I like it. My take on the issues I see here: 1) Moderator liability and anonymous posting. The open nature of the list means that "copyright violations" threads and the like are thought more or less safe for the people who own toad.com. With moderation, this is less likely to be as "safe." Without calling for a blanket assault on copyrights (I do have friends who make their living as writers), and speaking only selfishly, I think it would be a shame to lose the "copyright violations" posts. So I think we need a way to diminish or at least distribute moderator liability. Let's revisit the "Member of Parliament Problem" thread of a month or so ago for solutions. Presumably STUMP or some other moderation tool could be modified to support a secure anonymous- approval protocol. 2) "Vote of confidence in Sandy." No. I agree with Igor Chudov. Absolute power corrupts; confidence, and particularly votes of confidence (this isn't a popularity contest), are the wrong way to go. Try "trust, but verify." As many of you know, I'm still barred from a list run by another cypherpunks subscriber for reasons I consider totally invalid. While I have confidence in much of what this person writes, and don't mind if other people have full confidence in him (because he's usually on the right side), this content-based censorship, and particularly the lack of transparency about it (his list never had this kind of discussion, nor do most of his subscribers even know that some people are banned), bugs me. 3) Full v. filtered v. flame lists. I'd choose to dump the full list, keeping the flame & filtered. People who want to can simply subscribe to both, and filter them into the same incoming mailbox, for the same effect. Only minor problem I'd forsee is that the flame list might propagate faster than the filtered list because it would have fewer subscribers. 4) "Qui custodiet ipsos custodes." When I first saw that thread title, I thought it pertained to the moderation proposal. It could. That's why I'd like to see the rejected messages archived, at least for a while, as they are with Chudov's STUMP. What I'd like best, since I don't particularly want to waste bandwidth or my disk space with what would, by definition, be mostly crap, is a hks.lists.cypherpunks.flames on the open nntp port I'm using to read cypherpunks today. As some of you have noticed, I'm not on the list now, because most of it is junk; I just point Netscape at HKS Inc's open port whenever the whim strikes me, and grab the few messages that look interesting. I'd like to do the same with the "flame" list, every couple days. Of course, HKS and the other public archives would make that decsion, and I thank them for the free service they've provided me so far. 5) "[Mostly libertarian] off-topic political junk." As someone who disagrees with a lot of, variously, Tim's, Lucky Green's, and attila's politics, I strongly agree with them that that's what I'm on cypherpunks for. The alternative is not just coderpunks, but also Perry's cryptography@c2.net, which is dedicated to the issues that cypherpunks were apparently originally about. (I can't really say for sure, because the majority of messages have been off-topic since about January 1996, and I only joined in October 1995.) I don't think it's a capitulation to admit that cypherpunks has evolved/devolved to a forum that bears little resemblance to its original charter. What we are is a bunch of mostly (but not all) libertarian ranters and ravers who are, for various and not necessarily consistent reasons, interested in the theme that ubiquitous strong crypto is a good thing. (I just edited the previous sentence to change "believe that it's a good thing" to "are interested in" because I wouldn't mind having a Denning or a Sternlight here.) Not all threads need have *anything* to do with that theme for the forum to be useful to me. This happens to be the only place I get to hear people like Lucky Green and Tim May rant and rave about all sorts of other topics (I mean that in a good way; I read most of what they write, and while I don't always agree with it, it's always important). I don't want to lose that unique opportunity just because it's "off-topic." -rich