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.

As I, and a number of other list members, have said: Why did you not rename the lists so that cypherpunks@toad.com was uncensored??? You and I know perfectly well that probably 1250 of those addresses are people who don`t know the censorship is taking place, don`t read the list (defunct accounts), don`t know how to change their subscription, are too lazy to care either way etc... I would guess there are less than 100 that have considered the issues and decided to subscribe to the censored list.

If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both ways, or six different ways. Name it this, or name it that. I'm not; all I want is something that works. The cypherpunks list was unusable for this kind of discussion, only a month ago. It's usable now.

No, it was usable to those with time and patience or the rather rudimentary knowledge necessary to set up filters. Now all we are doing is relegating a list that was once subscribed to by intelligent and well educated people into a playground for the inept. I`m not being elitist but if we can`t expect a member of this list who actually uses it for discussion to know how to set up filters then he might as well unsubscribe.

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.

You should indeed have shut down the list. The problem being not that you choose to run a censored list but that you have associated the name cypherpunks with it and in doing so you have destroyed the reputation that the name cypherpunks once had.

Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very gratifying.

Paternalism is the root of all statism. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"