December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: New Linux-IPSEC mailing list for the S/WAN project
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:29 AM 11/9/96 -0800, John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> wrote: >I'm sending you this message because you might be interested in >helping to build or test or document, or teach about, my S/WAN project >to secure 5% of the net by Christmas. > >There is now a public mailing list which you can join to find out >what's happening in the project, get the latest software for testing, >ask questions, etc. To join the list, send mail to: > linux-ipsec-REQUEST(a)clinet.fi >The email should contain a single line that just says: > subscribe Actually, it needs to say subscribe linux-ipsec # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk

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Re: FW: Dr. Vulis is not on cypherpunks any more [RANT] (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From: "networks(a)vir.com" <networks(a)vir.com> > Date: Thu, 7 Nov 1996 15:15:38 -0500 > > It seems that, like a bookstore, the cypherpunks mailing list has the > right to choose the content it distributes and who it distributes the content > to. Actualy bookstores distribute the books they are under contract to distribute via the publishers they have contracts with. An easy way to tell if a bookstore is a reasonable distributor and one with some level of ethics is to ask if they participate in the yearly banned books week. If they don't I would suggest you go elsewhere. Businesses in general are not allowed to prohibit patrons based on their belief, speech, or action unless it can be shown to pose some threat to the operation of the business or they post said policy in a public place where patrons can see it. An example may be in order. Here in Austin, TX. we have a problem with bums and kids who are homeless. They urinate on the walls and commit various other acts that are not acceptable to the community at large. In order to do anything about these people on public property the city HAD to pass two laws. These two laws are that it is now unlawful to camp overnite on public property. In effect you cannot reside on public property in Austin, TX between midnite and 6am. The other law was that it is now a crime in Austin, TX to emit a 'objectionable odor in public'. Strictly interpreted if you are in a city park at 12:01AM or before 6:00AM you can be arrested. Also, if you were to emit a fart outside your personal property you can be arrested. (Note that these laws have not resolved the indigent problems we have here) In short without this law (ie contract) it was not possible for the city or private businesses to do anything about this. > Bookstores are free to select what titles they offer for sale, and can > even refuse to sell a book to a particularly annoying customer if they > so choose (my legal knowledge is lacking, but I think this is correct). Irrelevant. The point is that bookstores are not legaly responsible for the contents of those books except in very special cases. The distributors or publishers are responsible. This list qualifies as a publisher so long as it retains editorial control of content of submissions prior to distribution. If they have no editorial control then they are in the situation of a bookstore which is protected from legal action on the contents of the books they carry except under special conditions. The action taken by the list operator explicity acts as an example of that editorial control. > To extend the analogy, what has happened in this particular case > is that Dr. Vulis is now forced to buy all his books by mail order :) What has happened here is that a member of a community has been expunged based on their beliefs. Not on any particular action they took which posed any sort of threat to that community. Jim Choate

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Re: Legal Deffinition of Encryption?
by Benjamin Grosman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Sir, >Is there any law(s) that actully define encryption? > >At it's very basics encryption is taking a group of 1's & 0's converting them into a different group of 1's & 0's and providing a mecanisim to change them back to the original group of 1's & 0's. > >>From a legal standpoitnt how is PGP any different than PKZIP? How does the law make a diference between an "encryption" program and a "compression" program other than the fact that the encryption program is advertized as encryption and the compression program is advertized as compression? I have absolutely no idea: this is a very interesting problem. Not for just compression and encryption differention legally, but also, well, ANY other data form. If one defines a new format for saving data (i.e a new image format), and then exports this technology from the USA, is this exportation of munitions due to it's unknown qualities? Or what? I know that in Australia there have been problems defining electronic data, especially pictures (usually porn), for the purposes of prosecution. Because, really, a pornographic picture is no more than 1's and 0's arranged in a different way by a different algorithm. Thus I think it most likely that the law would try and approach it from the direction of the algorithm that saved the data and the intent with which the algorithm was written. Otherwise, I don't know. Yours Sincerely, Benjamin Grosman

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RE: Smart Bombs
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Marshall Clow <mclow(a)owl.csusm.edu> wrote: >James wrote: >>Of course, not having a card may subject you to greater scrutiny at check-in >>time due to the reduced tracking ability. >> >I think that you have this backwards. There will be less tracking ability for >people flying w/o tickets. Less tracking for people w/o tickets, but more scrutiny for people w/o smart cards. I can easily see the working assumption that smart carded people have _already_ passed the security check, while those who pay cash would be under greater scrutiny.

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Re: [rant] Re: Censorship on cypherpunks (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 7 Nov 1996 20:42:46 -0500 (EST) > From: "Mark M." <markm(a)voicenet.com> > > This is why contracts are important. There is no contract, implied or > otherwise, to which John Gilmore is bound that forces him to protect everyone's > "right" to be subscribed to cpunks and post whatever they want to the list. The lack of an explicit contract detailing this is what makes it impossible for the operator of the list to enforce such actions. When I subscribed I gave the operator no permission to edit or otherwise control my submissions. I also gave no permission for such submissions to be considered property by any party other than myself. It is not possible to argue that my subscription implied such permission. When I subscribed to the cpunks list it was with the explicit intent of seeing a multiplicity of views, not those views which happen to be acceptable to the list operator. The fact that he chooses to host the list by paying its bills is irrelevant. If the operator wants to protect themselves legaly as well as ethicaly they should put a notice at time of subscription detailing exactly what editorial policies are active as well as sending a policy notification to all currently subscribed members. Jim Choate ps I never saw the post about the camp ground example. If the author would please forward me a copy I would be happy to critique it.

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Re: Black Unicorn exposed?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:45 AM 11/9/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >At 11:00 AM 11/9/1996, Robert Hettinga wrote: >> S. L. vonBernhardt, <mailto:unicorn@schloss.li>,... > >We are hardly operating in a hostile environment. Yet, somebody >who has apparently gone to some effort to have an anonymous >identity has been exposed. The implications of this are worth >considering. It seems obvious that this exposure was entirely intentional by him. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Pseudo-law on the list and libel (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 7 Nov 1996 10:10:19 -0800 > From: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> > > So, if a bookstore ejects a drunken lout who is disturbing the other > patrons, is the bookstore suddenly reclassfied as a book publisher? By your > logic, you seem to think so. Not at all. The drunk is not being ejected on the content of their expression (beliefs). Vulis posed no physical or economic danger to anyone, the operator simply could take no more of his POV. This is distinctly different than the example you are trying to equate. In short, another straw man. > So, if I have a party at my house and limit who I invite, or eject someone > who is misbehaving (insulting my other guests, barfing on the floor, > smoking when I tell him not to, whatever), you are saying that I "open > myself up for libel suits" by other guests who don't like the things they > hear from others at my party? Only if you advertise the party through a public forum as open to anyone and you are the one supplying the booze (as advertised in the ad). The operator of this list has NEVER implicity or explicity expressed any form of policy concerning who may subscribe to cpunks. > So, anyone who exercises ownership rights to his property suddenly becomes > legally responsible for the alleged misdeeds of anyone visiting his house? My subscription to this mailing list does not imply any ownership toward its operator. He owns the software and hardware, he does not own my thoughts or the fact that I use this forum to distribute them. The fact he pays the bills does not give him any right to edit or otherwise control my submissions without an explicit warning to me prior to his acceptance of my submission. > Could you cite some cases supporting your point of view? Try CompuServe and Prodigy. The logic that was used in both those cases is 1-to-1 applicable to this. For somebody who supposedly supports individual initiative, liberty, and anarchy you sure rely on precedence a lot. The whole point to crypto, Internet, and technology in general is to break the status quo not to promote it. > this outcome, strongly. However, it is far from establishing that a bar > which enforces certain rules ("no shirt, no service") and which has an > entire class of employees hired to _eject_ patrons has suddenly become > liable for slanderous comments made by customers. And so on.) Look at the recent 'Hooters' case involving women waitpersons. For a business establishment to impose 'no shirt, no shoes, no service" they MUST post such rules in a public place. This was NOT done EVER on cpunks. Again, you are trying to equate two distinctly different cases as equivalent, another straw man. Jim Choate

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Small "Hard" Problems Wanted
