L. McCarthy wrote:

I began composing a reply precisely to this effect, but was stopped by the words "They list...". If the address appears in some standard Compu$erve email directory, then this was hardly a major transgression.

Allow me to suggest a compromise. If some enterprising VV fan would volunteer to collect fan mail from c'punks, then forward it all, everyone involved might be fairly satisfied.

As I described in a post last summer, I was at a party that Vernor was at, and several of us stayed over until Sunday afternoon (it being deep in the mountains of Marin and all, a long drive)). Eric Hughes was there. Anyway, I talked about all this in that post. Vernor was there until Sunday night, too, when the party hosts drove him off to SFO (the airport, for the TLA-impaired) and I dropped Eric off in Berkeley on my way home to Santa Cruz. The point I'm making? First, Vernor had gotten some Cypherpunks posts forwarded to him by that time, mostly by Russell Whittaker. He is well-aware that the Cypherpunks list exists, and one must presume that if he wanted to be on the list, he could be on it easily. (I doubt his CompuSlave account is his only one, as he's on the faculty at San Diego State, and hence has the usual access. I suspect he uses the CompuServe account for his rec.arts.sf-lovers sort of mail; just a hunch.) Second, he was aware of--and generally pleased by--the explicit role "True Names" played in the early motivation for our activities. (As is well known, the works of Chaum, Vinge, Card, Stephenson, Brunner, and others played major roles.) Third, for the curious, he _is_ working on a sequel to "AFUTD." Contact him if you wish, but bear in mind that the more time he has to spend reading and answering e-mail, the less work he'll get done on his SF writing. (And if he has to spend many hours getting his HyperMIME-JPEG3 SLIP system running to see "Vernor Rulez!" in 80-point type, he may truly decide he's been marooned in realtime.) --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay