Dissolving Choke Points

[Sean Roach]

At 10:55 AM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
...
>Another lesson is the danger of choke points.  We can see how
>tempting it is for people to exercise their control.  Even John Gilmore
>was unable to restrain himself from involuntary social engineering
>experiments.  Who would we have considered to be more trustworthy?
>
>Toad.com is a choke point, not just in terms of moderation but in
>terms of the rate at which it can distribute messages.  Let's
>replace it.
>
>What we want are many machines carrying the cypherpunks list.  A
>message posted to any machine goes to all of the others.  Each
>machine sends messages to its subscribers only once.  Some of
>these machines should be across borders.
>
>The mail loop and multiple posting problems are solved by observing
>the message IDs.
>
>Fast implementation: use moderated mailing list software.  Put a
>filter in the .forward file of the "moderator" account which looks
>at the message ID and forwards the message if it hasn't been seen
>already.  The mailing list machines all subscribe each other.
...
What you are suggesting is reminiscent of IRC.  Except, I think that each
IRC network has a central computer which could be controlled.

On your idea for fast implementation,  this could be hacked by would-be
censors.  A message comes into the list, the censor sees that the post is
from a regular enemy.  The censor then copies the header information onto a
new message, one containing garbage, or snippets from old posts, reads the
new post to see if it is acceptable, and if it is, adds a new header,
probably only the time would be changed, and transmits it out.  If the would
be censor was the sysop of a machine near the origin of the message, and if
the censor operated the censorship either by bots, or monitored the feed 24
hours a day, (not likely), then the actual message would get to few.