three crypto lists - why and which

[Adam Back]

I am not sure if everyone is aware that there is also an unmoderated crypto
list, because I see old familiar names posting on the moderated crypto list
that I do not see posting on the unmoderated list.  The unmoderated list has
been running continuously (new posts in every day with no gaps) since mar
2010, with an interesting relatively low noise, and not firehose volume.

http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

The actual reason for the creation of that list was Perry's list went
through a hiatus when Perry stopped approving/forward posts eg

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/

originally Nov 2009 - Mar 2010 (I presume the mar 2010 restart was motivated
by the creation of randombit list starting in the same month) but more
recently sep 2010 to may 2013 gap (minus traffic in aug 2011).

http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/

I have no desire to pry into Perry's personal circumstances as to why this
huge gap happened, and he should be thanked for the significant moderation
effort he has put into create this low noise environment, but despite that
it is bad for cryptography if people's means of technical interaction
spuriously stops.  Perry mentioned recently that he has now backup
moderators, OK so good.

There is now also the cypherpunks list which has picked up, and covers a
wider mix of topics, censorship resistant technology ideas, forays into
ideology etc.  Moderation is even lower than randombit but no spam, noise
slightly higher but quite reasonable so far.  And there is now a domain name
that is not al-quaeda.net (seriously?  is that even funny?): cpunks.org. 

https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/ 

At least I enjoy it and see some familiar names posting last seen decade+
ago.

Anyway my reason for posting was threefold: a) make people aware of
randombit crypto list, b) rebooted cypherpunks list (*), but c) about how to
use randombit (unmoderated) and metzdowd.  

For my tastes sometimes Perry will cut off a discussion that I thought was
just warming up because I wanted to get into the detail, so I tend more
prefer the unmoderated list.  But its kind of a weird situaton because there
are people I want views and comments from who are on the metzdowd list who
as far as I know are not on the crypto list, and there's no convenient way
to migrate a conversation other than everyone subscribing to both.  Cc to
both perhaps works somewhat, I do that sometimes though as a general
principle it can be annoying when people Cc to too many lists.

Anyway thanks for your attention, back to the unmoderated (or moderated)
discussion!

Adam