At 12:35 AM 12/26/98 -0000, HyperReal-Anon wrote:

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And while we're being hypocritical and stealing (oh, it's okay because it's for "education"), maybe we ought to educate about why spam is bad, and how crypto may help end spam.

Its not stealing because only the Govt can identify crimes. And they haven't.

No, it's stealing. The government doesn't call the Waco incident murder, but that doesn't make it okay.

Legal Junk mail doesn't steal time? Legal Solicitors' phone calls don't steal? Taxes don't steal? Courtroom injustice isn't a theft of rights?

1) Yes, but at least the person sending it paid for it. It doesn't consume any resources from the recipient, other than mailbox space which the government claims it owns anyway. The postal service has to store and deliver it, but they got paid for it. When you get it, you're perfectly free to cram it back in the outgoing mail slot like I do. 2) They steal time and they're very annoying, but they don't steal money per se. If they're long distance the caller pays for it. Most people are annoyed by these. The anti-phone-soliciting action is to never buy from those companies. 3) Taxes are theft at the point of a gun. You won't find much argument about that here. There will be argument when it comes to the complete elimination of taxes because that generally means the almost complete elimination of services. 4) Of course it is. Just because all four of those things are legal in one way or another doesn't mean that we should support it. I can walk outside and insult random people to their face, but that dosen't mean I should. Just because you *can* do something and you have some reason to do something doesn't mean that you *should* do it, particularly if there are better ways.

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Right. About the only thing you people are going to accomplish is to alienate anybody who might care what you have to say.

The message must be phrased correctly.

The phrasing has nothing to do with it. The method of delivery does.

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While you're spamming, maybe you can even make the Cypherpunks look really bad.

Who mentioned any mailing list? This would be a private matter.

Apparently this is beyond your comprehension, so I'll explain it in explicit terms. You will likely direct people to FIJA. First off, when you send the spam FIJA and their upstream sites are going to get all sorts of complaints, and rightly so. The site it originates from will also get flooded. Assuming FIJA is still online a few hours later, they will probably wind up on spam block lists. If you spam through anonymous remailers, they'll wind up on spam blocking lists all over the place. If you falsify an origin address, it will also get flooded with complaints. Even mentioning FIJA is going to get them flooded with complaints. You also make the mistake of assuming that most people read spam. They don't. It just annoys them. If you spam through anonymous remailers, you further the theories of some people that they are simply abuse havens. This is not a positive thing for the remailers. The Cypherpunks are associated with the remailers, so it isn't a positive thing for us either, even though we'll only be implicated several steps down.

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After all, the ends always justify the means. When the USG wants to storm your home with a squad of ninjas, that's okay, so long as they're checking for drugs or other evil things. Since it will keep us all safe, let's eliminate privacy rights.

Alls fair in love and war.

If such tactics are fair, then why are we worrying about distributing FIJA literature? The government has our best interests at heart, after all. Whatever.

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The idea of spamming for "educational purposes" is the most obscene and

The sheeple who haven't figured out how to filter spam are the ones most in need of education. Do it for the children. For the future generations.

The best thing to do "for the children" is to kick the clueless masses off the Internet and turn it back into the academic area it used to be. Good has come out of the commercialization of the Internet, but by no means does it outweigh the bad. The best thing to do "for future generations" is to revoke the voting rights of welfare maggots. I don't see it happening very soon.

The only thing evil needs to succeed is for good to do nothing.

Or for good to use the means of the evil to express their good ideas, in the process becoming the very thing they are fighting against.

Or just carry on with the same old same old, if that's what makes you feel better. Best not to make waves, after all. Might scare the horses.

Make a web site. Put it in your signature. Have others put it in their signatures. Have people link to it from their pages. Advertise in *appropriate* forums in appropriate manners. It's threads like this that make me wonder what it really means to be a Cypherpunk today. If the Cypherpunks (in the democratic sense) actually support this, it is a sad day indeed. As far as I'm concerned, go ahead and spam. You'll probably make FIJA look like idiots, get some anonymous remailer sites shut down if you spam through them, screw over any site even remotely mentioned in the spam, get us blasted all over the abuse forums because it has been discussed here recently, and accomplish the exact opposite of our goals. But go ahead if that's what makes you feel better.