Tim May the Luddite--His Last Message for A While

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

It may be time for me to move on. More than 2 years on this list,
since the B.C. period, may be too long.

I'm fed up with fighting these battles, and no doubt many of you are
fed up with seeing contentious pitched battles. Cypherpunks is
increasingly a forum of strutting and posturing about who has the most
powerful tools, who is spending more of their lives staying at the
bleeding edge of technology. Depressing.

The consensus of the active posters in this latest thread (Perry,
Amanda, Lucky, Jim, others) is that I am a hopeless fuddy-duddy,
unwilling to begin posting in the latest modality.

(Funny, Netnews is still 99.999983% plain ASCII, by message count, and
nobody advocating a more advanced scheme is actually _using_ such ne
plus ultra formats here on this list. If it's so easy, and so 'punkly
correct, why not?)

Jim McCoy wrote:

> If you are truly interested in making strong encryption easy and
> transparent to the vast majority of the users of future communications
> systems you should be leading the MIME charge, not holding everyone back...

I don't care for this imputation that my views on communicating with
the list are somehow holding others back. Or that discussing these
issues is inconsistent with being "truly interested in making strong
encryption easy and transparent." 

Bluntly, I'm fucking sick and tired of these cheap shots and personal
innuendos. Maybe it's the "young guns" syndrome, with a codger like me
whose first Net account was in 1972 being a ripe target for the newest
pistoleros with their .486-caliber Linux boxes in their holsters.

Whatever, I'm fed up. 

I'm taking a break and unsubbing for a while. If I'm back in time for
the January meeting, we'll have the "Demo Day" as planned. If not,
you'll have to play it by ear.

As they say, you know what a Cypherpunks firing squad is? 

A circle.


--Tim May


-- 
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Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
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