Hi Alex, On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Alex B. Shepardsen wrote:

Can't the node operators set up some sort of filter to catch bounce messages and prevent them from being sent to the list? It seems logical to block anything from postmaster@, MAILER-DAEMON, etc...

Just a thought...

Yes, but it gets into a gray area of 'censorship'. I know it seems 'obvious' but boundary conditions that appear obvious here can be problematic 'there'. I prefer to simply stay away from the whole issue. The backbone is unfiltered and should stay that way. I'm not sure how algebra.com has their config file setup. In my majordomo these sorts of things normaly go to list-owner and not list. <shrug> The SSZ policy is to not touch the body or title of traffic on the backbone and pass this on to our subscribers to filter to their hearts content (that the title or body may be a bounce is irrelevant). Bounces from an SSZ subscriber I catch before they get re-sent to the subscribers (and the backbone) if I'm lucky. If the redirect to list-owner is in error then I'll forward it to the list with appropriate notice. If it's a real bounce (ie lasts at least a week) then I delete it. I used to try to send notices but I got what Peter got, indifference. So I just delete the accounts now. What I'd suggest is to ask Igor if he can redirect that sort of stuff to an account with a home dir of /dev/null. I know that he has operated the algebra.com node pretty hands-off now for quite a while. As far as I am aware he isn't even subscribed to the list. ____________________________________________________________________ Before a larger group can see the virtue of an idea, a smaller group must first understand it. "Stranger Suns" George Zebrowski The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 12:06:13PM -0800, Tim May wrote: [..]

A more interesting downstream filter service would be something operated as an automated site, like another CDR node, except that it automatically filters out nonsubscribers to one of the main lists. (This requires no cooperation with the other CDR nodes, provided the whois function can retrieve their subscribers.)

I have been meaning to do this for a while. I need some help from the existing CDR node operators though so that my node can get the subscriber lists from theirs- a number of CDR nodes don't have open who commands. Could y'all contact me off-list?

If one of you folks out there does this--sets up this kind of low-latency filtering of nonsubscribers, plus inclusion of anonymous or remailed or ZKS/Mojo-type posts--then I will subscribe to your service.

I'll post to the entire list once I get it running.

A more ambitious approach might give options for filtering, at a fairly coarse granularity. Not individual posters, but, say, "Don't pass on any traffic from toad.com."

I'll probably also add my spam-recognition stuff, which sticks a rating of the likelyhood of the contents being spam in the headers. (i.e. X-spam: 100). It doesn't drop the mail, just rate it. What recipients do with the information will of course be up to them.

(Choate can presumably be counted on to start foaming about how I am proposing censorship and that if I would like such a service I should build one myself. Happily, I won't see his foamings.)

SSZ's CDR web page (einstein.ssz.com/cdr/index.html#) says: http://www.securedesignllc.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5

Tim May wrote:

3. Wider use of downstream-filtered services, like Ray Arachelian's service. I have sometimes thought about dropping my subscription to one of the CDR nodes and subscribing to Ray's service instead, but I have several reservations. First, whether it will remain in operation. Second, what the lag time is. Third, his is a "this is what I think is interesting" service, so there are obvious problems of his interests not matching mine, or even of my own posts not being seen by me because he has elected not to pass them on.

