Tim May wrote:
At 9:26 PM -0700 11/14/97, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Tim May wrote:
(Hey, if the Paladin case withstands Supreme Court scrutiny and his upheld, look for the Cypherpunks list node distributors to face criminal charges.)
I do not think that it is entirely impossible either, but the likely scenario is that the government may first try to harass us and attempt the criminal charges only after some time.
In any case, the present structure of cypherpunks list is entirely unacceptable. We have only three working nodes. This is bad since all of these nodes reside in the US and can be taken out easily.
Besides government raids, we are all too susceptible on things like internet providers kicking us out, hard drives failing, and so on. Theree nodes is not a good redundancy.
I plead foreign cypherpunks to at least establish backup nodes that could be turned on should anything happen to the US-based ones.
I said this several years ago and I'll say it again: the Usenet is already set up for multinational, distributed, essentially uncensorable communication.
I used to try to copy many of my posts to alt.cypherpunks shortly after it was created, right after the the Great February End of Toad.com, but in recent months I haven'te bothered (mainly because no interesting communication was occurring in the alt.cypherpunks arena).
One need only look to Usenet for a robust, automatically (and automagically) distributed system.
You are right, USENET is a good medium. If cypherpunks list ever gets seriously harassed by authorities, migrating to a USENET newsgroup makes sense. At the same time, since a lot of people actually prefer the list as the cypherpunks medium, it would be "nice" to keep it working the way it is now if it is possible at all. The more likely scenario than gummint harassment, at least right now, is a technical failure of one or two nodes. Adding more redundancy would keep the list that we like more stable. - Igor.