Adam Back wrote:

Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu> writes:

...

I'll accept that the ranting faction do some good work but I've not seen anything usefull out of either Bell or Vulis unless that is you are an FBI agent looking to get a promotion from Freeh.

Dimitri rights code sometimes. He wrote a cancel-bot. Very constructive piece of work in an indirect way. See: having nice freely available cancel-bots enables technically clueless, would be-censors to censor more. They censor more, and cause a nuisance for themselves sending out tons of cancel messages. This incentivizes more and more people to ignore cancels (the trend in news administration these days I understand is to ignore cancels entirely), which means that you can't have your USENET posts censored nearly as easily.

Dimitri has long pushed the envelope of censorship and challenged those who don't like it to do something about it. The reason that Hallam-Baker is able to post thinly veiled "Dimitri is a cocksucker!" messages to the list is because Dimitri refused to lay down and quit when he was forcibly censored for his "Gilmore is a cocksucker!" messages. If the censorship coupe d'etat had succeded, then Hallam-Baker's post would have been trashed into the flames list. Dimitri and others, such as the Freedom-Knights, made it possible to "route around" the censorship of USENET posts to such an extent that any attempt I might make to censor Hallam-Baker's demeaning of Dimitri on USENET would have little effect. The bottom line is that Hallam-Baker's demeaning of Dimitri without facing censorship on this list and on USENET is partly the result of the efforts of Dimitri, himself, to fight censorship. This is not surprising, since, after all, Dimitri is a cypherpunk. (Despite all of his claims to the contrary.) TruthMonger