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Re: List Robustness
At 10:26 PM 11/14/1997 -0600, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>I do not think that it is entirely impossible either, but the likely
>scenario is that the government may first try to harass us and attempt
>the criminal charges only after some time.
>
>In any case, the present structure of cypherpunks list is entirely
>unacceptable. We have only three working nodes. This is bad since all
>of these nodes reside in the US and can be taken out easily.
[email protected] is in Japan, though I don't know if it only gets feeds
off of ssz or also off algebra and cyberpass. And the archive's in Singapore.
Also, there are a bunch of Usenet mirrors, mostly local newsgroups.
Just to balance Singapore, it'd be nice to have an archive in Amsterdam :-)
Or in Virtual Tonga, or Niue. Then there's the mirror at Ft. Meade :-)
At some point, though, it's difficult not to have reinvented Usenet.
Tim reiterates that Usenet really is distributed, robust, and uncensorable.
But the real Usenet has different failure modes - social ones:
> I used to try to copy many of my posts to alt.cypherpunks shortly after it
> was created, right after the the Great February End of Toad.com, but in
> recent months I haven'te bothered (mainly because no interesting
> communication was occurring in the alt.cypherpunks arena).
Usenet is a _great_ place to run Blacknet, because background noise is your friend,
and the uncensorability depends on piggybacking on the firehose.
It's a tougher place to run a cypherpunks list, which has enough problems
with signal-to-noise ratio as a mailing list, where majordomo filters out
the totally non-RTFM-capable users, without being an attractive nuisance for
crossposts from rec.politics.guns or alt.2600.flame.your.mama.
To some extent, running a sub-Usenet, or a robomoderated newsgroup which
kills crossposts from all but a select few groups, can help this.
But sci.crypt.research gets very little signal these days either, though no noise.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [email protected]
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