noise levels

The noise levels around here are getting astounding.

Posts on windows registration wizards, gun control, unemployment,
Kevin Mitnick's underwear, and all the rest are most certainly NOT
doing us any good.

Here we are in the midst of IBM putting espionage enabled versions of
Lotus Notes out (someone should be putting out a hack to change the
embedded public key), Microsoft putting out a crypto API that could
potentially be of enormous interest, activity moving in the Karn
lawsuit, and all sorts of other important events, and YOU DUNDERHEADS
ARE MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO CARRY OUT IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS.

If you want to help the NSA in its mission to stop the dissemination
of strong crypto, by all means, continue posting garbage.

Perry

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

 An entity calling itself Perry <perry@piermont.com> allegedly
wrote:
>
> The noise levels around here are getting astounding.

<snip>


Perry, I quite agree with you.  I am having a very difficult
time wading through cpunks, and I am currently reduced to
grepping for my name, and then picking out a topic or two by
subject line before junking 95% of the posts.  Since you have
such enthusiasm for solving the noise problem I suggest that we
do the following:


1.  Establish a "one-way" mailing list.  If you don't have an 
ISP which makes this convenient then I recommend Sameer's 
Community ConneXion.  It costs merely $7.50/month, it is very 
easy to create a mailing list, Sameer respects your privacy and
understands the importance of privacy and security issues, and
you can pay in Mark Twain Ecash.

2.  Write a script for your mail agent so that when you see a
noise post you can hit a key combination and send off a message
to all the recipients of your mailing list which identifies the
message (by its Message-ID, I suppose?) as trash.

3.  I will subscribe to your list.

4.  I will configure my mail user-agent to automatically delete
messages which have been identified by you as trash.



What do you say?  I'm up for it.


Hey, come to think of it I have a mailing list at C2 that isn't
being used for anything.  It is fortuitously named "c2punks".
Go ahead and send your "trash-o-meter" messages there and I will
receive them.  (That's "c2punks@c2.org".)



Of course there are some things we should work out as we go:


1.  You should PGP-sign your trash-o-meter messages.  Don't
worry about doing it on a secure box (who's going to crack your
e-mail hardware just so they can force me to read trash or 
delete cpunks mail from my inbox?).  You can configure your MUA 
to pass the passphrase to PGP (or have no passphrase) so that 
all you have to do is hit a single key combination to activate 
the "trashit" script.


2.  You might wonder what you are getting out of this?  I can
name 3 things:
   a.  Reducing the amount of c'groupies noise that I read, and
the amount of c'groupies noise that anyone else who subscribes
to "c2punks" reads.
   b.  Advancing the theory and practice of distributed ratings
systems.
   c.  I and others will reciprocate-- we will mail
"trash-o-meter" messages to c2punks which you can use so as to
read less trash yourself.


3.  I'll write some scripts that people can use to process 
trash-o-meter messages.  The first version will probably be in
sh and written for the mh mail-handling system.  Later versions
will work with different mail-handling systems, incorporate such
nifty features as author- and subject- trashing in addition to
message-trashin, having weighted scalar ratings, different
ratings categories, and so forth.


I'm entirely serious about this.  For the first iteration just
send something like "TRASH Message-ID: XXXXXXXXX" in the subject
line or the body.  We can discuss this in detail on c2punks if
it gets too specific to be on-topic in cpunks.  (What's your
flavor of MUA?  I'll write the trashit script for you.)



Regards,

Bryce

signatures follow


      "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."  -Tennyson
            <a href="http://www.c2.org/~bryce/Niche.html">

                          bryce@colorado.edu                </a>



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Bryce writes:
>Perry, I quite agree with you.  I am having a very difficult
>time wading through cpunks, and I am currently reduced to
>grepping for my name, and then picking out a topic or two by
>subject line before junking 95% of the posts.  Since you have
>such enthusiasm for solving the noise problem I suggest that we
>do the following:
<auto-kill sublist scheme elided>

I have an expansion on this.  Why not generalize the problem to create
a group rating system?  Anyone who wants to can send ratings messages
(rating each message on a scale of one to five, one meaning "what total
crap" and five meaning "what a useful piece of information") to the
ratings server.  The server maintains the ratings for each message by
sender.  Client software can retrieve the ratings added since a
given time and use this information with the ratings assigned by the
user to generate compatibility profiles indicating with which raters
the user tends to agree, and provide ratings on all messages based on
it.  The user can then have anything lower than his tolerance threshold
automatically deleted.

This is patterned after a newsgroup collaborative filtering tool I
read a paper on not too long ago.  I can't find that reference, but
<URL:http://www-sloan.mit.edu/ccs/CCSWP165.html> has an open
architecture design for a ratings server.

Ideally, one would modify MUAs to recognize an "X-Ratings-To:" header
to tell where ratings messages should be sent, and the list server
would add that to all outgoing messages.  The MUA would present
the ratings buttons when displaying messages containing "X-Ratings-To:"
headers and automatically generate and send the rating when the user
pushed a button.

The beauty of this is that it works for *any* mailing list that has
an associated ratings server.  It allows anyone with the appropriate
MUA to ignore those conspiracypunks boneheads almost transparently.

Necessary coding:
    modifications to majordomo:
	- add optional ratings server address and update frequency in
	    list configuration data
	- add "X-Ratings-To:" headers to outgoing messages in lists with
	    ratings servers
	- periodically send ratings updates to ratings server subscribers
    modifications to MUAs:
	- recognize "X-Ratings-To:" headers in incoming messages and
	    present ratings interface when displaying them
	- generate ratings messages to ratings server
	- interpret incoming ratings messages to compute user's predicted
	    rating
	- maintain user preferences vector

>I have an expansion on this.  Why not generalize the problem to create
>a group rating system?  

	I do this for myself.

	I hacked elm to accept, display, and update ratings from 0-9, keeping
the database in a very simple ascii file (internally it's a hash table).
	Then I have a script that converts the database into a procmail
program, so for me cypherpunks is seperated into cps (signal, rated 6-9)
cpu (unknown, rated 4-6 or no rating) and cpn (noise, rated 0-4).

>This is patterned after a newsgroup collaborative filtering tool I
>read a paper on not too long ago.  I can't find that reference, but
><URL:http://www-sloan.mit.edu/ccs/CCSWP165.html> has an open
>architecture design for a ratings server.

	This was an interesting project.  My favorite part was the idea 
that ratings from people you generally agreed with would be given greater
weight.  I don't know if they based this on comparing your ratings over 
a long list of messages, or simply looking up the average rating you 
gave their posts.

	I'd be interested in working on the other MUA and majordomo changes
you listed, if you're really interested in experimenting with this.

	Kevin

-- 
Kevin Maher          Software Engineer / General-Purpose Computer Geek
maher@gso.saic.com   Geophysical Systems Operation      
(619) 458-2167       Science Applications International Corp., San Diego

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net> writes:

Scott> I have an expansion on this.  Why not generalize the problem to create
Scott> a group rating system?

This has already been implemented in the Gnus Newsreader/Mail Agent
for Emacs.  Gnus uses an open-ended method for scoring articles, and
the score files may come from any place you can reach by ftp.

-- 
steve@miranova.com baur
Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be proofread for $250/hour.

On 31 Jan 1996, Steven L Baur wrote:

You know folks, I do run a free filtered cypherpunks list.  there's no 
need for ratings.  I filter, you read. :)

If you want to subscribe send a message with the subject "FCPUNX 
SUBSCRIBE" or "FCPUNX HELP"


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