by mpd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Fellow C'Punks, In my quest to reduce NP-Completeness to NP-Not-So-Hard-Ness, I have just finished coding and debugging a very complicated algorithm which manages to solve circuit satisfiability problems of up to 1000 nodes in a few minutes and about half a meg of memory. It works directly from the connectivity information and the time required is not a function of the number of input bits. Circuit satisfiability problems, and other well known problems like Max P-Sat, are amongst the more useful canonically NP-Complete problems, since other problems map very nicely into them. The algorithm is currently in APL, and I am in the process of recoding it in C, after which I plan to test it on reduced round DES, full 16 round DES, and some RSA problems of various sizes. I already have C code to map RSA and n-round DES problems into an appropriate circuit satisfiability problem and generate appropriate input for the algorithm, so finishing up the C version is the only remaining step before these tests can begin. The current APL reference inplementation can still handle problems up to about 1000 nodes, which should include a lot of stuff for which exhaustive search would be intractable, even on supercomputers. Nothing I have so far fed the reference implementation has bombed it, and I would like to make sure it is perfect before the finely tuned C version is complete. So if anyone has a "hard" problem they are dying to solve, which maps into a circuit satisfiability problem that isn't over 1000 nodes, Email it to me and I will see if I can divine the answer. I will post any interesting results to the list, of course. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd(a)netcom.com $ via Finger. $

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Re: FW: Dr. Vulis (ad nauseum) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 07 Nov 1996 17:12:47 -0500 > From: camcc(a)abraxis.com (Alec) > This is not a they; this is an individual with (and within) his own rights. Who or how many own the (digital) press is irrelevant. > Nonsense, no policy has been stated. The owner determined that the good Dr. > had been disruptive and had become a detriment to the owner's list (and > possibly sanity). Exactly! With no policy and the wide advertising of this list as a open forum for the discussion of crypto and speech related issues such action by the list operator constitute censorship (ie editorial control) and make the operator legaly responsible for the actions of those messages which LEAVE his machine. No contract means no contract. It applies to all parties involved. > PLEASE, let's not drag poor Tim into this. Hasn't he suffered enough?! > This does not follow even from the tortured logic above. Nobody ever suffers enough. > "Implies the right"?? Rights either exist or do not exist (endowed by their > Creator); they are not be implied. I suggest you read the 9th Amendment again then. You obvously didn't get the point the other time(s). > The content of speech is certainly not irrelevant. Disruptive speech and > behavior have never been protected. Vulis's speech was not distruptive. It did not interfere with anyone else being able to submit or filter submissions. His speech was outside the norm but posed no threat to the operation of the cpunks mailing list. > It says CONGRESS! We're not discussing an action by the federal govt. here. > I may choose to ask those visiting my house to refrain from discussing mumbo > jumbo; if the individuals persist, I can ask, nay demand, that they leave. > : > :And just to make shure it is clear, the right to put something on the paper > :(ie speech) is distinctly different from being the one doing the actual > :printing. Agreed. It was intended to make the point that this is the ideal we should all be striving for. We as members of a free democratic society should NEVER censor anyone on the content of their speech. > What paper? What does this mean? This list is a digital press. > Advertised? It has been a matter of regret that I _stumbled_ into this > unruly tangle of wits. Then you have not been reading a lot of computer and crypto related material. I see references to this list and how to subscribe several times a year in various sources going back several years. > Simply because one has argued that "the list is ... a defacto public list," > don't make it so any more than my arguing that a newspaper available to the > public can have no control over its own editorial policy. True, but the paper MUST publish that policy in its editions. Which papers and magazines do religously. Jim Choate

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RRE: notes (8 Nov 1996)
