I guess there are a fair number of people from Europe on the list. I think there are a number of UK readers, plus others Tim mentioned. (I'm from the UK, but living in Canada right now). There is a UK crypto list, but it's full of news and legal stuff so relatively uninteresting.
But the reason at least from my side that I don't post news is I eschew news of the banal kind such as our resident idiot Jim Choate streams dozens of on a daily basis (I kill-filed him, plus the moderator of the moderated version squashes most obviously idiotic output). I intentionally watch almost no TV, including TV "news", or other traditional news. There are perhaps 20-30 news items worthy of comment per year and discussion usually happens here so using traditional media news won't achieve anything apart from wasting your time consuming typically heavily biased, technically confused journalists produce cute sound bites and generally mindlessly regurgitating the party line. I find these days I have such negative views of the bias in the traditional news that it makes me cringe and turn it off. (Irrelevant detour, but every time "shrub" (aka "small Bush" -- US president) is broadcast his inarticulate stuttering and inane grin, just causes me to hit the off-switch, the guy seems like a complete moron -- Blair is smug, also with his cheshire cat grin, but at least he is somewhat articulate and can come across intelligently -- shrub is a PR disaster.) So the interesting technical challenges from a "cypherpunks write code" point of view are already abundabtly clear without more news. You can pretty much rely on the maxim that politicians and the media will achieve the worst legal system for personal liberties in cyberspace, so our job is to build cypherspace where their ill-thought out laws particularly on speech, content, copyright etc largely don't apply. So I'd sooner for example spend time discussing how to design censor resistance, publisher and reader anonymity into a large scale file-sharing or next gen distributed web publishing replacement than for example the on-going burble along the lines "gee look what stupid laws the politicians and media are thinking of introducing now". We already know they continue to make stupid laws, our task is to use technology to make their stupid laws as irrelevant as possible. Combing over the details of the political systems stupidity never seemed like a constructive use of time to me. Yes, there are 'Net lobbying groups, but I'm not sure they ultimately achieve anything apart from at best burning resources just acting as a stupidity-brake, and typically worse being sucked into the deals and favors for trade lobbying and bribing-fest. Adam On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 04:32:09PM +0200, Jan Dobrucki wrote: > Greetings, > I've been reading the list for a while now, and what I find annoying > is that there are mostly American news and little about what's > happening in Europe. As little as I respect America, America is not > all of the world. Come on Cypherpunks from Europe, make your presence > noticed! > Jan Dobrucki
