-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hal told the oral history of my remailer as...
I suggest, then, that you run a remailer (it only costs $20 a month on the system I use), and publicize the fact that Detweiler can use yours with impunity. Set up a mail-to-news gateway that other remailer operators can use so that they don't have to worry about the consequences of abuse. It's easy to talk about sacred ideas, but perhaps not so easy to keep an unpopular and misunderstood remailing infrastructure in place. "Xenon" also accused us of hypocrisy, started up a remailer, and stopped it in just a couple of days faced with these kinds of problems.
However, I experienced *no* abuse of my remailer, I being at the time on fairly good terms with Mr. Detweiler. (I had a single amusing "abuse" in which the person told someone in personal anonymous mail that their continued us of their IP number was a copyright violation and would be procecuted. Guy just didn't have a sense of humour.) I did not accuse anyone of hypocrisy. All I said was that a simple quick fix solution of blocking his known address would ONLY MAKE THINGS WORSE, since then he would forge mail instead. Besides, fight him and he'll fight back with renewed energy, I reasoned. I also thought it was sort of funny to see all the propellor-beenie types yelling at the top of their lungs about some inappropriate posting in their oh so precious newsgroups, and said that his posts could be called performance art. I said we needed an *abuse* filter not a Detweiler filter. This of course got me flamed :-). I shut down qwerty-remailer, after perhaps a month of operation, due to two reasons. I felt moderated remailers were necessary (until Usenet is "fixed" to catch such abuses in some open moderation scheme) and did not have the *time* to moderate qwerty. The major reason however was the public threats of other remailer operators sending *their* abusive user's mail through qwerty-remailer when I refused to block Detweiler's address! That threw me for a loop. Wow. Nasty situation that was, and an isolated remailer is not an effective one. I also was not at all effective at trying to gather FULL information about the existing remailers, and my "Full Discosure Remailer List" is still incomplete, as well as now outdated. -=Xenon=- P.S. If anyone is interested in a few radical essays on remailer/internet security from an output larger than the internet, see the Rant Series on ftp.netcom.com in /pub/qwerty/Writings. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLinKgQSzG6zrQn1RAQE7JwQApnXmm35jUxq0QyAYEN+pJgPxnQE5Jcqz RJfMKNjNT/1LDkgRvKoJxCoYfzd9ga/nQvIZczwefAPI2Ko8Q7bLMh1zm/txZzN7 RnCVd8Hdhq9UpPue3rwZ037jRc6K/XTEwgeKT9Ct3tmIJDbu5FyMqsK4asT4fgFi b/8h2TZG7ks= =FemC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----