
get much better. In some ways it would get even worse. Eudora is very
nice for those who travel frequently: you can download mail in a big
batch whenever you can find a phone, read and edit it offline (e.g.,
during a flight), and then transmit your responses when you find
another phone.

The problem, of course, is the severely limited bandwidth of the phone
link. Sometimes I only have 10 minutes between flights. I simply don't
want to waste the time downloading the day's several megabytes of
cypherpunk flamage. Filtering it out after I've received it doesn't
help me.

Some have suggested netnews relays. This is not sufficient either,
given that most sites I know keep news for only a few days
to keep their disk space requirements within reason.

Is it so hard to add an entry to the cypherpunks list on toad.com so
that every message can be appended to a file in the anonymous FTP
area? It's not like it has never been done before...but perhaps that's
what makes it uninteresting to this group.

Phil