-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 10:58 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers.
My mention of Usenet was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; I don't know if I'd bother with the list if it were moved to (or gated with) Usenet, as Usenet has become for the most part 100+ Mb/day of uselessness. But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g., uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left the list. (And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v. no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?", which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from which to argue.) There's really nothing stopping anyone from just setting up a gateway. The list is already gated one-way to Usenet; it shows up many places as mail.cypherpunks. What's missing is a gateway running the other direction; from looking at the headers as messages are received at my ISP (io.com), toad.com is already in the Path: line, so preventing backfeeding shouldn't be a problem. (Doh, it's been a few years since I fussed with mail-to-news and back again, but this isn't rocket science.) The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn (whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many messages. The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of it's bound to spill over. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.5 iQEVAgUBMvcLpv37pMWUJFlhAQFTJgf/UAFESNbjEK2NRabq56We3PkF+sM7pwHU b7Gy/h6a+KusZECe3epIm9/ubvGiZJtVpkp1zTG/AqBJVkdRb9xyIwWpOXU9HUz+ gjzASY/x0Zwsy9AlCgAk0HSEL1bggFTgAjDPB8SSOaYuxP1czpmAAVHTZiNXioV5 AAsnCXLc0qLgXYZ6/3dQhtIznH41ciNhVgI4RhV9lfheCpIhxJJC0zlh7wX2QzMv VhPidpcCmKiCriULwvOJuIkt0SFLvIjxm18zBh6UIe/APgL6TDsr022DTB+S6G/b qgH1aO9xhZtu84I/+V/pOCyKGk+9qij94CwNumN+Hs/cZMybiaO4bQ== =YwhW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles@netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |