Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. Tim May said:
I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.
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. 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. 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. 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. The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until recently, has been responsibility. In an anarchy, *everyone* is responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job". Sandy felt responsible, so he proposed something. I felt responsible, so I helped. But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse. Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very gratifying. You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South: The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possesion of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom. Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you. It is a more serious thing than than you expect. All it takes it hard work and judgement. Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without knowing whether you are right. Face the uncertainty and build anyway. Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one? Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! Create and nurture an alt group! Make an independent moderated list drawn from the unedited list! Hold meetings! Establish for it a home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of philosophies. Dead simple for people as capable as us. Just takes work. Who's volunteering? Just do it! The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it? 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!". John 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 gist of your post seems to be saying that: - yes, the result it is not purely anarchic - the moderation experiment intentionally moderated the main list by design - this is perhaps slightly at odds with cypherpunks philosphy on freedom but that this is necessary because: - cypherpunks larger goals are more important - cypherpunks goals are better served by having a lower noise environment to work in - create that environment by any means possible (ends justify the means) - people weren't being responsible with their freedom anyway - it's only an experiment - if you don't like this and complain you're part of the problem Now it may seem nit-picking to a pragmatist, which is the way you presented your arguments, but the idea that cypherpunks should stoop to moderation/censorship calls into question what cypherpunks larger goals are. Why? Because we promote electronic freedom, but in order to effectively organise the promotion of freedom, we reject full freedom of speech as unworkable, and impose restrictions. This lends ammunition to our opponents. "See even they realise there must be limits to free speech". Cypherpunks main goal is: "to promote privacy and freedom through technological means" and arising from this goal, are presumed philosphical stances: - privacy and freedom are a good thing (unconditional free speech is a good thing) - censorship is a bad thing - government retrictions and backdoors in crypto are a bad thing (crypto providing practical privacy, and practical free speech being provided by cryptographically enabled anonymity) - chaumian credentials are preferable to fully traceable credentials - etc. etc. So the question to me boils down to is unconditional free speech a good thing? Dorothy Denning says no. Louis Freeh says no. The Clinton administration says no. I thought you said yes. I thought most of your actions for the last 10 years screamed yes! Why cut corners for little gain? Another moderated list with official sanction (hosted by toad.com, with your commendation that people subscribe to it (to reduce noise and increase productivity), with instructions in the sign on message listing the moderated/filtered lists available, clearly stating the filtering policy, regularly posted instructions on available filtered lists to cypherpunks) would have been beautiful. Fine. Lovely. But you set up moderation of _the_ list, with no interaction required by the subscriber. That caused Tim to unsubscribe. It's causing me, and others to argue for this aspect of the moderation to be reversed ASAP.
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?
Education, and countering government news-speak seems to be the key
issues at the moment.
Educate the journalist that perpetuated the pro-GAK lie. Write an
article to the same publication pointing out the fallacy
(unfortunately as these are private presses they are `moderated', so
you may not get your say). Buy the advert space if they won't
publish. I'll contribute.
Distribute strong crypto (you are personally, the ipsec S/WAN
initiative is important). I'm working on creating and distributing
strong crypto, and influencing sectors of users to use strong crypto,
rather than export crippled US stuff. The myth that 56 bits is strong
is perpetuated by journalists outside the US too. The export
situation is complex, many user groups (even IT managers) don't
understand. They don't understand the meaning of key strengths
either.
Break DES to demonstrate it's weakness. May happen in the next 1/2
year. Gets free publicity. People aren't saying 40 bits are secure
anymore. Cypherpunks acheived that.
Hope that Matt Blaze goes ahead with his hardware DES breaker. He
said some time ago that he had spare funding and was considering using
it for this purpose. Anyone know the state of play? This would be
more important as it would quantify the costs, and would be much more
impressive, and realistic for an estimate of the strength of DES
against industrial espionage or well funded criminal attack.
Adam
--
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0
I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here.
Tim May said:
I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not.
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.
[huge snip] If I might make a suggestion: Some people want moderation. That's fine, I've never been very big on letting other people choose what I read, but some people want it. For those who want it, let someone moderate the list for as long as they care to do it. Approved messages get a "X-sandy-approved" header. The responsibility for setting up a filter to toss everything that doesn't have the header is the responsibility of the end user. Toad will need to filter incoming posts to make sure they don't come "pre-approved", but that's the only hole I can think of. Everyone gets all of the Cypherpunks list. Those who want moderation filter the unapproved posts, those who want all of it get all of it. Hopefully, this will make (almost) everyone happy.
aaron@herringn.com wrote:
John Gilmore wrote:
I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. 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.
Re: the below. Easily the best and most intelligent suggestion so far. Why couldn't Sandy and John with all their experience think of this?
If I might make a suggestion: Some people want moderation. That's fine, I've never been very big on letting other people choose what I read, but some people want it. For those who want it, let someone moderate the list for as long as they care to do it. Approved messages get a "X-sandy-approved" header. The responsibility for setting up a filter to toss everything that doesn't have the header is the responsibility of the end user. Toad will need to filter incoming posts to make sure they don't come "pre-approved", but that's the only hole I can think of. Everyone gets all of the Cypherpunks list. Those who want moderation filter the unapproved posts, those who want all of it get all of it. Hopefully, this will make (almost) everyone happy.
John Gilmore wrote:
Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this month.
I havent chosen nothing like that. I read all the stuff from all the messages from before modernation and since then and nobody got to choose nothing. You told them what they were going to gwet and thats what they got. Anybody that made it plain that they werent happy got thrown in the trashcan and labled as being a flamer.
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.
1311 addresses that you stole for your censored list. Nobvody subscribved to cypherpunks-censored. You put them there cause its you decided it was your list an dyou could put people where you wanted even if they didnt like it. My uncle calls it the cyperpunks-Auschwitz list. Thats what subdir he keeps it in in his Dorks dir.
The cypherpunks list was unusable for this kind of discussion, only a month ago. It's usable now.
I could use it before and Im just a kid but Im not a lamer. Maybe you should call the list you stole cypherpunks-lamers.
I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship".
I know you are or else you wouldna thrown cypherpunks honest and truthful feelings in the flames-crapper.
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 read a lot of flamessages which people put a lot of their thouhgts into bu t they were emotional cause people get like that when someone doo-doos on them.
*I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did.
You dont make any signal/noise at all since you dont even send messages to the list. (except when you want tell bs about how people "chose" Sandy to be their dictator when they didnt)
"Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful option.
Not necessary either if your a dictator.
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.
Howcum reading the list is a wast eof your time but making decisions for ecveryone on the cypherpunks isnt?
To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.
Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom.
1311 ofg them? Howcum you just stole all of the list people for your censored list? I think that was real stupid unless you just didnt care if people would know that your were stealing the list for yourself. It was really rotten to call pewople flamers just cause they complained.
Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without knowing whether you are right.
Thats what those GAK guys are for and all those secret govbernment guys that want there not to be a cypherpunks anymore.
Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one?
No you already done too much.
The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it?
I will. Im just a kid but I cant do any worse than already.
the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!".
Im a kid so I get told to shut up all the time but I dont.
PS: Can we talk about crypto too?
What do you mean _we_ white man? (thats a joke) You havent talked about nothing on the list except how your not a bad guy for pushing people areound into the lists where you want them whether they like it or not. You stole my uncles subsribing to the cypherpunks list and made him a censored person. He had to break out to go to the uncensored list. I think your a lamer. Human Gus-Peter
participants (5)
-
aaron＠herringn.com -
Adam Back -
Dale Thorn -
John Gilmore -
lwjohnson＠grill.sk.ca