December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Reputations
by gregburk＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: > To stick with my restaurant example, consider _advertising_. MacDonald's > and Burger King spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year claiming > their "restaurants" are great. Many millions of people obviously are > swayed. So? > > Others choose not to trust the advice of the MacDonald's hucksters. Maybe > only a tiny fraction choose Chez Panisse over MacDonald's. This is the way > of the world. > > It's still the give and take of reputations. It ain't perfect (in that it > doesn't produce results I believe are empirically valid and optimum :-}). > But it's all we have. It's the market. The agora. I'm reading "It's shaky. Accept that." Fine, consider it accepted. I don't think it is comparable to the market, simply because even the more nebulous market exchanges (say, consultant-on-call) are much more clearly defined. > >"Reputation capital" is hard to spend down to absolute 0 because it is > >significant work to distinguish valid "reputation capital" from > >worthless counterfeit, and it is easy to counterfeit... just talk. > > I strongly disagree. It's quite possible for Person A to quickly convert > his reputation to Person B to a _negative_ value. Real quick, in fact. I don't see how there can be such a thing as negative reputation capital. Wouldn't that mean B believes the opposite of what A says? If you anti-believed someone in a consistent manner, couldn't they exploit that? Also, you are speaking only of 1-to-1 reputation-relationships. But that is inefficient. The mere fact of having to evaluate each person's reputation yourself is significant work. On the other hand, you could talk about the transmission of reputations. This seems more in line with what I understood "reputation" to mean, to include some element of indirect knowledge. But that's mighty easy to abuse and therefore mighty hard to trust. For instance, when a certain infamously-low-reputation (deservedly so) individual recently joined the cypherpunk lists, others who had endured him in the past tried to relay their impressions of him. It proved very difficult to convey, and they were somewhat attacked for their efforts and not entirely believed. In other words, he *could not* spend down to 0, despite years of unflagging effort. > Perhaps my short article did not fully explain a few things. Reputations > are a _tensor_ or _matrix_ quantity. Person A has a reputation R(A,B) to > Person B, a reputation R(A,C) to Person C, and so on. (And the matrix may > be further broken down into reputations for advice on various subjects, in > various fields, etc.) I can't dispute or agree with your mathematical model until we can agree on more basic issues. > We may lump a lot of folks together and say, for example, that MacDonald's > has a reputation of R (MacDonald's, lots of people) = 0.7531. And perhaps R > (Chez Panisse, lots of people) = 0.0013 (i.e., they don't know what it is, > and so value the rep of Chez Panisse at near zero). > > And so on. Lots of examples could be given. I'll accept your example, but I don't see how the numbers are meaningful. > Now suppose that J. Anonymous Gourmand announces that MacDonald's is shit. > How much will anonymous claim hurt MacDonald's? Obviously, not much. Well, how many people did J. Anonymous Gourmand reach, anyways? Now, suppose J. Anonymous Gourmand spams all of Usenet, and millions of people who have never heard of J. Anonymous Gourmand before read a plausible but false account of the disgustingness of McDonald's food. Perhaps the same detailed study, just fake. (Not to intertangle this with other issues, let's further suppose that Ms. Gourmand sneaks in underneath spam-watcher's radar, and cleverly appears to be on topic in every group.) Nothing about her reputation has changed, but surely when her claim is read by millions it will hurt McDonalds a non-trivial amount. Again, that doesn't mean the reputation was not a factor. > But > what if the American Heart Association publishes a detailed study on the > fat levels of MacDonald's products and declares it to "Dangerous." The > effect will probably be greater, as R (AHA, many people) = high, and by the > kind of Dempster-Shafer belief calculus I discussed a few months ago, the > rep of the AHA propagates semi-transitively to the rep of MacDonald's. > > (This all happened recently, with the famous studies of fat levels of movie > theater food...sales dropped almost overnight, and now the fat levels of > popcorn, etc., have been changed for the better.) I don't think you are illustrating what you think you are. Consider the American Sociological Association. Wouldn't you say its reputation is equivalent to the American Heart Association's? Most people would, I think. And various claims by ASA members have certainly gotten as much press as anything the AHA has got. But the ASA winks at severe violations of its Code Of Ethics and lets its members pursue their Politically Correct agendas at the expense of science. They have effectively counterfeited a reputation. I've already made the points I wanted to make, so I may not have further comments. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQBVAwUBMi9qpbMyVAabpHidAQFRnwH8CyCjOnz071ZMWXNNURR/NMSMw9y9bs+n dutQOqLSNqeJhsYwNZJP2Z1o+JdhWZ7sQ/xnhdWbdupYsoRhcpacpA== =zcJQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Browne and foreign tyrants
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i also have never heard of an attempt on Hitler's life by anyone other that the germans. the us did, however, assassinate Yamamoto Isoroku, and did a very neat job of it at that. i once read a sci-fi story about time travelers going back to kill Hitler, and the disaster that occured when someone succeeded and Hitler's place was taken by someone even more onerous. in the story there was a group of people whose job it was to prevent this assassination, since so many people in the future had that idea that doing away with Hitler was a good thing to do there was practically a queue of would-be assassins. -paul > From cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com Thu Sep 5 03:07:59 1996 > X-Sender: jimbell(a)mail.pacifier.com > X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset="us-ascii"> > Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 16:43:23 -0800 > To: libernet-d(a)listserv.rmii.com, nwlibertarians(a)teleport.com, > dnowch2(a)teleport.com > From: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> > Subject: Browne and foreign tyrants > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Content-Length: 2362 > > >From: "George D. Phillies" <phillies(a)WPI.EDU> > >Subject: Re: Browne & foreign tyrants > >There is a section of the Geneva Protocols forbidding actions in occupied > >territories directed against officers of political parties. Under that > >section, the actions in Somalia against, e.g., the treasurer of General > >Aidid's political party, were war crimes. No one seems to get very upset. > > > >> If there is such a treaty, the US has a long history of ignoring it. > >> > >> 0) Attempts to kill Hitler. > >I don't think we ever tried this. > > And this was a real shame. Over 30 million people died in WWII, directly or > indirectly. We knew that Hitler was going to be a problem well before 1936. > Think how many could have been saved... > > If anything, WWII is excellent proof that AP is a good idea. Stauffenberg > was the German who bombed Hitler's meeting in 1944 but failed to kill him. > Stauffenberg knew as early as 1942 that Hitler needed to be killed, and a > recent "60 Minutes" episode related how hundreds of people knew about this > plot. > > The reason he failed was that while he was preparing the two bombs in a > bathroom, he was interrupted. (The bomb's delay mechamism was acid > dissolving a metal.) Rather than being caught, he left one of the > briefcases in the bathroom and went to the meeting with only one bomb. > Furthermore, he left the bomb at the meeting, but it was pushed behind the > heavy table after he left, which shielded Hitler from much of the force of > the explosion. > > If AP (or at least, some anonymous reward mechanism for Stauffenberg's > family) had been available, he would have done "the honorable thing," and > walked up to Hitler with the bomb and instantly detonated it right there, > resulting in both Hitler's and Stauffenberg's certain death. At least > hundreds of thousands or perhaps over a million people would have SURVIVED. > As it happened, Stauffenberg's reticence caused not only his death after > torture, but also the deaths of well over a hundred coup-plotters, but also > the thousands that were yet to die in the last 6+ months of WWII. > > Question: Would you kill yourself to save a million lives? Even if you > wouldn't, would you change your mind if your heirs would be anonymously paid > an extra $10 million dollars or so? I'd say that's a pretty substantial > motivation, wouldn't you? > > > > Jim Bell > jimbell(a)pacifier.com >

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PRESS RELEASE: GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL
by tank 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please forward: Contact: XS4ALL Internet BV (http://www.xs4all.nl) Postbus 1848 1000BV Amsterdam Fax: +31-20-6274498 Email: felipe(a)xs4all.nl * * * P R E S S R E L E A S E * * * GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL, WITH 3100 WEBPAGES German internetproviders, joined in the Internet Content Taskforce (ICTF), started censoring the Dutch website www.xs4all.nl, containing 3100 personal and commercial homepages. This act of censorship is caused by the webpage of a magazine that is banned in Germany, Radikal (http://www.xs4all.nl/ ~tank/radikal/). A German prosecutor sent the following message to the ICTF (http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm) "Under the following addresses in Internet: http://www.serve.com/spg/154/ http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal//154/ and using the link on page http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/angela1/radilink.htm one can call up the entire edition of the pamphlet entitled radikal Nr. 154". Parts of this pamphlet justify preliminary suspicion of promoting a terrorist organization under ' 129a, Par.3 of the German Criminal Code, public condoning of criminal activities penalizable under ' 140 no.2 of the German Criminal Code and preliminary suspicion of inciting to criminal activity under ' 130a Par.1 of the German Criminal Code. The Public Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice has therefore initiated a criminal investigatory procedure against the parties disseminating this pamphlet. You are herewith informed that you may possibly make yourself subject to criminal prosecution for aiding and abetting criminal activities if you continue to allow these pages to be called up via your access points and network crosspoints" Providers in Germany are already blocking packets to and from the host www.xs4all.nl. The 3100 websites on this server include the Kurdistan Information Network (http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/) the very popular Internet Charts (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jojo/) and the world famous Chip Directory (http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/) XS4ALL has not received any request from the German Government regarding the homepage of Radikal. Without any prior contact the German prosecutor decided that the XS4ALL website needs to be blocked for German Internet Users. XS4ALL is awaiting legal advice, and will investigate if legal procedures against the German government are possible. Censorship on Internet usually has the opposite effect. Internetusers consider it a sport to publish censored materials. Many users have already published the Radikal website on other Internet hosts. Here are some of the URL's: http://burn.ucsd.edu/%7Eats/RADIKAL/ http://www.jca.or.jp/~taratta/mirror/radikal/ http://www.serve.com/~spg/ http://huizen.dds.nl/~radikal http://www.canucksoup.net/radikal/index.html http://www.ecn.org/radikal http://www.well.com/~declan/mirrors/ http://www.connix.com/~harry/radikal/index.htm http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/index.htm Xs4all Internet will rotate the IP-numbering of the website www.xs4all.nl to ensure that it's 3100 userpages will all remain available for any internet-user. <end> -- Felipe Rodriquez - XS4ALL Internet - finger felipe(a)xs4all.nl for http://xs4all.nl/~felipe/ - Managing Director - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9 pgp Key fingerprint = 32 36 C3 D9 02 42 79 C6 D1 9F 63 EB A7 30 8B 1A

