On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Jamie Zawinski wrote:
> and I'm amazed at the amount of spam now! Actually I'm amazed that
> anyone is actually *on* this list if that level of spam is normal.
There have been some recent discussions on how to get around this problem.
If you look back in the archives, you should see announcements for
mailing list addresses which do such things as reject mail sent to
toad.com. There are of course the standard issues with filtering as
censorship.
>
> So, I'm not a cryptographer, but I sometimes hack security code, and
> I'm very interested in the politics of crypto/security/privacy/etc.
> Back in 94-97 or so, cypherpunks was a great source of news and clueful
> discussions. Are there any other mailing lists that are more like what
> it used to be? I miss it...
You should not write off cypherpunks just yet. The level of spam is high,
but there are still clueful people here. Including a mysterious anonymous
poster who seems to know a heck of a lot about cryptology. :)
If you post something interesting, people do respond. Most recently
we've had a row over the economics of MicroMint which has been quite
interesting.
What kind of politics do you have in mind? have some test issues to argue
over? read any good papers lately?
speaking of that --
Has anyone else seen "How to break and repair a practical MIX" from this
year's Eurocrypt, btw? I was lucky enough to get a copy of it a few weeks
ago and have been looking at it. Has anyone ever implemented this kind of
mix-net in which the servers check up on each other? maybe something done
as a research prototype at Bell Labs after Jakobsson's Flash Mixing paper?
I have a nebulous idea of a mixnet along these lines where mix nodes are
java applets which discover each other, form a group of nodes, process
a packet, and then disband. Anyone know if Jini would be appropriate for
something like this? or know where to find examples of Jini apps?
still, other places to go, since you asked :
The newsgroup sci.crypt is still active, although it has always had a
different "flavor" than cypherpunks. I am not keeping up with it much
these days, but it seems that most of the substantive discussion is on
better block ciphers.
talk.politics.crypto had some good discussion of the export control laws
and what they mean last year, but I haven't seen anything much there
recently.
There are also the [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] lists.
Tim May has pointed out that these are moderated lists and therefore
possibly objectionable. A practical example of why moderation can be bad
popped up recently (at least IMHO), when an interesting thread on
electronic voting drifted off-topic and was requested to stop on the list.
That's certainly within the rights of the moderator, but I thought it was
interesting and would have liked it to continue.
Coderpunks has substantive technical discussion on a semi-regular basis.
Most recently there is a discussion on practical "passphrase condensing" -
taking an arbitrary length passphrase and crunching it into an encryption
key. Previous discussions have covered Ben Laurie's Lucre and other fun
things to do with digital cash. Not too much politics, though, except as
it directly related to crypto (e.g. patents).
Cryptography has a little more political content, but tends to be lower
volume. So it won't satisfy your radical crypto needs by itself. Sometimes
interesting and substantial discussion pops up, such as on electronic
voting or key agility.
Then there are presumably a bunch of more political mailing lists. I'm not
on any of those, but poking around the EFF and such places may get you
started.
-dmolnar
