Deloitte-Touche, e$pam plug, Moderation, Cypherpunks as a cresote bush

At 4:05 pm -0500 2/5/97, Mark Voorhees wrote:
>I'm almost certain that Murray is a consultant rather than
>or in addition to an accountant. He's been saying these things
>for years at conferences, in papers, on mailing lists, etc.

For the longest time, I've had a couple of people from dtus.com on my e$pam
feed. They signed on when I started my own list out of www-buyinfo.

About 6 months ago, however, mail to them started bouncing out of e$, the
chat list I set up as an adjunct to e$pam. Which makes sense, because
that's when they stopped chatting about e$. :-). I expect that the same
thing happend to e$pam, though Rachel Wilmer, who is my e$pam listmaster
would have seen it, and not I.


Actually, e$ has become something of a watering hole, now with about twice
as many subscribers as e$pam does. Some cypherpunks among them.

Oh. While we're all talking about moderation, e$pam is a sort of filtered
superset of cypherpunks. I have filtered cypherpunks posts in it, but I
also have stuff from the 50-odd mail lists and 70 news groups I follow. The
total feed can reach 300k a day sometimes, mostly because I include the
full text of stuff like some of John Young's articles, and the text of the
occasional web-page which tickles my fancy. Sort of immoderate moderation.
:-). You can subscribe to it on my web page, which is in my .sig, below.

I've a bunch of people working with me now on e$pam, who, among other
things, are in the process of getting it set up in a searchable archive.
Though, to prevent crawlers from seeing all the juicy bits (cf. Mr. Young,
above), we're probably going to have some kind of certificate-access scheme
when we get it all running. Rodney Thayer, who's doing IPSEC stuff, (among
other things :-)), is going to run a quick-and-dirty generic certification
authority to make that happen.

In the meantime, if you're interested in e$, or financial crypto, or other
stuff I'm interested ("it don't say e$pam until Bob says it says e$pam"
:-)), you might want to check it.


Even though cypherpunks is a lot "cleaner" now, and I did encourage Sandy
in his efforts initially, I suppose I'm now weighing in with (horrors!) Tim
on the subject of moderation. I think that if Sandy and John want to create
a moderated list (like I have done, though e$pam is more specific in
content) out of what happens on cypherpunks, they could do it with exactly
the traffic they have now in experimental moderation mode. The current
machine load doesn't seem to be impacting the throughput to
cypherpunks(moderated), modulo Sandy's moderation time, though if
toad.com's being used for much else, there might be problems there.

Part of the nice thing about cypherpunks 1.0 was that anything could happen
there. That it was anarchy in practice. And, maybe because of my periodic
altercations with Mr. May on this list (thank god for his kill-file :-))
even the anonymous Tim-slams were occasionally entertaining, in a, ahem,
biologically curious sort of way. ;-).

So, I guess I think we should put it back the way it was. Including, please
Mr. Gilmore, "officially' resubscribing the Wee-vil Dr. V. Then those
who've made it so can annouce to the world that cypherpunks is again a
proper anarchy. Then we can us deal with miscreants the way we used to, by
ignoring them, (and the occasional e-mailbomb...).


Finally, I have an analogy for cypherpunks from nature. There are lots of
plants, some of them the technically the largest living beings on earth,
which, at first glance, look like a bunch of different individual plants.
Aspen groves, for instance, are all linked together under the soil to the
same system of roots, and are genetically the same individual. Some of
these "stands" of trees cover tens of square miles, and one patch of
Aspens, in Wyoming? Montana? is the world's largest living thing, massing
several million(?) tons, and probably tens of thousands of years old.

Fungi do this too. Toadstools (a rather, heh, fecund analog for
cypherpunks) tend to create very large "individuals", with each toadstool
representing the fruiting body for a huge bunch of mycyillia(sp?)
underneath it. Toadstools create structures called, ahem, "fairy rings",
where the central mushroom dies, only to be replaced by a ring of other
mushrooms, which die, and so on, until they're covering your whole fucking
lawn and messing up your lawnmower bag... (well, anyway, you get the idea.)
There was the claim a few years ago that the same genetic individual slime
mold covered half of Wisconsin (Minnesota?).

The king of all the plants which do this, I think, is the cresote bush,
which, I believe, in some pieces of the Sonorran(sp?) desert, cover
hundreds of square miles. Scientists, using tree-ring dating, have worked
back, through various rings of cresote bushes, using their very slow growth
rates in the desert environment, to the center of the creosote bush
cluster, to estimate the date of these things. I remember claims that these
plants may have started from a single individual, there at the long dead
(or at least regrown-over) center of the ring, more than a hundred, and
maybe several hundred thousand years ago.

So, let nature take its course. Most lists die when people stop posting to
it. That certainly hasn't happened to cypherpunks. And, when it does, we
can all migrate out into the numerous rings of lists that cypherpunks has
spawned (I think I can account about putting together 10 or so myself)
among them.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Never attribute to conspiracy what can be
explained by stupidity." -- Jerry Pournelle
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/rah/
FC97: Anguilla, anyone? http://www.ai/fc97/

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At 09:09 PM 2/5/97 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:

>In the meantime, if you're interested in e$, or financial crypto, or other
>stuff I'm interested ("it don't say e$pam until Bob says it says e$pam"
>:-)), you might want to check it.

I think that Bob's e$ list should be considered a viable alternative to the
other two filtered cpunks lists; I recommend it to people looking for a
moderated alternative to the list. (I get e$, but use Eudora and procmail to
suck out the duplicates where messages are copied from lists I already get.)
He also finds a lot of the stuff that used to show up on cpunks but doesn't
any more because people have wandered away.

I've been meaning to write up a long message explaining why I think I'm about
to drop off of the list. It's peculiar to spend a lot of time discussing
things with a group of people over the course of several years and then
disappear without saying why. But I'm having trouble coming up with anything
more profound than "it's not interesting any more." Philosophically, I agree
with Lucky - it looks to me like it's time to kill the list and move on to
other things. But that's not my choice to make, and perhaps other people can
still extract something useful from this. More power to them if they can.

I'm starting to think that cpunks may be similar to college, in that it's a
good thing for a few years, but if you stick around too long you just get
bitter and cranky and frustrated because the new people keep talking about
the same old problems. Don't they know we've already talked about that? 


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--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
                            |

Greg Broiles wrote:
> At 09:09 PM 2/5/97 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:

> I've been meaning to write up a long message explaining why I think I'm about
> to drop off of the list. It's peculiar to spend a lot of time discussing
> things with a group of people over the course of several years and then
> disappear without saying why. But I'm having trouble coming up with anything
> more profound than "it's not interesting any more." Philosophically, I agree
> with Lucky - it looks to me like it's time to kill the list and move on to
> other things. But that's not my choice to make, and perhaps other people can
> still extract something useful from this. More power to them if they can.
> I'm starting to think that cpunks may be similar to college, in that it's a
> good thing for a few years, but if you stick around too long you just get
> bitter and cranky and frustrated because the new people keep talking about
> the same old problems. Don't they know we've already talked about that?

But college continues because it wasn't designed for just one group
of people of one time period.  It was designed for everyone, and to
evolve to meet future need. If the c-punks list were to survive, it
too would have to evolve to meet future needs, and that evolution
would be sure to disappoint a lot of the older crowd.

The big difference here is that college is far from cutting edge in
anything, and the list is (or could be) cutting edge.  But nearly
everyone so far has acknowledged that, despite improvement in signal-
to-noise on the moderated list, the factor of external control has
also removed much of what was interesting.  Remove the control and
incorporate the best of the suggestions that have been made so far,
and some of that interest may return.  Perhaps more importantly, if
the principals could see their way to mend some fences along the way,
that would restore even more confidence in the list.