At 11:46 AM -0400 6/3/00, Sunder wrote:
>While I normally would agree with this, it's not that great an
>idea. There are old materials out there that point to this address as the
>canonical cypherpunks address. Whether they're articles or old web sites
>or whatever, it would be bad to simply let mail that goes to that address
>into a vacuum.
>
>The better idea, and I'm sure there will be better than this one, is to
>ask John to bounce messages from that address back to the sender with
>information about the CDR addresses and how to join them.
I certainly agree with this...I wasn't suggesting that dropping
toad.com be the only step.
Frankly, after John G. turned off the list hosting several years ago
(early '97 IIRC), and then turned it back on temporarily, I expected
the "temporarily" part to last only a few months. This was to allow
other operators/nodes to get rolling.
Now, years later, the toad.com address is still being picked up by
the other nodes. Surprising on two counts. First, that John has not
pulled the plug. Second, that the other nodes are still "subscribed"
to it.
By the way, on Ray's point about the "old materials that point to
this address..." I'm skeptical that this is even tertiarily
important. If someone is reading an old copy of "Wired" or "The
Village Voice" and sees some 1993 article mentioning the toad.com
address and then doesn't even try to use the Web to find more recent
subscription information, perhaps it's best that they don't find us.
We've seen very few "key contributors" arrrive in the past couple of
years, anyway. D Molnar, from Princeton, and maybe one or two others.
All things tend to move in waves, and the big wave of Cypherpunks was
in 1993-95, with the rising interest in crypto, Clipper, new mags
like "Wired," and so on. In recent years there have been other
interests, other options, other avenues.
The point being, the time has come to slough off an old address that
is a) spam-dominated, b) not a real CDR node anyway (doesn't behave
the way the several main CDR nodes behave), and c) not intended to be
a node, i.e., John G. told us to go off and get new nodes, as he
wasn't going to host Cypherpunks on toad for much longer.
I say we pull the plug on toad.com. Obviously, up to the CDR sites to
decide what to do.
If John wants to bounce mail back to senders with some advice about
how to subscribe to the main, modern nodes, this is for him to decide
to do. Frankly, the Web provides more than enough options for finding
the lists.
On another point that Ray raises:
>
>
>The biggest shit I've got with this list is the active attempts by several
>assholes to get us subscribed to other mailing lists, some being not just
mailing lists, but rather corporate moutpieces that the same assholes gave
this address to when signing on for whatever "free" service.
>
>I completely understand the need for an anonymous dumping ground where you
>can receive your passwords for whatever-the-fuck.com website, but why have
>that be the cypherpunks list?
>
>
>I would not be opposed to setting up a mailing list for just junk on
>some free mailing list service (there are fuckloads of sites that
>will let you set them up for free). You could just subscribe yourself
>right before signing up for passwords, then once you get the passwords,
>unscumscribe yourself and have a nice fucking day without spamming
>everyone.
Yes, there are various needs for "untraceable lists," lists which act
like broadcasts, so that nobody can know with certainty which of N
readers is the one who requested information. This is the "message
pool" concept, seen in certain Usenet newsgroups
(alt.anonymous-messages, or somesuch).
Obviously the Cypherpunks mailing list is not ideal for such uses. A
variant of the tragedy of the commons, of course. If a few people use
it for their "New York Times" or "NAMBLA News" password
confirmations, not a major deal. But as the usage rises, the list
becomes swamped.
We've talked about these issues a lot. Time to do some simple things.
Pulling the plug on toad.com would at least eliminate a lot of
spam...and would actually comply with John Gilmore's stated wish that
toad.com not be used for Cypherpunks traffic.
--Tim May
--
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
