ways to stop something as controversial as an anon service. In this case, a very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality managed to contact exactly the right people to create a situation where it is politically impossible for me to continue running the service. I would really like to know who the person is or why I can't be told. Did they put pressure on you to keep it quiet? Did they hold a gun to your head? a minuscule minority of anon users. The latest statistics from the service show 18203 registered users, 3500 messages per day on the average, and This is impressive. In retrospect I realize that I have been guilty to keeping a far too low profile on the network, prefering to deal with the abuse cases privately ...I apologize to the whole net community. Let me rephrase: You took a long step towards providing true privacy on the net and it worked so well that people wanted to stop you. You've shut down, but come out of it with lots of experience with running such a service, lots of good publicity (and some bad stuff), lots of new uses to which people put that sort of anonymity to, and some really good ideas for how to make these systems succeed politically (the being very visible thing). Though the outcome isn't optimal, it sure sounds like an impressive success to me. Congratulations. Now I hope you will follow up this experiment with a write-up to document the things you learned (positive and negative), and your recommendations on how to do the next one. dean PS and if you can't tell us about the politics of the shutdown, I'm sure there's someone else in the know that can publish it anonymously so you won't have to :-)