In article <9310242219.AA08866@toad.com>, Eli Brandt <ebrandt@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> wrote: : > From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) : > For my service, given what it is for, the presumption should be : > anonymity. For the personals groups, perhaps the presumption : > should be the other way around. There is, almost certainly, no : > one right answer. : : What are your thoughts on solutions which do not do either of these : alternatives? For example, several people have discussed systems : involving two sets of addresses. These avoid both problems : (unexpectedly failing to anonymize / unexpectedly anonymizing a : message with a sig), at the cost of some complexity. I haven't really given this much thought because it hasn't been relevant to my server. There are a number of problems that I think fall into the same category of inadvertent disclosure. All of them are "operator error" in a sense. All of the anonymous e-mail services are hacks added onto the existing e-mail services and require significant attention to detail if one is to not inadvertently give away one's real identity. It's as if you had to type in the RFC822 headers yourself for each message; even though they're quite simple, you're going to mess up reasonably frequently. And just once is sufficient to destroy one's anonymity. The multiple address thing doesn't address this at all so I don't think it will help. Alas, I really don't have the spare time to work up my thoughts on where the e-mail system ought to go. All I can really say for sure is that the whole thing should be rethought from the ground up. : > Either the perpetrators are so intellectually lacking that they : > do not see what they are doing or they are so intellectually : > dishonest that they do. In either case, I am utterly disgusted. : : Aren't you detweiling a bit here? I don't think so. Detweiler and those like him simply react; they do not examine where they are coming from nor are they willing to do so. Their fault is not that they reach strong moral conclusions nor that they express them but that they so lack respect for others that they will not examine the positions of others nor attempt to determine where the line of "it isn't my business to tell them what to do" should be drawn. (BTW, cypherpunks wins big when it loses Detweilers; just look at Objectivism's reputation for why.) : I don't think the situation really : warrants "utter disgust"... Technical problems can often be solved by "try it and see" but systemic people problems rarely can or should be. A wrong solution is often just too costly; ask the folks in the ex-USSR what they think of that "try it and see". People problems require careful thought if the results of one's actions are not to lead to misery and death. When people resort to rather obviously flawed modes of reasoning, disgust is quite appropriate, except when stronger responses are warrented.