It may be time for me to move on. More than 2 years on this list, since the B.C. period, may be too long. I'm fed up with fighting these battles, and no doubt many of you are fed up with seeing contentious pitched battles. Cypherpunks is increasingly a forum of strutting and posturing about who has the most powerful tools, who is spending more of their lives staying at the bleeding edge of technology. Depressing. The consensus of the active posters in this latest thread (Perry, Amanda, Lucky, Jim, others) is that I am a hopeless fuddy-duddy, unwilling to begin posting in the latest modality. (Funny, Netnews is still 99.999983% plain ASCII, by message count, and nobody advocating a more advanced scheme is actually _using_ such ne plus ultra formats here on this list. If it's so easy, and so 'punkly correct, why not?) Jim McCoy wrote:
If you are truly interested in making strong encryption easy and transparent to the vast majority of the users of future communications systems you should be leading the MIME charge, not holding everyone back...
I don't care for this imputation that my views on communicating with the list are somehow holding others back. Or that discussing these issues is inconsistent with being "truly interested in making strong encryption easy and transparent." Bluntly, I'm fucking sick and tired of these cheap shots and personal innuendos. Maybe it's the "young guns" syndrome, with a codger like me whose first Net account was in 1972 being a ripe target for the newest pistoleros with their .486-caliber Linux boxes in their holsters. Whatever, I'm fed up. I'm taking a break and unsubbing for a while. If I'm back in time for the January meeting, we'll have the "Demo Day" as planned. If not, you'll have to play it by ear. As they say, you know what a Cypherpunks firing squad is? A circle. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay