Deloitte-Touche, e$pam plug, Moderation, Cypherpunks as a cresote bush

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 4:05 pm -0500 2/5/97, Mark Voorhees wrote:
>I'm almost certain that Murray is a consultant rather than
>or in addition to an accountant. He's been saying these things
>for years at conferences, in papers, on mailing lists, etc.

For the longest time, I've had a couple of people from dtus.com on my e$pam
feed. They signed on when I started my own list out of www-buyinfo.

About 6 months ago, however, mail to them started bouncing out of e$, the
chat list I set up as an adjunct to e$pam. Which makes sense, because
that's when they stopped chatting about e$. :-). I expect that the same
thing happend to e$pam, though Rachel Wilmer, who is my e$pam listmaster
would have seen it, and not I.


Actually, e$ has become something of a watering hole, now with about twice
as many subscribers as e$pam does. Some cypherpunks among them.

Oh. While we're all talking about moderation, e$pam is a sort of filtered
superset of cypherpunks. I have filtered cypherpunks posts in it, but I
also have stuff from the 50-odd mail lists and 70 news groups I follow. The
total feed can reach 300k a day sometimes, mostly because I include the
full text of stuff like some of John Young's articles, and the text of the
occasional web-page which tickles my fancy. Sort of immoderate moderation.
:-). You can subscribe to it on my web page, which is in my .sig, below.

I've a bunch of people working with me now on e$pam, who, among other
things, are in the process of getting it set up in a searchable archive.
Though, to prevent crawlers from seeing all the juicy bits (cf. Mr. Young,
above), we're probably going to have some kind of certificate-access scheme
when we get it all running. Rodney Thayer, who's doing IPSEC stuff, (among
other things :-)), is going to run a quick-and-dirty generic certification
authority to make that happen.

In the meantime, if you're interested in e$, or financial crypto, or other
stuff I'm interested ("it don't say e$pam until Bob says it says e$pam"
:-)), you might want to check it.


Even though cypherpunks is a lot "cleaner" now, and I did encourage Sandy
in his efforts initially, I suppose I'm now weighing in with (horrors!) Tim
on the subject of moderation. I think that if Sandy and John want to create
a moderated list (like I have done, though e$pam is more specific in
content) out of what happens on cypherpunks, they could do it with exactly
the traffic they have now in experimental moderation mode. The current
machine load doesn't seem to be impacting the throughput to
cypherpunks(moderated), modulo Sandy's moderation time, though if
toad.com's being used for much else, there might be problems there.

Part of the nice thing about cypherpunks 1.0 was that anything could happen
there. That it was anarchy in practice. And, maybe because of my periodic
altercations with Mr. May on this list (thank god for his kill-file :-))
even the anonymous Tim-slams were occasionally entertaining, in a, ahem,
biologically curious sort of way. ;-).

So, I guess I think we should put it back the way it was. Including, please
Mr. Gilmore, "officially' resubscribing the Wee-vil Dr. V. Then those
who've made it so can annouce to the world that cypherpunks is again a
proper anarchy. Then we can us deal with miscreants the way we used to, by
ignoring them, (and the occasional e-mailbomb...).


Finally, I have an analogy for cypherpunks from nature. There are lots of
plants, some of them the technically the largest living beings on earth,
which, at first glance, look like a bunch of different individual plants.
Aspen groves, for instance, are all linked together under the soil to the
same system of roots, and are genetically the same individual. Some of
these "stands" of trees cover tens of square miles, and one patch of
Aspens, in Wyoming? Montana? is the world's largest living thing, massing
several million(?) tons, and probably tens of thousands of years old.

Fungi do this too. Toadstools (a rather, heh, fecund analog for
cypherpunks) tend to create very large "individuals", with each toadstool
representing the fruiting body for a huge bunch of mycyillia(sp?)
underneath it. Toadstools create structures called, ahem, "fairy rings",
where the central mushroom dies, only to be replaced by a ring of other
mushrooms, which die, and so on, until they're covering your whole fucking
lawn and messing up your lawnmower bag... (well, anyway, you get the idea.)
There was the claim a few years ago that the same genetic individual slime
mold covered half of Wisconsin (Minnesota?).

The king of all the plants which do this, I think, is the cresote bush,
which, I believe, in some pieces of the Sonorran(sp?) desert, cover
hundreds of square miles. Scientists, using tree-ring dating, have worked
back, through various rings of cresote bushes, using their very slow growth
rates in the desert environment, to the center of the creosote bush
cluster, to estimate the date of these things. I remember claims that these
plants may have started from a single individual, there at the long dead
(or at least regrown-over) center of the ring, more than a hundred, and
maybe several hundred thousand years ago.

So, let nature take its course. Most lists die when people stop posting to
it. That certainly hasn't happened to cypherpunks. And, when it does, we
can all migrate out into the numerous rings of lists that cypherpunks has
spawned (I think I can account about putting together 10 or so myself)
among them.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Never attribute to conspiracy what can be
explained by stupidity." -- Jerry Pournelle
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/rah/
FC97: Anguilla, anyone? http://www.ai/fc97/