Re: List! No Way: Creation of "alt.cypherpunks"

["Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>]

At 7:11 PM +0000 2/11/97, Attila T. Hun wrote:

>    tim:
>
>    two points you make:
>
>    1.  the propogation is slow...
>
>    2.  some sites do not carry alt. groups
>
>    are enough to kill an active discussion list. of course, it does
>    slow down excessive volume.

Good points. However, I'm used to fairly robust debate on Usenet, and the
prop delay does not seem too stifling to me. As you note, it cuts down on
immediate replies; this may not be a bad thing.

I see any site which can be identified with a corporate or institutional
entity--like C2Net, toad, Tivoli, Primenet, Netcom, whatever--being
targetted if a controversial mailing list is hosted at that site.

(This may not have been the case when the list was full unmoderated, and
was only a "reflector" or exploder of incoming messages. As soon as a
moderator started passing on some messages and rejecting others, the
precedent was set (somewhat) for charges that a site or sysadmin is now
liable. This has not been tested in court, of course, but I fear this is
how things will go. As I mentioned in another message, had the traffic in
alt.religion.scientology instead flowed through a site such as
"scientology@primenet.com," the operators of Primenet and the sysadmin of
that mailing list almost certainly would have received "decease and cyst"
orders. Remember that Netcom was hit with similar orders. Usenet cannot be
stopped in this way. A major strength.)



>    I vote we just set up a new majordomo with some additional antispam
>    filters including knocking out exploding mail headers, etc. I would
>    accept excluding non-members as long as we take the remailers which
>    are listed with either JP or RL.

This is a suggestion I have long thought to be a good one. Only allow posts
from list subscribers, and make a special exception for remailers by adding
them to the approval list. Figure if a spammer is smart enough to know what
a remailer is, at least see her traffic for a while. Drop the inclusion of
remailers if volume is too high.

(Or, put remailer messages in a special place. An ftp or Web site, for
retrieval. Or  have list members "vet" the remailed messages, as someone
was suggesting a few months back. Or....)

>    Likewise, Jim Choate and Sten Drescher apparently are trying to
>    establish a multi-site majordomo.  the extra work of maintaining
>    non-duplicates and sychronization makes the task non-trivial and
>    questionable...

Yeah, it seems to be one of those potentially good ideas that will just
never get done, due to the difficulties, the maintenance, and the press of
other projects. (And even if it gets done, which I hope for of course, I
doubt many of us will want anything with added complexity, new commands for
our posting software to deal with, etc. So, it will have to look just like
an ordinary mailing list, with the mirroring handled transparently.)

(Speculation: Isn't some of this talk about distributed mailing list sites
and mirroring beginning to echo the structure of FidoNet?)

--Tim May


Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside"
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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