Latency is pretty high actually these days as I tend to be too busy to read the list in a timely manner - whatever that means. As usual I queue up mail as I read it, saving it to a folder, then I use a perl script to deliver it. It used to be once a week, now, it's sometimes more. At times of stress (i.e. moving, changing jobs, heavy work load) the delay has gotten as high as a month - though this tends to be rare. The norm is a week to a week and a half. Because of this, I don't always include notices of meetings or events that I don't anticipate sending the queued up messages in time for. It will remain in service as long as there is interest in it (both my personal interest in running it and the interest of its users), and as long as I can devote *some* time to it. Indeed, it's filtered based on what I think is interesting, though most of the time I take pretty much any post that's not spam, not a subject that's offtopic to cypherpunks - i.e. answers to request for envelope stuffing, bomb making, stickers, child porn, glue sniffing, CDR node politics and discussions about filtering. Yes, some of Choate's postings do make it through - the useful ones. Sadly even the single url ones if the url points to something useful. The alternate Choatian universe posts don't. Anything technical, if on topic makes it. (i.e. a discussion of the combustion engine, or types of boilers and heating systems won't make it - if it does, only one or two interesting messages will.) All crypto related math or tech stuff goes through. Since you mention it, most of your posts make it through, though, not the attakcs on morons, as I delete the original moron's message, hence the thread itself being offtopic the replies to it don't make it. The Reply-To's are set to whatever mailing list/person they came from. I don't censor your replies nor receive them unless you send them to a mailing list that I read (i.e. the cdr's) I censor only the incoming text as if I were clipping articles out of a newspaper and junking the fluff and ads. The side effect of replying to a filtered message is that the subject gets a "cpunx: " tag added to it. So if you dislike the "CDR:" you won't like this. At the same time to avoid overload of such subject like keywords, I strip the "CDR:" from all subject lines before sending the messages, thus effectively replacing one tag for another. I also remove the artifacts of "RE: Re: re:" whenever possible. You won't see "cpunx: Re: cpunx:" as I filter those out also. A lot of mailing lists do this type of subject tagging, and I happen to like. I realize most of you - those who have commmented on this dislike the practice. I happen to agree that it should be done with a bit of caution to prevent "Re: Re: Re:" and "CDR: CDR: CDR:" subjects. Sometimes I fuck up and save an important message twice. Sometimes I fuck up and a notice for a meeting that already happened gets sent. It happens. Get over it. :) These aren't rules, and I don't have this as a hard in stone policy, and yes, I break my own "rules" because they aren't - they're more of an observation of my personal decisions and actions. I used to have archives of the digests, but too many spooks were emailing me about them, or being attracted by them, so I stopped distributing them on the web, removing obvious assholes that have .gov addresses. Hey, I don't want them wasting my hard earned taxes for their surfing. Let them get hotmail accounts if they've got half a clue. :) I'm sure the real spooks already are subscribed to the unfiltered cdr's, so why the fuck should I provide them with sanitized info? I already "work" for them half of my working time by paying them over 50% of my pay to taxes. As this rant is about the filtered list, I likely will let it in the filtered list to let those who read the list get a glimpse of how it works, or rather how 'I work' to provide it. -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

At 11:22 PM -0500 3/28/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:

On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 12:06:13PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

...

A more interesting downstream filter service would be something operated as an automated site, like another CDR node, except that it automatically filters out nonsubscribers to one of the main lists. (This requires no cooperation with the other CDR nodes, provided the whois function can retrieve their subscribers.)

This is an old message, but let me point out that I post from a differnet address than my subscription address. I suspect I'm not the only one, so some manual "includes" may be in order.

Eric Murray took my proposal and ran with it, quickly implementing it as the "cypherpunks@lne.com" address. He has said that he is manually "including" various remailers, and probably other addresses. It might be enough for him to include the names outside of the address boxes. E.g., "Declan McCullagh," regardless of the "declan@well.com" or "agentdeclan@kremvax.org" or whatever. Of course, if people use different names AND addresses, they are indistinguishable from noise. By the way, subscribing to Eric Murray's cypherpunks@lne.com has cut out most of the spam and nearly all of the toad.com traffic. There is no significant delay, either. Or to to be more precise, I see my own posts about 2 minutes after sending them off. (It's conceivable that my own messages loop back to me faster than other messages, but this seems an unlikely feature of the mail exploder.) [Note from Agents in the Northwest: "May just said "exploder." Put this in his folder. We may have another Cypherpunk terrorist here."] --Tim May --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns