From: IN%"gnu@toad.com" "John Gilmore" 4-FEB-1997 12:20:22.10
Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold.
You're making an invalid assumption... namely that people who stayed on the moderated list are neccessarily wanting it to be the main list. This isn't the case with me, for instance. I'd also point out that some of us - including me - were taking the time to take a look at what happened with the moderated list. On the one hand, it did result in a decrease in the trash messages... on the other hand, it also drove away 1+ good posters (TCMay for one). As I've said before, I might wind up going with Sandy's (or some other) filtered list. But changing the name (effectively, to cypherpunks-unedited) was a bad idea.
I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did.
I can see how you might ignore objections from those who did make the signal/noise get worse... but from those who didn't? _I_ tried to help you by letting you & Sandy know when something was going wrong.
Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month.
I (and others, I believe) are gratified by y'all's attempts to help. I just think that you went about it the wrong way.
Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere!
[...]
The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it?
Would you be willing to help in starting up a distributed list? That would appear to solve at least some of the toad.com problems (keeping it running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) with which I am sympathetic.
If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!".
I'm willing to help the _libertarian_ crypto community, to the limit allowed by my available resources (I'm a grad student). Organize? I'm not so sure to what degree that's helping. Progressive? I'm not a liberal. Slight but meaningful difference in terms.
PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse novices into thinking that two very different things are the same thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What should we do about this? Educate the public?
The public won't listen until 56-bit DES is broken; then, they can be told that "somebody broke the cryptography used by banks" and they might listen. In other words, what can be done is supporting DES-breaking efforts (ideally, via the collection of different possible keys and their indicators, as someone had mentioned earlier - sorry, I'm a biologist, not a mathematician, so I've forgotten the actual terms. It was something that would essentially enable the near-instant breaking of _any_ DES code after the competion of the project. My apologies if I've gotten mixed up on this). -Allen