Re: A personal response to your email to sixdegrees

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 10:09 AM -0700 9/16/98, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>Mark, trust me on this: remove all five cypherpunks addresses from your
>lists.
>
>Really.
>

As others have noted, operations like "sixdegrees" need to be very careful
about how list addresses are signed up. This is a problem mailing lists
(formerly called "list exploders," until Congress began to rant about
Internet terrorists) have been dealing with for many years.

"Lists subscribed to lists," with resulting circularity problems, is
something that can bring a list to standstill.

>From the dozens of irate messages about "sixdegrees," and the joking
responses sent to "I hear you are my friend, but who are you?" queries seen
from hapless "sixdegrees" clients, the meltdown may be underway.

There are concrete things you folks can do. When someone is nominated (or
whatever) as a potential contact, you can ask the contactee if he or she
wants this person to be a contact. In other words, take some of the
automation out of the loop.

(Or add more of the right kind, such as sending a cookie or chit back to
the parties and require them to forward the cookies back. This, of course,
adds complexity for the "sixdegrees" customers and may actually cause many
of them to just give up in frustration.)

If you do nothing, expect many of us to get more and more irate at the
abuses your service are facillitating. I expect some of the list
subscribers on lists your service "infects" will take the usual hackers
measures to crash your system.

Not that I necessarily endorse this, but it's happened in the past.

--Tim May

(This space left blank pending determ. of acceptability to the gov't.)
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.