Excerpts from the CodherPlunks Mailing List Charter, v1.2

Origins

The CodherPlunks list was born of frustration at the end of 1995. At that time the Cypherpunks list had become, to a fair extent, a victim of its own success. Cypherpunks was increasingly overwhelmed by FAQs, recriminations, reheated spam, etc. Periodically someone would rue the relative inattention paid to the actual deployment of strong cryptographic measures. Anarchies being as they are, no-one stepped in to dictate the behavior of the list members. Assorted proposals to spawn new lists were floated, but none came to fruition. Finally the exasperation expressed by Raph Levien in a November 1995 message to Cypherpunks led to the creation of CodherPlunks.

"Cypherpunks write code. They know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it's their privacy, they're going to write it. Cypherpunks publish their code so that their fellow cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Cypherpunks realize that security is not built in a day and are patient with incremental progress."

List Topics

The CodherPlunks list is intended for discussion of implementation of strong, robust cryptosystems. This includes but is certainly not limited to cryptographic libraries, reference implementations of cryptographic algorithms and protocols, user applications incorporating cryptography, etc.

Since the list is simply meant to fill a niche, many topics are generally inappropriate for discussion on CodherPlunks, viz:

• politics (crypto or otherwise)
• social commentary
• theoretical cryptography, except as it directly relates to implementation issues
• vanilla (not crypto specific) programming Q&A
• messages forwarded from elsewhere (announcements, essays, etc.)
• wild speculation about the possibility of writing a program that does XYZ
• personal attacks
• anything else not directly involved in implementing cryptography