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This has a rather chaotic mixture of inapplicable and useful information; I'll try to edit out the non-useful stuff (via [...]). He's made the distinct goof of misidentifying libertarianism with 60's style anarchosocialism, as well as other problems... I'll be emailing him myself with some comments. -Allen From: IN%"rre(a)weber.ucsd.edu" 9-NOV-1996 05:26:15.31 To: IN%"rre(a)weber.ucsd.edu" CC: Subj: notes Notes on network computers, blind copies, democratic culture, monopolies, and the idea of an Internet establishment... As a periodic reminder, a Web archive of nearly all the RRE messages ever sent can be found through http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/rre.html It turns out that the article on cryptography by Bruce Schneier that I forwarded from the Risks Digest the other day was actually an unfinished draft that Peter Neumann sent out by mistake. Bruce asks that everyone refrain from propagating that version around the net. Steve Lohr's article on the "network computer" in Monday's New York Times includes the following priceless quotes: The line between these network computers being used as really effective corporate tools and being used as mind-control tiger cages is a fine one. There will be a real temptation for corporate managers to go too far in the direction of control. -- Paul Saffo The paradise of shared knowledge and a more egalitarian working environment just isn't happening. Knowledge isn't really shared because management doesn't want to lose authority. -- Shoshana Zuboff What's a floppy disk? It's a way to steal company secrets. -- Scott McNealy We think we can go after the dumb-terminal market too. -- Bill Gates I wish we could rewind this whole computer revolution thing and start over. [...] Non-Americans keep remarking on the predominance of American items on RRE. That's simply a function of the items that RRE subscribers send me. If you come across interesting items from other countries, I hope you'll consider sending them along. [...] A while back, I came across an op-ed column addressed to teen-agers which purported to explain certain points about life. The first of these points was, and I quote, Life's not fair. Get used to it. All of the points were like this: each of them presupposed that their reader held a putatively naive or self-serving opinion about life, and they proposed to set the reader straight in a remarkably nasty and disrespectful way. I view this article as part of a larger and very depressing trend: the return of authoritarian culture. The purpose of authoritarian culture is to instil a mindless obedience to authority. It employs two basic methods. The first of these methods is stereotype: one's normal human tendencies to think critically and oppression resist are caricatured and ridiculed; endless stories are adduced to portray people who employ these innate faculties in a bad light; and labels such as "whining" and "complaining" and "victim" are liberally applied. The second method of authoritarian culture is the attempt to naturalize authority by hiding it behind large abstractions. In this case, the abstraction in question is "life". Having established that "life" is unfair, it becomes possible to label any protest against unfairness as a demand that the whole world conform to one's own immature whims. These teenagers are counseled to "get used to it" and to reconcile themselves to a life of being treated unfairly. No liberal nostrums about self-esteem here: this columnist's message was that nobody deserves to be treated with respect, and that it's arrogant to think otherwise. Another example of authoritarian culture is the contemporary American use of the word "accountability". Accountability, we are told, means "accepting the consequences of your actions". Everyone is supposed to "be accountable", and to embrace this condition as a concomitant of responsible adulthood. Authority here is hidden through a grammatical device. In normal usage, the word "accountable" takes a complement, as in "accountable to ...". When the complement is omitted, the human authority is displaced into the woodwork, and obedience to that authority is conflated with a variety of quite different conditions: responsibility, honesty, etc. No reasonable person has a problem with the idea of being responsible for one's actions. But nobody who believes in a democratic society can accept the idea that any person has absolute authority to judge any other person's actions, and hand down "consequences", without likewise being constrained by norms of responsibility, which in the old days were called "justice" and -- yes, that's right -- "fairness". It is not surprising when people in authority employ such language. But authoritarian culture requires more: it requires that people internalize this language, applying it to themselves and dissociating all desire for justice and fair treatment. We all have our failings, but we we cannot have a decent society unless everyone is treated with respect and judged with a reasonable regard for proportionality and due process. Healthy people don't just "get used to" injustice. Quite the contrary, genuine maturity begins with the skill and discipline of helping people organize to identify and overcome injustice. Shame and ridicule are the least violent of the tools that have historically been employed to condemn people to passivity. But they are also the most basic and, in the end, the most destructive. The basic method for promoting an extreme position is to harp on the evils of the opposite extreme. Authoritarian culture thus lives in a symbiotic union with its evil twin, libertarian culture, whose sole value is freedom from constraint. The symbiosis between authoritarian and libertarian culture has many facets: * Authoritarian culture holds that people are essentially bad and that nothing can be done about this; libertarian culture holds that people are essentially good and that nothing needs to be done to encourage this. * Authoritarian culture imposes constraint without respect for individual dignity; libertarian culture holds that individual dignity consists in the absence of constraint. * Authoritarian culture holds that people are innately irresponsible; libertarian culture denounces responsibility as an authoritarian myth. * Authoritarian culture and libertarian culture both conflate feelings with action, authoritarian culture to repress them both and libertarian culture to license them both. * Authoritarian culture crushes the spirit and eventually gives rise to an immature impulse toward libertarian culture; libertarian culture stands indifferent as great industries arise to support an epidemic of addiction, which then gives rise to a fearful impulse toward authoritarian culture. What authoritarian and libertarian have in common is their claim to follow a simple, objective rule that lies beyond human interpretation: the rule of order or the rule of freedom. The terra incognita that lies beyond the dysfunctionality of both authoritarian and libertarian culture is democratic culture: the form of culture within which everyone takes responsibility for living together constructively. Democratic culture is not just a matter of voting. It is a set of values, and it is a set of skills. Some of these skills are organizational: you can't have democratic culture unless people know, deep down in their bones, how to hold a productive consensus-based meeting. Other skills are emotional: you can't have democratic culture unless people can tell the difference between resisting oppression and acting out resentment, between organizing and polarizing, between freedom and irresponsibility, between pleasure and addiction, between discipline and shame, between personal boundaries and passive aggression. The sixties have left an ambiguous legacy because they blurred together two very distinct impulses: countercultural libertarianism, for which I don't have an awful lot of respect, and democratic experimentation, for which I have a great deal of respect. Recreational drug use, for example, is stupid and boring. But the democratic organizing traditions that arose and flourished in the sixties were an important cultural contribution, and it's sad to see them forgotten. The rise of authoritarian culture depends on this forgetting, and on crushing at an early age the hopes for human dignity with which all of us are born. Why isn't this obvious? One reason is that the American conservative movement originated as a marriage of convenience between authoritarians and libertarians, both of whom portrayed themselves as opponents of something called "government". But opposition to government tout court is opposition to democracy. We have been inundated in recent years by rhetoric that seeks to make democracy literally unthinkable by conflating all types of government, whether democratic or totalitarian, into a single stereotype of oppression. This stereotype requires its proponents to construct themselves as powerless victims, and it licenses all sorts of whining and complaint by the very people who make a big point of censuring whining and complaint by others. By treating the institutions of a democratic society as inherently beyond control, it also licenses an abdication of personal responsibility -- the responsibility to learn, practice, and teach the values and skills of a democratic society. Back in the Later Middle Ages, around 1994, I often found myself lectured by experts who asserted that great bureaucratic institutions, government and corporate alike, would necessarily and inevitably disintegrate in the world of the Internet. It's almost 1997 now, and as the months go by I find it ever harder to remember why this great disintegration was supposed to take place. If evidence counts for anything, we are actually living in an unprecedented era of concentration and centralization. ABC has now become the Disney Infomercial Channel, and British Telecom is buying MCI. And the more I learn about Internet economics, the more the Internet seems like a veritable engine of monopoly-creation. The reasons are numerous. Most of them are explained in the recommendations and bibliographies that I have provided in past issues of The Network Observer, and any one of them would suffice: * The Internet backbone business, like any other utility, involves high fixed costs and low marginal costs of serving additional customers, so that bigness is highly rewarded. And every provider has an incentive to give priority to packets that remain within its network, thus giving a quality-of-service advantage in the market to whichever provider first establishes a dominant position in a given segment of the market for network services. * The pattern of high fixed costs and low marginal costs is even stronger for software: if two software products compete then the price of each is determined by its development costs divided by the number of customers. As a result, other things being