The noise levels around here are getting astounding. Posts on windows registration wizards, gun control, unemployment, Kevin Mitnick's underwear, and all the rest are most certainly NOT doing us any good. Here we are in the midst of IBM putting espionage enabled versions of Lotus Notes out (someone should be putting out a hack to change the embedded public key), Microsoft putting out a crypto API that could potentially be of enormous interest, activity moving in the Karn lawsuit, and all sorts of other important events, and YOU DUNDERHEADS ARE MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO CARRY OUT IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS. If you want to help the NSA in its mission to stop the dissemination of strong crypto, by all means, continue posting garbage. Perry
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- An entity calling itself Perry <perry@piermont.com> allegedly wrote:
The noise levels around here are getting astounding.
<snip> Perry, I quite agree with you. I am having a very difficult time wading through cpunks, and I am currently reduced to grepping for my name, and then picking out a topic or two by subject line before junking 95% of the posts. Since you have such enthusiasm for solving the noise problem I suggest that we do the following: 1. Establish a "one-way" mailing list. If you don't have an ISP which makes this convenient then I recommend Sameer's Community ConneXion. It costs merely $7.50/month, it is very easy to create a mailing list, Sameer respects your privacy and understands the importance of privacy and security issues, and you can pay in Mark Twain Ecash. 2. Write a script for your mail agent so that when you see a noise post you can hit a key combination and send off a message to all the recipients of your mailing list which identifies the message (by its Message-ID, I suppose?) as trash. 3. I will subscribe to your list. 4. I will configure my mail user-agent to automatically delete messages which have been identified by you as trash. What do you say? I'm up for it. Hey, come to think of it I have a mailing list at C2 that isn't being used for anything. It is fortuitously named "c2punks". Go ahead and send your "trash-o-meter" messages there and I will receive them. (That's "c2punks@c2.org".) Of course there are some things we should work out as we go: 1. You should PGP-sign your trash-o-meter messages. Don't worry about doing it on a secure box (who's going to crack your e-mail hardware just so they can force me to read trash or delete cpunks mail from my inbox?). You can configure your MUA to pass the passphrase to PGP (or have no passphrase) so that all you have to do is hit a single key combination to activate the "trashit" script. 2. You might wonder what you are getting out of this? I can name 3 things: a. Reducing the amount of c'groupies noise that I read, and the amount of c'groupies noise that anyone else who subscribes to "c2punks" reads. b. Advancing the theory and practice of distributed ratings systems. c. I and others will reciprocate-- we will mail "trash-o-meter" messages to c2punks which you can use so as to read less trash yourself. 3. I'll write some scripts that people can use to process trash-o-meter messages. The first version will probably be in sh and written for the mh mail-handling system. Later versions will work with different mail-handling systems, incorporate such nifty features as author- and subject- trashing in addition to message-trashin, having weighted scalar ratings, different ratings categories, and so forth. I'm entirely serious about this. For the first iteration just send something like "TRASH Message-ID: XXXXXXXXX" in the subject line or the body. We can discuss this in detail on c2punks if it gets too specific to be on-topic in cpunks. (What's your flavor of MUA? I'll write the trashit script for you.) Regards, Bryce signatures follow "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." -Tennyson <a href="http://www.c2.org/~bryce/Niche.html"> bryce@colorado.edu </a> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.01 iQCVAwUBMP7qj/WZSllhfG25AQHmmwP9FbAxfvWz1SwQP0AeEUFODVnGVFSCgkxS YzqzskooI8BZYEhBJVKSidM/jf3Hr/D+T5MsXsavH3hZ9aS5O4qYjuJO+7Y78bGe NaCszo+OcScJXWQn2UdLEo3bsYNoNF3smXD/nndce5pMucAjxTb2Mzd/T3UbKAtH AJZl7W2wUNw= =Ulv6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Bryce writes:
Perry, I quite agree with you. I am having a very difficult time wading through cpunks, and I am currently reduced to grepping for my name, and then picking out a topic or two by subject line before junking 95% of the posts. Since you have such enthusiasm for solving the noise problem I suggest that we do the following: <auto-kill sublist scheme elided>
