Re: Dissolving Choke Points

[Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>]

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At 10:58 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
>An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is
>called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers.

My mention of Usenet was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; I don't know if I'd bother
with the list if it were moved to (or gated with) Usenet, as Usenet has
become for the most part 100+ Mb/day of uselessness.

But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents
of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many
people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g.,
uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about
whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to
be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition
to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings
about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left
the list.

(And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be
quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v.
no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?",
which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from
which to argue.)  

There's really nothing stopping anyone from just setting up a gateway. The
list is already gated one-way to Usenet; it shows up many places as
mail.cypherpunks. What's missing is a gateway running the other direction;
from looking at the headers as messages are received at my ISP (io.com),
toad.com is already in the Path: line, so preventing backfeeding shouldn't be
a problem. (Doh, it's been a few years since I fussed with mail-to-news and
back again, but this isn't rocket science.) 

The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the
comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn
(whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited
so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're
still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and
server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many
messages.

The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of
it's bound to spill over. 


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--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
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