equal, the company with the larger market share completely destroys its competition. If other things aren't equal, a company with an existing flow of monopoly rents can simply give away its products until its competitors' capital is depleted. * And then there are de facto standards: the dynamics of standards are fantastically complicated, but the Internet still needs several additional service layers, and even a single proprietary standard could give one firm immense power to extract rents from Internet users and dictate future directions for Internet architecture. Since most of the forthcoming standards will be implemented in software, the monopoly tendencies of the software market will promote the rise of proprietary networking standards. Past experience with the Internet is misleading: small players and ARPA philosopher-kings can establish a new standard in the world if the big players are asleep, but the big players are awake now. In the future it will take capital and speed to impose a standard, and winner takes all. * The economics of information -- "content" -- are no more reassuring. Since information can be replicated cheaply, an overwhelming, life-or- death incentive exists to leverage creative effort across as many channels as possible. Of course, every industry has an incentive to increase its revenue. But as the marginal cost of selling additional units approaches zero, prices are directly determined by market share, thus giving rise to a positive feedback loop and eventual monopoly. This suggests that, to the extent that the Internet is a vehicle for the delivery of information commodities, it will necessarily be absorbed into the institutions of the media system. Nobody will be able to afford to produce a news service that only operates on the Internet, for example, given that existing news services can adapt their work to the Internet for much less than it costs to produce a competing service from scratch. And content providers who already operate in other media will have a powerful incentive to adapt their services to the Internet, provided only that additional money can be made by providing those services in the Internet medium. It is commonly argued that the Internet, by reducing transaction costs, will cause organizations to break apart and industries to reorganize on a more entrepreneurial basis. I have argued this myself. But the argument doesn't work. The Internet (and not only the Internet, but a world of other technologies) reduces transaction costs and coordination costs alike, making it less efficient to operate large organizations that cross many disparate functions but more efficient to operate large organizations that do one standardized thing. Thus we have waves of both outsourcing (due to decreased transaction costs) and concentration (due to decreased coordination costs). And high-tech industries increasingly favor those firms that can see standards battles coming and prepare to fight them in a coordinated way. Other arguments against the monopoly scenarios have more force. Internet service provision is not yet a monopoly, and it is not obviously headed in that direction right now. Nobody understands the ISP business very well, and it would appear that the smaller entrepreneurial firms have an advantage in adaptability in an environment of rapid technological and market change. AT&T, moreover, would seem to be falling apart at the seams in very much the fashion that Schumpeter, that patron saint of entrepreneurs, would have predicted. Even MCI has been hitting itself on the head pretty hard during the last few years. So my point is *not* that the Internet is definitely going to be locked up by cigar-smoking corporate titans. My point is simply this. It's almost 1997, and yet the airwaves and magazine pages are still full of ideologues, still reciting old-wave technological determinist mantras about how the Internet will inevitably bring us a decentralized world of freedom. Technological determinism, however, is a kind of cargo cult: it asserts that we can obtain a happy society if we simply work hard enough at idolizing the technology. The world doesn't work like that. Significant forces are operating in several directions, some of those directions are more pleasant to contemplate than others, and the outcome is not preordained. It seems to me that the proponents of a totally unregulated economy should learn a little more economics. It also seems to me that it's time for a revival of the democratic values that make it possible to imagine a conscious choice about our technological future. [...] After my comment about the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce the other day, I got an irate message from the Journal's editor. Among his less extravagant suggestions was that I am a member of the Internet establishment who has the power to destroy people with a word. Gosh. My first response was to wonder if Hallmark has a card for this occasion: To a childhood friend, after all these years I can still remember how, it seems You never picked me for your teams I have no idea now where you've went But I'm a member of the Internet establishment So you better watch out