On Thu, 28 Mar 1996, Vincent S. Gunville wrote:
Here is an example of what anonymous remailers can do.......
I'm re-forwarding you the second half of this article, because it seems clear that you didn't read the whole thing the first time.
Suponcic, being a public official, knew his way around the local police department, and soon a detective started pounding the Net. By tracing the header information on the Usenet postings, the detective determined--O.K., this part is murky, we admit--that the messages had originated in Ohio, passed through Florida Online, an Internet provider in the Sunshine State, and then through anon.penet.fi, a free E-mail remailer service based in Finland that allows Internet users to post messages anonymously.
The identity of the poster was, and is, unknown, though Suponcic has his suspicions. "It's my personal belief that the root of this is political," says the councilman, who had to get an unlisted telephone number and whose wife now wants to move.
On Feb. 6, at Suponcic's urging, the Willowick city council passed a resolution asking the state and federal governments to close the "loopholes" that allowed anonymous remailers to operate outside the authority of U.S. law-enforcement officials. "Once you've achieved one of these anonymous identities, you're dangerous, and there's no way law enforcement can track it," Suponcic says. "The animal's out of control."
I know you read at least this far, but keep reading...
Still not content, Suponcic contacted Steven LaTourette, the U.S. Congressman who represents his district. LaTourette's staff suspects that the problem lies with Julf Helsingius, the Finn who runs the anonymous remailer. They wrote a letter to the Finnish ambassador and sent copies to the Secretary of State and the chairman of the House Committee on International Relations. The State Department agreed last week to look into the complaint.
But here's a reality check. The Finnish remailer could not have been used, since anon.penet.fi no longer transmits binary image files. Jerry Russell, who runs Florida Online and who looked into the case, says he figures the whole thing was a relatively simple prank called a sendmail spoof, in which the prankster posts a message with a phony return address. He says the Willowick police never produced a copy of the posting for him so that he could unravel the tangle for them. Indeed, when the policeman called, "he didn't really understand what he was trying to tell me," says Russell. "The average Joe Blow police detective doesn't know flip about the Internet."
Neither does the average public official. And that, friends, is why stuff like the Communications Decency Act--the Christian Coalition's attempt to remove pornography from the Internet--sails through Congress.
Allow me to adjust your point to "Here's an example of what sendmail exploits can do". Kathleen M. Ellis http://zeus.towson.edu/~kelli/ kelli@zeus.towson.edu Diverse Sexual Orientation Coll. Towson State University DSOC@zeus.towson.edu "I can't help it, I'm a born lever-puller" -Ringo from "Yellow Submarine" "Your friends are really just enemies who don't have the guts to kill you" -J. Tenuta "Obscenity is a crutch for inarticulate motherfuckers." -Fortune Cookie Courtesy of Linux 1.3.45