writes Nick Szabo:
Can you post a brief description of how this works for us Mosaic-deprived souls?
Sorry for the brevity of the announcement, I had just finished it and needed to get to class ;-) OK, I'll start from the beginning (pardon if this is too much info). NCSA has a product (available for Xwindows, MS Windows, and the Mac) called Mosaic. It is a HyperText client (server if your in X, I suppose) that lets the user graphically connect to Gopher, WAIS, and many other already-established information servers (including ftp). The big advantage, however is that it can connect to machines running a WWW server, the most popular, and functional I might add, of these servers is the "HTTPD" server from NCSA itself. It's a long story, but httpd stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Daemon. Anyway, check with NCSA for more info on httpd. HTTPD 1.0 allows the use of "forms" where I can program in (with extreme ease) text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, menus, selectable lists, etc. One the other end, the client (Mosaic) interprets this, and will let the user fill out the form and submit it. On my end, a little program catches a stream of data coming from the "world out there" and decodes it so that I can pick out what the user typed into the text boxes, which check boxes are checked, etc... it's quite cool and very easy. The decoding of the data is not really difficult, especially since NCSA provides some functions that will decode it into an array of structures with fields called "name" and "val" -- it's pretty straight forward. My form takes what a user types into the TO: and SUBJECT: boxes, checks to see that the TO: box is not empty and that it has a more-or-less correct email address in it (it checks for an '@' in the value). It then creates a temp file, writes some generic info into it, adds the text from the text box, and makes a system call to mail off the file and destroy it. I coded the whole thing up in about 30 minutes this afternoon. I will be adding check boxes to bounce the mail throught remailers and to do encryption for remailers. I will also add the ability to send mail through anon.penet.fi. For the password to anon.penet.fi, I will use a feture wchich allows the text written in a field to show up as asterics (just for those paranoids out there ;-) As for absolute security, you would just have to trust that I will not be archiving these messages, etc, which I will not. Also, the Mosaic server has the ability to log the IP address from which the connection comes, but as yet, it has no way of figuring out the login name of the person on the other end. Incidently, this whold thing has some *really* cool possibilities. The new HTTPD (1.x) allows for user authentication via passwords -- each directory can have an associated password and group databse... just think of having authentication systems that will let "strangers" send mail in this manner and do all kinds of things virtually anonymously. I really must applaud the NCSA folks for coming up with this, as it has more possibilities that they could have ever dreamt of (which is, I suppose, the mark of really good software). For people wishing to start up their own remailers, even if they don't have access to a machine to make the server, if your site has a server, ask your administrator about "user directories" -- this is where the server has a specified directory that goes in a user's home directory into which users can dump HTML documents (HyperText Markup Language)... for instance, on my server, the directory is called "mosaic-public" so if I have a reference to "http://monet.vis.colostate.edu/~nate/testing.html" then the server figures out that it is actually a link to the file ~nate/mosaic-public/testing.html -- very cool, and actually damn easy for a server admin to set up. Fee free to ask questions. -nate -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons <nate@VIS.ColoState.Edu> <nate@yuma.ANCS.ColoState.Edu> | | Colorado State University Computer Visualization Laboratory | | Data Visualization/Interrogation, Modeling, Animation, Rendering | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+