Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> writes:

On Thu, 2 Oct 1997, Anonymous wrote:

...

C2Net was wrong to censor the cypherpunks list in the guise of moderation. It was wrong to send threatening letters to people who claimed its products were weak. The whole moderation/censorship experiment was a terrible mistake. The actions taken by C2Net were completely unjustified.

Where do people get these bizarre ideas? C2 didn't censor the list. A guy who happened to work for C2 dropped some messages from one list. The messages still went out on the unfiltered list. Had he worked for Mc Donald's or the the NYC Sanitiation Department, would you blame them for this as well?

Are you serious? The messages dropped were those which made (spurious) claims of weaknesses in C2 products. And later messages were dropped which attempted to discuss the dropping of earlier messages. The effect was that subscribers to the filtered list not only were not exposed to the messages critical of C2, they were prevented from knowing that a controversy existed about the filtering policies. There can be little doubt of the truth of these facts. One of us is remembering things wrongly. And yes, if the moderator were a McDonalds employee and he not only dropped messages which criticized McDonalds, but also filtered out later messages complaining about his actions, then I'd jolly well blame him.