Black Unicorn wrote:
On Sun, 5 Jan 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Hello,
For a long time, cypherpunks mailing list has been plagued by two types of irrelevant traffic:
1) Flames by Vulis against cypherpunks and by cypherpunks against Vulis. 2) Off-topic rants about libertarian ideology, guns, poverty, Ebonics, etc etc.
Both types of messages were equally damaging to the content that I consider worth reading: discussions about applications of cryptography, protocols and crypto-related code. As a result, most of the people who used to talk about cryptosystems do not do so anymore because they moved to other, less noisy, forums.
[...]
Cypherpunks's uniqueness and appeal is not in the breadth of issues discussed: there are forums dedicated to libertarian issues, guns, languages, terrorism, and so on. The mission of this forum, as I understand it, was to provide amateurs with interest in applying cryptography, and professional cryptographers alike, a good place to discuss crypto-related issues productively.
It is understandable that many of those people who subscribe to cypherpunks' credo of digital freedom happen to be devoted libertarians and have strong views on other political subjects. It does not justify bringing every important issue to this mailing list, however.
If restrictions on content are to be imposed, it is not only fair but also rational to exclude off-topic political rants as well as
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flames. Both of these categories add zero value to accomplishing Cypherpunks' mission.
Disagree strongly.
Were you to call for a total restriction on political topics, frankly, your argument would be more convincing. You do not. This suggests, correct or not, that your dispute is with libertarian views specifically.
Thanks for your comments. I apologize for not being clear. I do call for a total restriction on political discussions not related to privacy and cryptography. It so happens that the vast majority of off-topic political ranters on this list are of libertarian persuasion, that's why I used word "libertarian" to identify what I was talking about. Of course, I consider any discussion of politics not related to the cypherpunks charter to be inappropriate for the list. For example, if in the future a socialist joins this list and starts advocating gun control, he should be censored just as well. I do not advocate censoring any particular political view more than any other. Another question is, how do we tell an on-topic political discussion from an off-topic discussion? My suggestion for such litmus test would be to ask: do different political alternatives being discussed have immediate ramifications for digital privacy and use of encryption? For instance, discussion of ITAR regulations obviously passes the litmus test. Discussion of machine gun laws, to the contrary, has nothing to do directly with any encryption issues or privacy issues, and should therefore be banned. Some may argue that they can build a logic chain that would imply that more machine guns means more encryption or something like that, and use this as an argument in favor of allowing machine gun discussions. This is not a correct approach because the logical chain would not be "direct" in the sense above.
It also demonstrates the danger of allowing that kind of selective moderation, specificially, that it gives rise to interest group politics and issue based censorship. Moderation here is being proposed in (I
This is absolutely correct. I do not believe that this problem has a universal and perfect solution. One of the possible remedies would be to write a charter that restricts moderators' ability to censor messages, and have a diverse moderator board.
believe) reaction to the "Tim May sucks (insert reproductive organ of choice here)" posts and flames having not even a tangential attachment to cryptography. If you get into singling out other topics as somehow universally inappropriate I think you get into very deep water.
We may be in very deep water already. Lately we had a discussion about a token-based protocol for identifying posters. Someone raised an issue of preserving anonymity of remailer users, and brought up a point that in certain cases the list maintainer should be "trusted". Vulis followed up with a message insulting Gilmore, and said that Gilmore should not be trusted in that cryptographic protocol. Is that about cryptography? And if we answer no, why is our answer different from the answer for a discussion about machine guns? If we answer yes, we'd have no way to legitimately prevent other annoying insults.
Is finance unimportant to cypherpunks? I think this is a tougher argument to make, but only because financial services and banks are not seen as the kind of political entitites that free market systems generally are.
Again, some aspects of finance -- for example, ensuring integrity and secrecy of electronic transactions -- are. Some, like whether blacks should pay higher rates in consumer loans, or why investment bankers make more than computer programmers -- are not. The litmus test should be the same.
Cypherpunks is an important and distinct list because of the intense cross pollenization between e.g., cryptographers and finance types, cryptographers and bankers, cryptographers and lawyers, cryptographers and polititians.
In the same way that crypto types despertly want the rest of the world to become crypto savvy, it is important for crypto types to become political, economicly savvy, and generally understand the larger context of crypto applications.
This is an excellent argument. I am not sure if my answer to it is any good, but do we want to make this a general education forum that is meant to be a free replacement for college and books? Probably not. "Political savviness for cypherpunks" probably does not mean that cypherpunks should learn here how to run campaigns. Financial savviness probably does not imply that cypherpunks should expect to learn here the methods of derivatives pricing, negotiating M&A deals, and security analysis. There are better places to do that. You are mentioning learning the "context of crypto applications", and that is very close to the answer that I had in mind. Discussions of all disciplines -- law, finance, politics -- are very important and relevant here as long as they are giving us the "context of crypto applications", and irrelevant beyond that.
Cypherpunks will make the networks safe for privacy.
And how will this happen without having the bankers, lawyers, polititians, brokers, and economists in the boat?
Having all these interesting people here does not contradict my proposals in any way. - Igor.