Re: A personal response to your email to sixdegrees

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

Better yet, give anyone on the mailing list a veto over their new
membership. Send a cookie to the address that was signed up, and an
anti-cookie. If anyone returns the anti-cookie, in effect saying "we don't
want to be part of your blasted service," put them on a list of
do-not-contact people for half a year or so.

That will minimise disruptions. It will also minimise disruptions to your
service when pissed-off vigilantes decide to take matters into their own
hands.

-Declan


On Wed, 16 Sep 1998, Tim May wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>