Encrypting the list

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

Summary: Encrypting the cypherpunks list make no difference in the
security of information dispersal, but may make a large difference in
local security and as a spur to software development.

>> It would be nice, however, to set up crypto I/O connection
>> OPTIONS to the list, as an incentive for lazy people like me to
>> figure out how to get PGP and mail filters set up.

>Yes!

Michael, here is a word from your friendly neighborhood list
maintainer.  I don't have time to work on this, and neither to the
people who run toad.com.  So it's not going to happen on toad for a
while.

The good news is that it doesn't have to.  You yourself can write the
code!  The code for the existing cypherpunks remailer is all you need
to get started.  Here's how.  You subscribe to cypherpunks and then
forward the list mail, encrypted, to all the people who have
subscribed with you for an encrypted version of the cypherpunks mail.

With the cypherpunks remailer, you can do all this with your own
account.  It is a pretty good skeleton for the creation of email
servers out of user accounts.  You don't need your sysadmin's
cooperation to get it running, although you may need their blessing to
keep it running.

You can implement a listserv type operation if you want, with
automatic subscribe/unsubscribe and add all the options you want to
it.  You'll have to deal with the bounce messages, of course, but you
can rwrite software to deal with that.

Someone who wants to provide digest service can to a similar thing for
digestification.

There have been lots of people over the course of the list history who
have wanted encryption and digests.  I would suggest that those who
want them convince someone to run a secondary service to provide them
with these services.

Eric