Forwarded message:

Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 18:49:46 GMT From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>

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This appears to be as good a time as any to announce that I'm "putting up". I've already taken steps, along with Jim Choate, to start a network of majordomos hosting a Cypherpunks mailing list. I didn't intend to announce this until Jim and I had gotten the first pair of 'domos working properly, but this means that we'll need to speed things up. Our intention is to have a set of majordomos which are intersubscribed to a cypherpunks list on each one, with measures taken to ensure that mail loops don't develop.

I'll contribute what I had planned:

As a stop gap measure you could create a standard majordomo at the beefiest of your 'domo hosts.

While it is true I was planning on bringing the Austin Cpunks remailer back (kourier.ssz.com) this rather unexpected expansion has got me backpedalling. So it looks like it will take about 3 weeks to get the intial site ready for public access. Right now my ISDN based site is all we have working. We have another site through another ISP in the process of registering and configuration. I have currently created a 'cypherpunks@ssz.com' but still have a couple of other issues to work out. The most relevant one is that I will be upgrading both Linux and Majordomo in approx. 2 weeks. We will be discussing this issue further on Saturday at the Austin Cypherpunks meeting. If all goes well with our discussion and my upgrade we should have the SSZ cypherpunks site available in about 2 weeks. Sten and I hope that we can pursuade some others to get involved both running remailers as well as modifying the various scripts. At this point everything we do will be released to the public domain. We also are expecting to add a proviso that all submissions to the cpunks distributed remailer will be de facto public domain unless a specific 'fair use' header is included in each submission. Finaly, another issue that will slow me down is the upcoming SRL show here in Austin. I have committed time and effort so I don't know yet how the conflicts will come or how I will resolve them. The next SRL planning meet is Thu. nite so I will have a clearer idea of my upcoming schedule.

Or you could create a quick 'n dirty mail exploder, by taking the current subscribers, and putting 100 mail addresses in a .forward file

[much good comments cut out]

Final comment: perhaps you've investigated this, but what Perry Metzger has for the majordomo running cryptography@c2.net is excellent at stopping people forging subscribe and unsubscribe messages.

And would really cut down the nuisance of people subscribing others without their knowledge.

These are several of the issues that we will be discussing this Saturday. We will also be looking at various means to distribute the subscriber list. The current lead suggestion is to have subscriptions at any of the cpunks be evenly distributed among them. This would somewhat complicate the subscriber process. Another aspect that I am hot to trot on is setting the system up so that some of the cpunks sites could be anonymous, crypto, or combo remailers as well. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage@ssz.com