Re: META: Lycos & Searchable archives

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 5:56 AM 11/30/95, Leslie Todd Masco wrote:

>Someone has expressed concern to me that the cypherpunks archives are
>searchable via Lycos.  Said person doesn't mind having the archives
>searchable to the smaller audience of people who go to the we-site,
>but is unhappy about net-wide searches turning up cypherpunks articles.
>
>Can we try to find a consensus on this?  My initial inclination was to
>shrug the concern off (properties of information, etc, as well as c'punks
>being a more-or-less anarchy and the express desire for some sort of
>searching mechanism for c'punks), but I thought I'd double check as I've
>been mostly out of touch for the better part of a year.

I'm not sure how we'll find a consensus, and I don't relish the thought of
seeing hundreds of responses to your point, but....here's my vote.

I say any self-respecting Cypherpunk should realize immediately that
_every_ word one has ever posted to Usenet, mailing lists, and other public
or semi-public fora will soon be instantly retrievable. (The rates of
growth of the Net and of storage densities make it clear that archiving
_all_ past public messages is not much harder than archiving only the most
recent ones...thus, I predict, in 2005 one will be able to buy a disk or
disks of _all_ Usenet traffic prior to, say, 2003.)

More immediately, the person or persons who object to Lycos/Deja
News/Excite searches of their words face an uphill battle. Satisfying them
would mean making the various archive sites (currently only yours, Todd,
but other sites also store the traffic) unavailable.

So, I say: "Get with the program." Don't say anything under your True Name
that you don't want job interviewers to pull up in their pro forma searches
of your Usenet involvement.

(Thank God the U.S. has none of those damned "data privacy laws" which
might interfere with how people access the Net.)

--Tim May, who has said many, many controversial or even embarassing things
over the years, but who thinks anyone offended by his comments is not
someone he would want to deal with anyway.

Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
Corralitos, CA              | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839      | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."