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technical issues of the list




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Issues:


1.  Robustness.  Usenet wins.
2.  Efficiency.  Usenet loses, but perhaps some kind of hack 
     could be implemented combining mail and news delivery for
     greater efficiency without losing robustness?  I'm not 
     familiar with NNTP.
3.  Access control.  Usenet is too easy to get in to.  We need
     to discourage clueless newbies from bothering us.  This 
     too could be hacked, e.g. set up a PGP cancel bot which
     only allows PGP signed posts.  (This has many other 
     convenient benefits such as encouraging nyms, and 
     preventing spam.)


Hm..  But people might worry that sigs could increase their
legal exposure, even if they use (less than perfectly strong) 
nyms.  So a good variation is to generate the canonical key 
pair and share the secret key around.  Hell, post the secret 
key once a week in the FAQ...  The cancel bot should allow
sigs by either that key or any arbitrary key.  Whoops!  Such
a cancel-bot undermines our goal of robustness..   HMMMmm.


Okay the best solution to signal/noise management is (as 
always) filtering at the reader's desk.  I don't read William 
H. Geiger III or Paul Bradley posts (usually), I don't read
anything Subject: "Make Money Fast", from "Graham-John 
Buellers" or containing "Timmy" in the first sentence, and if 
we switch to Usenet, I won't read articles posted by unknowns 
without PGP sigs.  There.  :-)



Regards,

Zooko

P.S.  I am not a crook.  Nor am I the anonymous who is so 
earnestly pleading for some sanity-checking around here, 
although I tend to agree with some of his points.

P.P.S.  Hi, Joichi Ito!  Nice to see some articles from the
Japanese chapter of The International Committee to Put The 
Bastards Up Against A Wall---  whoops-  I mean, the Japanese 
chapter of the Peace-Loving, Code-Writing, Money-Making 
Cypherpunks.


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