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Metcalf and Other Net.Fogies
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm evolving a hunch that the problems we're seeing with "old fogies" denouncing the Net, and anonymity, and "smut on the Net," are part of a larger cultural issue. Namely, the familiar case of an older generation complaining about the sloth and sin of the younger generations. (Caveat: I'm 44, so I'm certainly a generation older than many of you, and am about the same age, give or take a few years, of Dyson, Metcalfe, Kapor, Denning, and the other Net.Doomsayers. However, 20-25 years ago, when I was in college, I recall of course similar predictions of disaster. (And as it turned out, the predictions that promiscuity would lead to a disaster turned out to be partly correct, viz. AIDS.)) Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3COM, and how publisher of "Infoworld" and sailing enthusiast, was interviewed on CNBC a few minutes ago. He repeated his prediction of an "Internet collapse" in 1996, based on overuse, on bad pricing models, on lack of controls, and on other concerns. It could be that the Dennings, Dysons, Kapors, etc. of the world are simply growing jaded with the Net and are projecting their own ennui in their comments that the Net may need to be controlled. This may come with age, as I'm sure the Kapor of 25 years ago would not have wanted President Nixon and Attorney-General Mitchell telling him what he could read and write. (In fairness, none of these folks listed have called for censorship. But all have expressed "concerns" of one sort or another. Not that discussing concerns is inappropriate--after all, we do it all the time. But I sense in many of their phrasings of concerns a stereotypical "old fogeyness" emerging.) Just a thought. Maybe the solution to the EFF problem is to "not trust anyone over 30." --Tim May (untrustable since 1981) We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Race Bit: C
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:11 PM 9/5/96 +0000, jonathon wrote: >On Thu, 5 Sep 1996, Anonymous wrote: >> defunded 100%, IMO). Violence begats violence which begats even larger >> government, don't start us on that road -- leave me in peace. >If I understand you correctly, it is OK for a government to >institute violence against the residents of the land it claims >dominion over, but it is not acceptable for the inhabitants of >that piece of land to respond in self defence. I think Mr. Anonymous displays a mental crutch that you'll occasionally see: A person who, while he'll not quite admit defending the status quo, criticizes alternatives to it yet doesn't have a solution of his own. He says he wants to be left "in peace," forgetting that most people in the world today are NOT left in peace. The way I see it, the status quo doesn't come "pre-justified": It needs just as much a defense as any other proposal. Its main advantage is that it tends to be more understood that most hypotheticals, because it's been tested. Sadly, people tend to ignore its disadvantages, to to excess familiarity. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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No Subject
by Zaphoid _d00l 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

desubscribe

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Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd)
by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Suggest you look at draft-eastlake-internet-payment-*.txt in the IETF shadow directories. I don't think any one step will solve all our spam problems but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each real piece of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged 5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming would be crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could collect the money and then just throw away the mail.) Donald (not on cypherpunks) ===================================================================== Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1 508-287-4877(tel) dee(a)cybercash.com 318 Acton Street +1 508-371-7148(fax) dee(a)world.std.com Carlisle, MA 01741 USA +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA) http://www.cybercash.com http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 19:47:15 -0400 From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> To: dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu Subject: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 11:35:28 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) Subject: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology Keywords: agoric systems, computational ecologies, resource auctioning, Mark Miller, K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, contracts, distributed trust, metered usage, software objects, software ICs, superdistribution, Brad Cox, emergent order. In physics there are various conservation laws: conservation of energy, mass, charge, and whatnot. You all know about