List Robustness

Bill Stewart stewarts at ix.netcom.com
Tue Nov 18 00:24:29 PST 1997



At 10:26 PM 11/14/1997 -0600, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>I do not think that it is entirely impossible either, but the likely
>scenario is that the government may first try to harass us and attempt
>the criminal charges only after some time.
>
>In any case, the present structure of cypherpunks list is entirely
>unacceptable. We have only three working nodes. This is bad since all
>of these nodes reside in the US and can be taken out easily.

Cypherpunks-e at htp.com is in Japan, though I don't know if it only gets feeds
off of ssz or also off algebra and cyberpass.  And the archive's in Singapore.
Also, there are a bunch of Usenet mirrors, mostly local newsgroups.

Just to balance Singapore, it'd be nice to have an archive in Amsterdam :-)
Or in Virtual Tonga, or Niue.   Then there's the mirror at Ft. Meade :-)

At some point, though, it's difficult not to have reinvented Usenet.
Tim reiterates that Usenet really is distributed, robust, and uncensorable.
But the real Usenet has different failure modes - social ones:
> I used to try to copy many of my posts to alt.cypherpunks shortly after it
> was created, right after the the Great February End of Toad.com, but in
> recent months I haven'te bothered (mainly because no interesting
> communication was occurring in the alt.cypherpunks arena).
Usenet is a _great_ place to run Blacknet, because background noise is your friend,
and the uncensorability depends on piggybacking on the firehose.
It's a tougher place to run a cypherpunks list, which has enough problems
with signal-to-noise ratio as a mailing list, where majordomo filters out
the totally non-RTFM-capable users, without being an attractive nuisance for
crossposts from rec.politics.guns or alt.2600.flame.your.mama.
To some extent, running a sub-Usenet, or a robomoderated newsgroup which
kills crossposts from all but a select few groups, can help this.
But sci.crypt.research gets very little signal these days either, though no noise.




				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts at ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639







More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list