At 10:55 AM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: ...
Another lesson is the danger of choke points. We can see how tempting it is for people to exercise their control. Even John Gilmore was unable to restrain himself from involuntary social engineering experiments. Who would we have considered to be more trustworthy?
Toad.com is a choke point, not just in terms of moderation but in terms of the rate at which it can distribute messages. Let's replace it.
What we want are many machines carrying the cypherpunks list. A message posted to any machine goes to all of the others. Each machine sends messages to its subscribers only once. Some of these machines should be across borders.
The mail loop and multiple posting problems are solved by observing the message IDs.
Fast implementation: use moderated mailing list software. Put a filter in the .forward file of the "moderator" account which looks at the message ID and forwards the message if it hasn't been seen already. The mailing list machines all subscribe each other. ... What you are suggesting is reminiscent of IRC. Except, I think that each IRC network has a central computer which could be controlled.
On your idea for fast implementation, this could be hacked by would-be censors. A message comes into the list, the censor sees that the post is from a regular enemy. The censor then copies the header information onto a new message, one containing garbage, or snippets from old posts, reads the new post to see if it is acceptable, and if it is, adds a new header, probably only the time would be changed, and transmits it out. If the would be censor was the sysop of a machine near the origin of the message, and if the censor operated the censorship either by bots, or monitored the feed 24 hours a day, (not likely), then the actual message would get to few.