this... Conservation of mass says that mass is neither created nor destroyed. (For smart aleck quibblers, conservation of mass-energy.) How does this relate to our issues? "Abuse of Resources": Mail loops, infinite loops, spamming, overloads of networks, and congestion in general are cases where "unrealistic" models of costs are implemented in software. In the real physical world, infinite loops don't occur (at least not in the sense seen with mail loops, as a relevant example.) Conservation laws are related to the "cost model" of the universe. Real physical objects have costs, or ontological status, or presence.... (Please don't read too much into this point...I mean to be suggestive, not literal.) There are no "memory leaks" in the universe which suddenly fill it up with stuff, no perpetual motion machines, no creation and destruction of objects. Cyberspace Ontologies: There are several things which need to be done to make the cyberspatial world more like the spatial world: * payment for CPU cycles consumed (via contractual, permission-based access: "If you want access to this machine, here are the terms and conditions.") * metering mechanisms, such as e-stamps for e-mail (essentially a special case of the first point, where a machine says "I'll pass on your message if you pay me to.") * digital contracts, agreements on usage and payment (resource auctioning, or the "smart contracts" that Nick Szabo has written about) (you can all think of additional examples....) Cryptographic protocols have their uses here, but there are also some other measures which bear looking into. In the LISP community, for example, work has been done on "engines," which are building blocks that are "fueled up" with "CPU fuel" and allowed to run for some amount of CPU cycles. Thus, one could put an engine into a process and it would run for some number of ticks, then stop. (I'm sure there are Unix-level tools which do similar things, in terms of giving a spawned process so many ticks of the clock. The "engines" concept is somewhat more semantically clean, in that it's pushed down into the "ontology" of the thing being simulated or run, and is not at the "God level" (to use a non-technical term!).) Now, certainly I support the right of any person or machine to run programs freely and without charge, to pass on e-mail free of charge, to run remailers for no charge, to accept spam mail without complaint, and so on. What I'm suggesting is that many of the problems being seen with overuse of resources, spam, congestion, and denial of service are really due to a poor model of resource allocation. Unix and other modern operating systems offer various tools for helping to constrain such problems, but, I submit, better methods are needed. (Especially when multiple machines, networks, and even anonymous sites are part of the overall system....clearly the constraints must be managed locally, and via "contract," as part of a computational ecology, and not as a hierarchical, top down Unix-type operating system.) Economics is about the "allocation of scarce resources." Many of the existing models being used treat various scarce resources as _free_. Then, when the inevitable problems occur, calls for top-down regulation are heard (e.g., the frequent calls for illegalization of "unwanted mail"). In my view, building a consistent, distributed, "conservative" system is what Cypherpunks need to be thinking about. (I used the term "conservative" in the physics sense. A system in which various conservation laws are obeyed.) As I said before, this should not be compelled, but voluntary. However, those who give their resources away for free (choosing not to adopt a conservative ontology, in other words) should be in no position to complain or run to the government for top-down regulation because there freely-given resources are being overused or "abused" (in their thinking). And closely related to this whole issue--and something I've written about extensively--is the issue of "building walls in cyberspace." In the real world, persistent structures are build out of real materials, resulting in castles, forts, skyscrapers, bridges, houses, highways, etc. These objects have persistence, have controllable access (gates, doors, locks,...), and have "structural integrity." Cryptographic and distributed trust protocols are about the only means I can think of for constructing the equivalents in cyberspace. (And to a large extent, this is already happening: the Net and the Web have structure which cannot be demolished casually, or by top-down orders from any single national leader. Millions of machines, linked in various ways and implementing various protocols and "terms of service" with users and other machines....an early version of the "conservative" system I think we'll someday see.) Well, this gives the flavor of my points. I haven't rigorously argued all of the points, but the Cypherpunks forum is for presenting informal arguments. Thoughts? --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway." --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To unsubscribe from this list, send a letter to: Majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu In the body of the message, write: unsubscribe dcsb Or, to subscribe, write: subscribe dcsb If you have questions, write to me at Owner-DCSB(a)ai.mit.edu

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BAY AREA PARTY REMINDER
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C'punks, We are at one week and counting until my Second Occasional Anarcho-Dilettante costume party. If you would like to attend please RSVP as soon as possible. If you did not get or keep the original invitation, let me know and I'll send you another copy. In addition to Cypherpunks and Extropians, there will be gun nuts, a contingent of Burning Man survivors and some total strangers. It will be one hell of a party. S a n d y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactly?)
