-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Several people are working on improvements to netnews which allow more active filtering. The most promising techniques that I have heard about involve a lot of "ratings" being generated by readers and then taken into account by other readers when filtering/sorting the articles. I am perfectly happy with the social scene on the cypherpunks list as is, and I think those who want to move to a newsgroup don't know what they are asking for. (Go read sci.crypt and talk.politics.crypto for awhile. I expect an "alt.cypherpunks" would be indistinguishable from those two in short order.) BUT, I was thinking that this group (I mean, this group of people) would make an excellent group to test this new technology. Think about it: Perry Metzger could routinely give conspiracy articles/authors a "-10" rating, and those of us who agreed with him could set our "Perry coefficients" to indicate the degree to which we agree with his evaluations. Thus we might actually gain a *higher* SNR by moving to UseNet. (And it would provide an exciting example of reputations in action...) I don't know if the technology is there yet, or if it is accessible to most of our readers. One person who is working on such a scheme is "(cm)", or "na48985@anon.penet.fi". I have added his name to the Cc: line so perhaps he would be so kind as to tell us about his "NoCeM" ("No see 'em!") software. Bryce signatures follow: + public key on keyservers /. island Life in a chaos sea or via finger 0x617c6db9 / bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu ---* -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0beta4 iQCVAwUBMFtjUvWZSllhfG25AQHSoAP/aH1kzLO+JYzlPqdAA9Zeb7JpeWbt4xEI WH0HCP+sjEFgsW/sXpEpjT5TuMe3/FyGAJFZTN0l8SLythYuFJauGs5xf2tEv8OQ 3q5jTq4pztMbvD9FnlFeU4kfcg5yJkvy9KDebfxtRAfDvIz6BTxGuNkJ18rJBXlY OCg+mm8vYmc= =paQk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----