I do understand how both types work, however, the opportunity for subterfuge is always present. I was making a point that the assumed security of a remailer should not factor in if you intend to put yourself at risk. Assumptions are dangerous all over the place, and if your assumption could get you into trouble, it's better to verify it or not instead of just proceeding blindly, if at all possible.
Even if you trust each remailer to "do the right thing" only 10% of the time, by chaining 10 such remailers the probability of having your identity revealed is only 1 in 10^10 - assuming that the remailers are independent. [That secondary assumption can be improved by chosing remailers in different countries.]
What is the outrageous claim? That someone could purposely set up an insecure remailer, claim that it's secure, and that people could then unwittingly use it to incriminate themselves?
No - that by using an open-relay mailer you get the same anonymity as using a Type 1 / Type 2 remailer.
and honestly my comment about faking the return addresses was in no way to say that this method could replace remailers
Funny, that's how it looked for everyone. Admit it - you said something stupid. [Even I admit I'm wrong sometimes. <g>]
I'm going to stop myself here.. The original email I sent was simply a question about what could be done to possibly quell the flow of spam generated by this list, followed by a few suggestions. It's gotten utterly out of hand because somebody apparently took it as a personal attack, and responded with a series of attacks of his own.
Most of the regular subscribers are tired of the complaints (which are usually worse - as in more and bigger - than the spam).
As I said before, if [you] (the reader on the list) don't want to hear these questions, then what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Filter my emails if you like; It'll be a lot easier for you to filter them automatically than it will be to filter the spam messages in any event.
I don't use any (deleting) filters; I read about 500 messages each day, and it only takes me 2-3 hours. A friend of mine reads around 2,000 messages each day. It's not such a big deal.
Instead, I received another nasty letter, and then a few days later a call from my upstream provider. They denied her request to deliver up my name and address, but told me that if I didn't take the information down that it would be a violation of the service agreement, and that they would disconnect the frame relay. I explained to their (the ISPs) lawyer the situation, and that they did not actually own the copyrights in question. He responded with "I know, but considering their history, they are very willing to take us to court over this, and honestly we don't want to deal with that. Take it down or we shut you down, we don't care who's right, we just don't want a lawsuit."
Yep. Same thing - the fear of lawsuits - is why we were warned, when we came to the US, to not even look at our female colleagues: even a hint of a lawsuit would make our employer send us back to our country in a heartbeat - whether we're guilty or not. [They wouldn't care.] US sucks a lot. Too bad this is where the money is :)
Needless to say, faced with the entire site being removed, I removed the materials.
One word: Freenet. See http://freenet.sourceforge.net
I see. But trying to find a way to save even more time and bandwidth by even attempting to figure out a solution to this problem is not as valuable?
No. There already is a solution: the client filters everything. Wait, there's also a second one: build your own cypherpunks node. [The second one is even better.]
It comes down to a simple bit of confusion on my part. I cannot understand the mentality of someone who has the time and resources to effectively combat the spam on this list, and yet who does not have the time or resource to either respond in a somewhat civil fashion, or to just delete the message along with the rest of the refuse.
Spam takes <1 second to identify and delete.
You seemed to be a bit more level headed, so while I still totally disagree that it's a waste of time to try and figure a way around this problem, I haven't utterly lost respect for you as I have with Tim. "Pillar of the community" or not, the guy is an utter asshole.
Here I agree with you :) Mark