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There is another spin possible on the reasons for replacement of pay phones with credit card phones. In Canada all new credit card phones are also able to take phone cards (which are anonymous). Using a prepaid phone card permits full anonymity. But what it also permits is metered local calls. This infrastructure would be more familiar to someone from Europe where metered local calls are the norm. Paris make the change to phones that *only* take prepaid phone cards (thus fully anonymous) obstensibly because people were breaking into phones for the money. Prepaid phone cards avoid this. James Why should my long distance calling subsidize your local internet access? ;-) ---------- From: "<pstira(a)escape.com>" <pstira(a)escape.com> Sent: Friday, September 06, 1996 9:54 AM To: unicorn(a)schloss.li Cc: vznuri(a)netcom.com; cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Re: What is the EFF doing exactly? Not just DC and Chicago, I'm afraid. If anyone around NYC noticed, there are less and less payphones, and all new ones installed, just about, are those yellow credit card phones. Not all of them, but it's now one for one, at least.

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Re: Reputations
by Omegaman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I don't see how there can be such a thing as negative reputation > capital. Wouldn't that mean B believes the opposite of what A says? If > you anti-believed someone in a consistent manner, couldn't they exploit > that? Of course they could exploit that. But you're not "anti-believing" the information an untrusted party is passing. Rather, you are not acting on their information in *any* fashion. You're ignoring them. In the case of the common killfile, you may not even know that they're talking at you. > Also, you are speaking only of 1-to-1 reputation-relationships. But that > is inefficient. The mere fact of having to evaluate each person's > reputation yourself is significant work. It is significant work. How much work depends on how valuable the transactions you are considering are to you. It's not as if the notion of reputation capital doesn't have precedent. When I make a purchase for my business, I do quite a bit of checking on the background of individuals and businesses I am purchasing from. The amount of reference work I do depends on how much I intend to spend. Furthermore, I am much more apt to do business with individuals who have been referred by other trusted parties (a transfer of raputation capital). Also my initial investment with a relative unknown is usually small. The repuatation capital of both parties increases relative to one another as a relationship is continued. > On the other hand, you could talk about the transmission of reputations. [..snip..] > For instance, when a certain infamously-low-reputation (deservedly so) > individual recently joined the cypherpunk lists, others who had endured > him in the past tried to relay their impressions of him. It proved very > difficult to convey, and they were somewhat attacked for their efforts > and not entirely believed. You seem to view the notion repuatation capital as absolute. It is relative to each user of it. The unnamed you are referring to did indeed come in with quite a bit of negative repuatation capital attached to his name. While I might regard the opinions of others on the list as being valuable, I chose to see for myself if the unnamed person warranted his bad repuation. > In other words, he *could not* spend down to 0, despite years of > unflagging effort. In other words, I decide if an when he has "spent down to zero" with me -- even if we never directly communicate. > Now, suppose J. Anonymous Gourmand spams all of Usenet, and millions of > people who have never heard of J. Anonymous Gourmand before read a > plausible but false account of the disgustingness of McDonald's food. > Perhaps the same detailed study, just fake. (Not to intertangle this > with other issues, let's further suppose that Ms. Gourmand sneaks in > underneath spam-watcher's radar, and cleverly appears to be on topic in > every group.) > > Nothing about her reputation has changed, but surely when her claim is > read by millions it will hurt McDonalds a non-trivial amount. Why? That depends on the sophistication of millions of Usenet readers (heh). I think your extension of this example is not useful. It's impossible not to "intermingle it with other issues" such as the substance of the message itself, the ability to verify any factual information, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Reputation is but one factor in many and has a mostly negative effect if J. Anonymous Goumand is indeed anonymous. Change J. Anonymous Gourmand to say, C. Everett Koop, and you can envision a more tangible example of reputation capital in action. me -------------------------------------------------------------- Omegaman <mailto:omega@bigeasy.com> PGP Key fingerprint = 6D 31 C3 00 77 8C D1 C2 59 0A 01 E3 AF 81 94 63 Send a message with the text "get key" in the "Subject:" field to get a copy of my public key. --------------------------------------------------------------

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