Pointers to news sources and other mailing lists

[Tim May]

At 11:27 AM +0200 7/31/01, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Tim May wrote:
>
>>  I think most of the "pointers" are just symptoms of laziness. It
>>  looks like people just think "cross-pollinating" without analysis is
>>  the thing to do.
>
>Some of the pointers are also symptoms of a bad connectivity. I've got
>only a very lagged ssh link at *work*, zero connection at home.
>
>I think there's definitely value in a dedicated cpunx news sink
>(Choategrams included), so if you have no objections, I'll go ahead, and
>make one at yahoogroups.

First, you will of course find that no one but yourself will check 
the "yahoogroups" ghetto site. (If you are not familiar with the 
history of such ghettoes, "alt.cypherpunks" was an example of such a 
ghetto created half a dozen years ago. Someone even created 
"alt.cypherpunks.technical" and a few other sub-ghettoes. I don't 
think they got much propagation, even in a world of 80,000 
newsgroups, and they may have been pulled...haven't seen mention of 
them in years. Yahoo is just the latest place for such ghettoes, 
where a handful of people will ask "Why isn't there any discussion 
here?")

Second, I'm confused. You say you have bad connectivity at work and 
no connection at home. If you can take Choate's URL pointers and 
follow them, why can you not go directly to the source (Yahoo, 
Slashdot, CNET, Wired, etc.)? And how will you access Yahoo groups 
with poor/zero connectivity?

(I assume you're not saying that your connections are so bad that you 
are counting on Choate to pre-screen material for you? The math 
doesn't work out, not to mention the aesthetics.)

In any case, the larger issue is not whether you have good 
connectivity, or are counting on Choate to keep you informed on 
Martian microbes and Teslas physics or whatever. The larger issue is 
that Cypherpunks cannot survive as a mere dumping ground for URLs.

Asking Choate to dump his URL pointers into a Yahoo chat room is a 
worthy thing, but not likely to make him change his evil ways.

And the problem goes beyond Choate. With many here subscribed to a 
dozen or more heavily-overlapping groups (covering crypto, copyright, 
etc. issues), the tendency is strong to simply bounce pointers 
around. In fact, the motivation for my article was seeing _your_ 
posting of several messages yesterday with nothing more than URLs. 
"Oh, no, Eugene's gone Choatian on us!"

If you connectivity is so bad, why are you sending _us_ URL pointers?

Careful with that ASCII, Eugene.


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns