Rumors of the death of Cypherpunks are greatly exaggerated
David Honig
honig at sprynet.com
Thu Nov 29 17:33:53 PST 2001
At 02:19 PM 11/29/01 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>
>Fact is, lists and other fora have lifecycles just like anything else.
>The peak for the list was no doubt in the 1993-4 period, when Clipper
>was hot news, and when many ideas were being exposed to lots of others
There is also the FAQ-ization of a contentful group. You yourself
have (rightfully, usefully) pointed to your cryptnomicon tome
and cypherpunk archives rather than regurgitate something already written.
>Anyway, to those who wander away because the owner of "toad.com," a site
>that is not even part of the regular CDR system, declares us irrelevant
>I have just one message: good riddance.
The toadlist is infested with spam, and most posters have migrated to
something
more pleasant like lne.com (blessed be the lne.com folks).
>And several of these lists are avowedly "non-political." How absurd.
>What's the point of a crypto list if there's no political angle? Yeah,
>maybe a handful of people want to chat about pure math and programming
>tricks...but not a lot, judging by the very low volumes of such
>discussions even on the "non-political" lists. And without political
>issues, what's the motivation to even talk about remailers, data havens,
>digital cash, etc.?
There are lists which are more exclusively technical. The value of this
list is conversing with tech saavy futurists with an interest in social
aspects.
>The fact that John is now pulling the plug is one of the few surprises
>of recent years....I thought his site at toad had gone away several
>years ago! That's when he announced he was shutting it down.
That he let
>it dribble on a dumping ground for those not smart enough to find the
>cyberpass.net, algebra.com, sunder.net, lne.com, or Choate's site
>doesn't mean his node was "the list."
Yes! His contribution was very useful and generous at a critical time,
but it is not a negative thing at all that he closes that spamchannel.
>But rumors of the death of
>Cypherpunks are greatly exaggerated.
Cypherpunks never die, they just get tarred and gzipped.
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