ADMIN: proposed new policy on the mailing list

Cypherpunks is an experiment in anarchy whose participants share
overlapping concerns with respect to privacy and cryptography.

One of the commonly shared goals of the participants in this group is
to change the technical context of the political debate about
cryptography.  This goal has not been reached, nor even has very close
approach been made as yet.  I believe that we have been successful in
inculcating, at least in ourselves, a set of values and attitudes
toward encryption .  Unfortunately this mental presence has not
blossomed into actual culture and practice, although we have attempted
and practiced.

Not all systems are self-organizing, and ours is not dissipative in
the right way.  Therefore in true micro-Keynesian fashion, I am
considering creating an artificial inducement toward cryptography on
this list.  You will be, of course, free not to participate.  The
rule I am considering is the following:

   Digitally sign your articles or their transmission will be delayed.

In terms of email privacy, we have not yet even reached the level
where content encryption is standard.  Since software to make digital
signatures is almost always the same software needed for encryption,
and likewise for signature verification and decryption, an inducement
to sign one's posts will be also an inducement to encrypt.  At the
very least it requires some change in the status quo of one's own
email system.

The hampering above will not be outright rejection, since the cost of
rejection creates a step function to participation, an insurmountable
hurdle for most of us.  Rather I am considering hampering posts by
delaying their transmission, by destroying some of their timeliness.
Timeliness, as I analyze it, will be one of the few things that have
economic worth in a post-copyright environment.

Delaying unsigned posts does not prevent people from participating,
merely from getting very close the topicality of discussion.  If you
are debating delayed against an undelayed correspondent, you will be
at a disadvantage, as your points may be immediately responded to, but
the other's points will stand unopposed for longer.  Truth, in other
words what _you_ believe, might triumph eventually, but practical
epistemology is more a matter of rhetoric than of validity.

Nor does it prevent occasional use of the forum by lurkers and
learners.  The first article on any new subject has very little time
value, rhetorically, but the question still gets asked.  Furthermore,
it will tend to slow down debate, at least for a while.

My initial thoughts are that the delay should be about six hours,
which would limit the number of salient responses of the unverifiable
to about one per topic per day.  As more and more people begin to sign
their posts, that delay would be increased.  I have considered more
sophisticated schemes, such as allowing automatic delayed moderation,
which sends you back a ticket that allows immediate posting, but after
some number of hours, or perhaps longer delays for unsigned repsonses
to signed articles, but I think that a simpler system will work
better, certainly at the outset where people are coming to grips with
delay's effect on the discussion.

I invite discussion of this proposal on the list itself.  If you only
wish to express approval or disapproval, that is, to "vote", please do
so only in private e-mail to me.  I welcome further analysis of this
idea as well as evaluations of its desirability or odiousness in your
own value system.

Unsigned,

Eric

> 
>    Digitally sign your articles or their transmission will be delayed.
>

Then the messages that I compose on this host will simply have to
be delayed, as I still refuse to keep my private key on an "open" 
system. In fact, the _only_ time in which I attach a digital
signature to any of my messages is from my PC at home.

Call me a prude, but this is a fact of life I'm sure you will
encounter with other folks as well.

Cheers.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________
Paul Ferguson                                                               
Mindbank Consulting Group                                    fergp@sytex.com   
Fairfax, Virginia  USA                                       ferguson@icp.net

The problem that I see with this policy is that how are you going to
verify that the signature at the bottom is valid?  Anyone can generate PGP
keys pointing to anything.  Are you going to collect keys from
subscribers?  What about spoofing keys so that they apear valid, yet aren't?

I'm just curious to how this is going to be achieved.  I assume you don't
want to moderate the list (reading and approving everything).

-Matt  (panzer@drown.slip.andrew.cmu.edu)
(I would have signed this, but I lost the message on how to get pgp
to sign and leave the message in plaintext)

-------------Included Message---------------------
On Sat, 23 Oct 1993, Eric Hughes wrote:
> You will be, of course, free not to participate.  The
> rule I am considering is the following:
> 
>    Digitally sign your articles or their transmission will be delayed.
>

>    Digitally sign your articles or their transmission will be delayed.

Under such a policy, I would be strongly tempted to move my PGP use
to jarthur (a public Unix box) rather than write software to snarf
text across a serial line, encrypt it, and spit it back.  As I'm
loath to give up my secret key in this way, I guess I'd just take the
delay.

While an incentive plan is a nice idea, I think most people on the
list would like to sign their messages.  Those who are prevented
from doing so are probably not going to be pushed the other way
by a delay of a few hours.

   Eli   ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu

Hi,

re the proposed policy:

I read mail offline, usually. The mailer I use, an ms-dos mailer,
doesn't support signing mail. It has some allowance for a .sig file, but
I can't get it to work. I sometimes reply online, a I am doing now.
  If I reply online, I can sign messages, I think, using elm. Although I
have no idea at all how to do this, but I'm sure I can find out.
However, if I use my offline mailer, my mail will be delayed.
Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but what if I came across
something urgent, wrote a reply, and uploaded it immediately?

Anyone else in this situation?

Dwayne.

Who is going to get in touch with the author of this mailer Real Soon
Now, he thinks....



              (Dwayne Jones-Evans  IRC: ddraig  )
     ( SCA: Cynon Yscolan ap Myrddin, Stormhold, Lochac, West)
        PGP public key available. finger me.  be gentle.
           internet---> hiscdcj@lux.latrobe.edu.au