Re: [Gnu-arch-users] counting

[James Blackwell]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 09:50:44PM -0700, Thomas Lord wrote:
> James:
> 
> 
> > How many addresses are left on this list? If the number is small,
> > how many of them are likely some sort of storage/gateway?
> 
> 
> There are somewhere between "a few" and "several" hundred addresses
> on the list.   (Sorry, I had to take a day to think about whether
> it was too privacy-robbing to reveal that.)

There is no risk to privacy here. This is a question of summation. The
cases that some people (of which I'm one) are worried about are those
cases in which the profile of an individual is name stripped and then
released (which is potentially not as private as originally seen because
of profile matching).

The US government, one of the more secretive organizations, usually has no
problem answering this sort of question. They'll happily list how many
people filed for unemployment, how many died after Katrina, didn't pay
taxes or went to federal jail. This is I have always been happy to provide
supermirror numbers to the arch community; The number of signed archives
"out there" doesn't tell you a thing about which person has a signed
archive or whether or not they're keeping their virtual dirty underwear
stored in an archive. I'd be quite surprised if any free software interest
were more secretive than the government.

I suppose there's potentially some value in a large (>= 1k) list avoiding
listing that number so as to go under the radar of the spammers, but since
we're talking low hundreds that sort of threat should be negligible.

I don't have a vocabulary that can sufficiently distinguish between a few
hundred and several hundred. I'd be curious to know for some interval of
50. My hunch was that it's somewhere around 240 (estimating 12 active
posters with a idle rate of 95%). 


-- 
 James Blackwell      |   Try out the blog planet for revision control
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