Re: Safe and fun environment?

[tcmay (Timothy C. May)]

Matthew, 

I think you're taking the stuff here too personally. Not all the
feedback to you has been negative--I recall congratulating you on a
nice political piece.

But you have raised issues about elitism and unwillingness to teach
newcomers that others have raised. And you ought to see some of the
abusive e-mail I get! Whew! 

Whenever I disagree with some of the paranoids and ranters, I am
called a traitor, a hypocrite, a lackey of Eric Hughes, a member of
the "Clique," and on and on.

Let me comment on a few of your points:

> a "safe and fun environment" to introduce new people to anything. At the 
> moment, in order to get anything out of it, one has to devote large quantities 
> of queue space and time to the subscription, and sift through the flames and 
> other noise to locate the rare bit of truly valuable info. There are very few 
> people on this list who routinely post things worth reading, and many who 
> _never_ post things worth reading, and seem to be only around for the flame 
> wars.

I'm sorry to hear you're getting so little new stuff here. Many of us
have spent many hour typing in (or scanning and OCRing, in my case)
papers and articles, from Chaum's "Dining Cryptographers" paper
(every bloody word of it!) to Shamir's "How to Share a Secret" to
scads of shorter articles and whatnot.

And the debate ranges from random number generators to Perl scripts
and TCL to digital money to ECPA to .... well, to about 20 major
topics, by my estimate.

>         And god forbid that a newcomer should ask a QUESTION! Dear lord no. 
> That newcomer will be flamed so totally that no burn unit around will be able 
> to save them.

This is simply not true. I have answered--when I could--the questions
of many people over the past 12 months. And I've repeatedly posted
reading lists, pointers to the Glossary at the soda site, and so on.

It is true that I sometimes am exasperated by people who have clearly
not been reading the list who ask "Can anyone tell me about digital
money?" when the topic has just been discussed!

(A FAQ would be nice. I was about to agree to do it a year ago, when
...comments on status of the FAQ elided to reduce flamage and angry
feelings.... 

Fortunately, there are many other newsgroups that beginners can read
ot learn crypto....Cypherpunks was not set up to compete with
sci.crypt and all the other sources.


>         The vast majority of people who post on this list and respond to other 
> people's posts are obnoxious idiots who are willing to flame at the slightest 
> provocation, and will do so until the person they attack backs down or simply 
> gives up.

I think this is uncalled for. I haven't seen this kind of flaming,
except in the XXXXX case, and that has its own dynamic. (And
please, Matthew, try to find a post where I have flamed XXXXX in
public...I don't believe you can easily find one.)

>         No one on this list is entirely to blame, nor is anyone entirely 
> blameless for this. Several of the top figures on the list (TC May and Eric 
> Hughes to name two) have recently adopted an inappropriately elitist attitude 
The mailing list cannot be run by "democratic means." Nor can
"teaching assigments" be handed out. 

The list is like a party at someone's home. The will of the herd is
not the will of the organizers.

Nor is the Cypherpunks agenda all that clear. I, for example, want to
see strong crypto deployed in ways very different than what others
favor. Are we to take a majority vote on an agenda, a charter?

It's better to just leave the agenda loose and unwritten, so as not to
have to grapple with this collision of goals. We can all pretend the
agenda is what we favor.

> running the _list_ however he wants, but the _movement_ belongs to all of us, 
> thank you. Even though I respect the crypto-political opinions that they 

The _movement_ belongs to what gets written and what gets responded
to. In other words, if you want to be listened to, you have to get
people's attention by the quality of your arguments. 

You can't rail against "leaders" (an ironic choice of words you used)
like Hal Finney or Duncan Frissell just because their posts get
reaction. You can't argue that the "herd" didn't have a chance to
vote. In fact, people vote with their own posts. Market democracy.

> express a great deal, I think that they and their supporters have taken this 
> too far. And worse, they have not taken a firm stand against the kind of flame 
> war that is continually erupting over individual posts on the list. For the 
> leaders to sit back and watch this go on is simply not the appropriate way to 
> handle things.

The "leaders"? I have commented many times on issues of rancor and
flames, even recently, and for this I am accused by some of being part
of "the Clique" that "runs" Cypherpunks. Nonsense.

>         Until we fix the serious problems in this list, it will never be an 
> appropriate environment for newcomers to learn about crypto-privacy, just a 
> training ground for flame-throwers.

About 70% of the flames would subside if XXXXX would cool his jets,
and stop ranting and raving. 

As for "training newcomers," it's not easy. Lots of books exist, and
many of the really solid contributors (Barrus, Honeyman, Collins,
Stewart, etc.) learned their crypto in exactly this way.

Many of us wrote _very long_ articles of a tutorial nature when the
list was getting started. Newcomers who are unwilling to read some of
the technical books on crypto should not expect us to write customized
tutorials.  

> mountains of flame wars. Questions could be referred to qualified personnel, 
> instead of going to the list where they act like little flame magnets.

May I ask which "qualified personnel" you have in mind? As per the
earlier comment, not many of the crypto experts I know have any
interest in hand-holding, not when at least a dozen good books on
crypto are readily available.

>         This newsgroup would not replace the list, nor would it be more than 
> marginally connected (because of the selected cross-postings), but it would 
> provide the kind of environment that the list does not or cannot provide.

How is this group you propose any different from sci.crypt,
talk.politics.crypto, the various *.privacy groups, the *.clipper
group, or the *.security groups? Seems to me sci.crypt is exactly what
you're looking for. (But don't expect hand-holding for newcomers
there, either!)

>         Oh, and for those of you that are tired of seeing me post, you can rest 
> assured that you will never see it again. Contributing to this list has brought 
> nothing but trouble to my life, and I have better things to do with my time 
> than wade through piles of flamage in my personal mail box.


Matthew, threatening to leave is not going to have much effect. But if
you have decided to leave, good luck in all your endeavours.

-Tim May

-- 

..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
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