It's cute, but it won't wash. The problem is that a list like this doesn't provide any Obscurity to its users unless there are a large number of subscribers. One reader out of a thousand is slightly Obscure. One reader out of three just isn't. Adding large numbers of posters to the list doesn't help, though you could use it as a dead drop for those NYTimes subscriptions and egroups subscriptions if you wanted. A gateway from alt.anonymous.messages might be fun anyway. Back when people read Usenet on their own machines, instead of getting it from an ISP via NNTP clients, Usenet groups gave readers Pretty Good Obscurity. That might still be the case at universities or companies that maintain their own news feeds, but there aren't a lot any more, especially since a full newsfeed takes multiple T1s full-time. At 08:39 AM 12/13/00 -0500, BMM wrote:
I would like to announce the "secret-admirers" mail list.
The "secret-admirers" list is intended to function in a manner similar to the well-known Usenet newsgroup "alt.anonymous.messages". This newsgroup serves as a dead drop for communications in which the recipient wishes to remain unknown.
While access to a Usenet news server is unavailable in many environments, the ubiquity and flexibility of e-mail may be advantageous for the following reasons:
- Penetration: More people having access to (pseudo|ano)nymizing tools is generally a good thing. - Pool Size: Higher utilization of the message pool may frustrate traffic analysis. The list may be gatewayed back into alt.anonymous.messages or vice versa. CDR-like nodes for redistribution may be established to reduce load on individual nodes. - Filtering: E-mail filtering tools are widely available, allowing recipients to draw only pertinent messages from the pool by filtering on tokens which have been negotiated out-of-band or by the public key to which a message has been encrypted.
The mail list is unmoderated and accepts messages from any submitter. Submissions may be sent to "secret-admirers@minder.net" or "sa@minder.net".
TO SUBSCRIBE to the list, send a message with "subscribe secret-admirers" in the body to majordomo@minder.net. The more subscribers, the better, even if procmail just sends it to /dev/null.
TO UNSUBSCRIBE from the list, send a message with "unsubscribe secret-admirers" to majordomo@minder.net.
A digest of this list is available. This list is not currently archived.
Thanks,
-Brian
-- bmm@minder.net 1024/8C7C4DE9
Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639