It's 2001, so it must be time for A Modest Filtering Proposal

[Sunder]

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_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------