krueger@cs.umn.edu (Alan Krueger) wrote:
ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:
Anonymity has value that is greater than the value of CAUCE.
Could someone help a rookie here? What's CAUCE and how does it relate to anonymity.
It doesn't, per se, but a number of people choose to believe that. CAUCE is the Coalition Against Unsolicted Commercial Email and supports the banning of such unsolicited advertisements. See their web page at http://www.cauce.org/ for more information.
The yelling is about the proposed (now ratified) robo-moderation policy for the *newsgroup* to discuss CAUCE issues, comp.org.cauce, which requires that you post with a deliverable email address. This was supposed to keep belligerant spammers and trolls from posting to the group without having some kind of valid contact address. This was not supposed to be anti-privacy, anti-munging, or anti-anonymity, though that is what seems to be the big issue many people were having with it.
That makes about as much sense as holding a rally to protest auto theft and requiring that each attendee leave his car UNLOCKED in the parking lot while attending. In this case, the price of admission to this "anti-UCE party" is to contribute one's e-mail address to the UCErs' mailing lists! And what, exactly, is the point of requiring "belligerant spammers and trolls" to post with a valid e-mail address? Unless they're planning to spam or mailbomb each other, they are the ones who have the least to fear from publicly broadcasting their e-mail addresses on a worldwide NG for the address harvesters to collect and exploit.