Tim May wrote:

I surmise that something is wrong. So I've subscribed to one of the alternates, cypherpunks@algebra.com.

Some thoughts:

* Is it possible for the interlinked lists to send out announcements of list problems to subscriber of all such lists? (Each list owner could do a periodic "who cypherpunks" of the other lists, then use this list to send a message if a problem comes up. More sophisticated cross-processing could eliminate duplicates, etc.)

I think that it is rather desirable. Also, I am curious if Raph Levien could adapt his remailer pinging system to pinging the cypherpunks network, and produce his reports about the speed and reliability of each site.

* Alternatively, if one of the sites goes down, such as "cypherpunks@cyberpass.net" seems to have done, could the other sites automagically pick up the task of distributing articles until the site comes back up?

I've been thinking about the same problem in the last month, and I am not sure how to solve this problem simply and reliably. The advantage of the current network is that it was extremely simple to propose and build. It would be great if someone could propose something as simple for the task that you are suggesting.

* How feasible is it to have a single "virtual subscription address" which gets traffic from one of the various list sites? (To avoid having to subscribe to two or more lists and thus getting duplicates.)

It is not hard, of course, but how should it be different from any other node in the network? Any existing node is such a virtual subscription address, and each of them is a potential point of failure for their respective subscribers. The only true reliability can be achieved by subscribing to two or more cypherpunks sites, and eliminating duplicates. Reliability has its costs. - Igor.

bounce (more precisely: "<cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>... Deferred: Connection timed out with rigel.cyberpass.net. Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours").

I too didn`t see some of my articles come through, I`m subscribed to cyberpass.net, Your copied traffic appears to have come through now though. When I did have trouble sending I pinged cyberpass.net and it was up, so I presume it was just a majordomo problem.

* Is it possible for the interlinked lists to send out announcements of list problems to subscriber of all such lists? (Each list owner could do a periodic "who cypherpunks" of the other lists, then use this list to send a message if a problem comes up. More sophisticated cross-processing could eliminate duplicates, etc.)

Yes, I still get a LOT of duplicates, after checking several times that I was only subscribed to one list. I`m not running procmail at the moment (still playing with linux) and I seem to remember the duplicates nearly always have *different* message IDs, is there a procmail recipe to kill these?

* Alternatively, if one of the sites goes down, such as "cypherpunks@cyberpass.net" seems to have done, could the other sites automagically pick up the task of distributing articles until the site comes back up?

This would be an excellent idea, if the sites kept a "who cypherpunks" on each other they could do a ping every hour or so to check the site was up and if not add the users in the "who" list to their subscriber list. Is this possible with majordomo or some sort of script, list operators?

* How feasible is it to have a single "virtual subscription address" which gets traffic from one of the various list sites? (To avoid having to subscribe to two or more lists and thus getting duplicates.)

Hmm, this rather kills the idea of a distibuted system which is impossible to censor. I know this isn`t really a necessary system as I`m sure we all trust the list operators who run the sites, but it is a very cypherpunk idea and I rather like seeing it in action. I can see problems with the current system, most notably the duplicates, but if these can be either killfiled on reciept, or even better, tweaking of the majordomos can remove them at source, the system will be very stable and useable, as it is the duplicates are not too great a problem, just an annoying quirk of the system, but it would be nice to see the back of them. This message is probably off topic as it talks about practical use of technology as opposed to ethics and blowing up poloticians, in which case I appologise, back to ranting and anarchism ;-)