Cypherpunks Rating System

[Declan McCullagh]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 09:40:26AM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Clearly it would be highly ironic for a pro-privacy group like the
> cypherpunks to adopt PICS technology, which has been widely criticized
> by free speech groups.  Nevertheless it would be instructive to have an
> example where ratings are used for the opposite of the politically correct
> purposes for which they were originally intended.  Cypherpunks could
> use PICS to help find information on defeating government surveillance
> and interfering with the increasing crackdowns on civil liberties.

Feel free to append ratings to your own posts, and if you like, create
a cypherpunks-nomen list that includes a full message feed but delayed
until you can get around to typing up PICS tags for each post. Or you
could start a Slash-like website where you (or registered users) could
add or delete PICS tags from each cypherpunks post that is gatewayed
to the site.

Nobody's stopping you.

Naturally such a project is silly and not worth the time it would take
to design, let alone implement. The number of people using PICS as a
search or retrieval tool for cypherpunks posts would approach one,
you. (If you really wanted to do something that might be useful, you'd
pick the more interesting threads from the dawn of the list, insert
them into a good search utility, and make that available for searching
and .tar.gz downloading.')

Anyway, there are better ways to make "highly ironic" points, if
that's your only goal.

-Declan