what you say Or with my keyboard I'll blow you away Then I thought about it more seriously. I'm not here to take shots at struggling Internet publications, unless you count Slate. My only goal had been to plug the Scout Report, and the truth is that I was too lazy to dig up an issue of TSR that I was 100% comfortable with. I won't go into the reasons for the opinion I formed of JIBC back in the spring, since you can easily judge for yourselves. Of course I should take ordinary care not to slam people at random, and by trying to run this list in odd moments of the day I'm all too likely to get careless. The harder question is, is this guy right? Never mind that he had a grossly exaggerated estimate of RRE's readership -- the idea that I am a member of any kind of establishment is completely foreign to me. Of course, this could simply be a self-serving delusion. After all, as a white guy who was born in the United States, I enjoy numerous social privileges that I have never earned. And as a graduate student at MIT, my cohort and I were located so close to the center of the post-WWII military-academic complex that we had the resources to pretend that we were antiestablishment nonconformists. Still, if the Internet establishment exists and holds councils, I have never been invited to them. I have met some of the publicly prominent Internet people once or twice and have found them to be remarkably decent, but I hope you will agree that my message on RRE is not particularly congruent with theirs. Yes, I organized a CPSR conference a few years back, but look what's happening to CPSR. So, at the end of the day, am I basically just another guy with a mailing list? When I started RRE, I assumed that surely by now the Internet would be crawling with filter lists such as my own. But even though some other excellent filter lists do exist, including some (David Farber's, for example) with many more subscribers than my own, my assumption hasn't come close to being true. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons: * Limited access to the tools. The hardware keeps getting faster, but the software for maintaining mailing lists isn't much better than it was in 1993. It's still impractical for 95%+ of Internet users to maintain large mailing lists. This is a scandal. * Flexibility of the tools. The assumption that lots of people would start filter lists depended on another, implicit assumption: that the Internet only supports a limited number of interesting mechanisms. Lots of people are doing great things on the Internet, and they have shaped tools to fit their particular visions, which simply differ from mine. Even the other filter lists vary widely in their traffic, contents, respect for copyrights, and amplitude of editorial voice. * Network externalities. As I mentioned the other day, it's possible that once a list like RRE establishes a large subscriber base, other lists will have a hard time getting enough traction to compete. This is because the success of such lists depends in part on the number of subscribers they have, and I got the subscribers first. On the other hand, 4300 is a small fraction of the total world of Internet users. * Critical mass. RRE is mostly about the social and political aspects of networking and computing. This is a fashionable topic, and it is a topic likely to appeal to a large proportion of Internet users. Someone who wanted to run a filter list devoted to medical issues, for example, would be limited by the number of Internet users in the medical field. On the other hand, one major early source of RRE messages was Gleason Sackman's high-volume filter list on education. I wish I could say that the Internet affords freedom of the press to those who don't own one. But it's not true, not yet. So maybe, on some very tiny scale, I'm an Internet analog of Rush Limbaugh or Scott Adams. Those guys could hardly be more different on one level, but they also reflect an important convergence. Rush didn't invent talk radio with its structured listener involvement; the innovation of his show was that it's basically about his opinions. Dilbert didn't invent the comic strip; his innovation was to use the Internet to involve his readers in thinking up the ideas. In each case, the result is a voice that seems on the surface like a synthesis of the star's voice with that of his audience, and the fear is that this result is a sham, giving just enough of an appearance of audience involvement to authenticate the star as the Voice of the People. Likewise, by forever soliciting subscribers' submissions while exercising absolute editorial control, I can imagine that this list conveys a sense of omniscience that has little basis in reality. As a recovering know-it- all, I can testify how addictive this position can be. I can imagine how this list can be perceived as more authoritative than it really is. And since perceptions of authority are largely self-fulfilling, I can appreciate how an RRE message can do more damage than it has any right to. I don't really know for sure, nor is it mine to judge. But I suppose I should err on the safe side.

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