From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker(_at_)verisign(_dot_)com>
...
We are not talking about moderation for spam or immoderate language.
We are talking about moderation to supress criticism, in the first
instance of particular spam control approaches but subsequently of
criticism of the chair's own activities both on and off list.
Ironically it was my criticism of Vernon's DCC scheme that led to
the chair's censorship.
I think Phillip Hallam-Baker knows that statement is inaccurate
and that technical criticisms of the DCC that have not been filtered.
Other sorts of comments from him have been rejected.
In particular I am very concerned that DCC
has the same weaknesses as blacklists in that they can be co-opted
as censorship mechanisms. Cindy Cohen of the EFF has described cases
where groups have run organized campaigns to get opposing groups
such as moveon.org blacklisted by first subscribing to the list then
making a complaint.
He feels that way about the DCC because his mail is not welcome at
any SMTP server I control. He persistently misrepresents the nature
of the DCC as somehow related to blacklists, and implicitly rejects
the fact that his envelope sender value is in sendmail access_DB files
I control. One might excuse his misrepresentation of the DCC as a
mental block causing a persistent misunderstanding. The DCC is
uninteresting to most people and so misunderstanding it is not a fault.
In fact and as has been pointed out to him, the DCC does not detect
spam, but only bulk mail. It is impossible for the DCC to have a "false
positive" or to be used for blacklisting provided that the fuzzy
checksums are not too fuzzy and that your private mail is not the same
as the private mail of lots of other people. Private mail can't be
known to the DCC and so cannot be blacklisted. On the other hand,
bulk mail can be known, but that's the point of the DCC. Users of
the DCC must use whitelists to distinguish wanted from unwanted bulk
mail, whether the bulk mail comes from the IETF, Verisign, or Ralsky.
Unfortunately many people are weasels and it is very difficult to
stop weaselish activities. The slashdot approach may be best in this
respect, moderation is frequently malicious but it is difficult to
organize campaigns because nobody chooses to be a moderator.
So here we have kind of a recursive/self-referential situation.
That last sentence is right or at least not far wrong.
Perhaps he has not considered implications of my recent claim to
archive unique samples of all mail caught by my filters. One is that
messages he submitted to the ASRG list with "courtesy" copies sent
toward my mailbox have been archived by my filters even when the ASRG
moderator did not pass them to the list.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com