After Cypherpunks mailing list host John Gilmore announced he was kicking the 1,400 subscribers off his machine, several participants have launched new newsgroups and mailing lists to take its place. Gilmore, one of the first employees of Sun Microsystems and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started running the Cypherpunks list from his computer system in 1992 as a forum for "discussing personal defenses for privacy in the digital domain." Last year, Gilmore began moderating the messages in response to a high volume of flames and irrelevant postings. As a result, Gilmore became the target of attacks and accusations of hypocrisy from several list members. This week, he told the cypherpunks that they had 10 days to find a new home.
Last Wednesday, Mike Duvos announced the creation of the alt.cypherpunks newsgroup. One of the first postings to the group, from Tim May, stated, "The mailing list has become unwieldy in recent years, with 1,400 or so subscribers, and with various spams and attempts to shut down or censor the list. An 'alt.' group makes such censorship impossible, and allows sophisticated news reading tools to be used. A newsgroup also ensures worldwide distribution, with no centralized nexus of control, no choke point for legal or governmental actions."
When asked why the cypherpunks did not long ago decide to create alt.cypherpunks, May answered, "the CP folks don't make collective decisions; there is no group decision on why things aren't done."
In addition to the creation of alt.cypherpunks, three sub-groups have also been created: alt.cypherpunks.announce, alt.cypherpunks.technical, and alt.cypherpunks.social.
Some of the cypherpunks objected to having their discussion move to Usenet, citing the spam factor, and uneven distribution as problems. Igor Chudov and Jim Choate, both cypherpunks, said that they are creating a distributed list, which they believe addresses the problems that occurred on Gilmore's single-node mailing list. Chudov and Choate's mailing list will have several nodes participating in the distribution of messages. A distributed list "creates a much more robust and fault-tolerant architecture," says Chudow. "It will never die if one or two of the participating machines stop working. This fault-tolerance is a result of certain redundancy, where each host gets full feed of articles but handles only a fraction of subscribers, who are free to resubscribe."
Chudov, who plans on participating in both the Usenet discussions and the mailing list, says, "Our goal is to set a list that would have no choke points and will be reliable and censorship-resistant."
Will there be two separate cypherpunk discussions going on at once? Not if Lance Cottrell can help it. He wants to create a news-to-mail/mail-to-news gateway in order to distribute Chudov and Choate's list to and from alt.cyperphunks.
Gilmore, too, has plans to hang out in the new digs: "I definitely expect to participate," he says, "I just won't run it. Consider me as demoting myself from 'manager' to 'programmer' - or from 'publisher' to 'writing letters to the editor.'"