I have an expansion on this. Why not generalize the problem to create a group rating system? Anyone who wants to can send ratings messages (rating each message on a scale of one to five, one meaning "what total crap" and five meaning "what a useful piece of information") to the ratings server. The server maintains the ratings for each message by sender. Client software can retrieve the ratings added since a given time and use this information with the ratings assigned by the user to generate compatibility profiles indicating with which raters the user tends to agree, and provide ratings on all messages based on it. The user can then have anything lower than his tolerance threshold automatically deleted. This is patterned after a newsgroup collaborative filtering tool I read a paper on not too long ago. I can't find that reference, but <URL:http://www-sloan.mit.edu/ccs/CCSWP165.html> has an open architecture design for a ratings server. Ideally, one would modify MUAs to recognize an "X-Ratings-To:" header to tell where ratings messages should be sent, and the list server would add that to all outgoing messages. The MUA would present the ratings buttons when displaying messages containing "X-Ratings-To:" headers and automatically generate and send the rating when the user pushed a button. The beauty of this is that it works for *any* mailing list that has an associated ratings server. It allows anyone with the appropriate MUA to ignore those conspiracypunks boneheads almost transparently. Necessary coding: modifications to majordomo: - add optional ratings server address and update frequency in list configuration data - add "X-Ratings-To:" headers to outgoing messages in lists with ratings servers - periodically send ratings updates to ratings server subscribers modifications to MUAs: - recognize "X-Ratings-To:" headers in incoming messages and present ratings interface when displaying them - generate ratings messages to ratings server - interpret incoming ratings messages to compute user's predicted rating - maintain user preferences vector
"Scott" == Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net> writes:
Scott> I have an expansion on this. Why not generalize the problem to create Scott> a group rating system? This has already been implemented in the Gnus Newsreader/Mail Agent for Emacs. Gnus uses an open-ended method for scoring articles, and the score files may come from any place you can reach by ftp. -- steve@miranova.com baur Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be proofread for $250/hour.
On 31 Jan 1996, Steven L Baur wrote: You know folks, I do run a free filtered cypherpunks list. there's no need for ratings. I filter, you read. :) If you want to subscribe send a message with the subject "FCPUNX SUBSCRIBE" or "FCPUNX HELP" ========================================================================== + ^ + | Ray Arachelian |Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness| _ |> \|/ |sunder@dorsai.org|is cleanliness and cleanliness is god-| \ | <--+-->| |liness and god is empty, just like me,| \| /|\ | Just Say |intoxicated with the maddness, I'm in| <|\ + v + | "No" to the NSA!|love with my sadness. (Pumpkins/Zero)| <| n ===================http://www.dorsai.org/~sunder/=========================
I have an expansion on this. Why not generalize the problem to create a group rating system?
I do this for myself. I hacked elm to accept, display, and update ratings from 0-9, keeping the database in a very simple ascii file (internally it's a hash table). Then I have a script that converts the database into a procmail program, so for me cypherpunks is seperated into cps (signal, rated 6-9) cpu (unknown, rated 4-6 or no rating) and cpn (noise, rated 0-4).
This is patterned after a newsgroup collaborative filtering tool I read a paper on not too long ago. I can't find that reference, but <URL:http://www-sloan.mit.edu/ccs/CCSWP165.html> has an open architecture design for a ratings server.
This was an interesting project. My favorite part was the idea that ratings from people you generally agreed with would be given greater weight. I don't know if they based this on comparing your ratings over a long list of messages, or simply looking up the average rating you gave their posts. I'd be interested in working on the other MUA and majordomo changes you listed, if you're really interested in experimenting with this. Kevin -- Kevin Maher Software Engineer / General-Purpose Computer Geek maher@gso.saic.com Geophysical Systems Operation (619) 458-2167 Science Applications International Corp., San Diego
participants (6)
-
Bryce -
maher＠gso.SAIC.COM -
Perry E. Metzger -
Ray Arachelian -
Scott Brickner -
Steven L Baur