This seems to be a case where technology can easily be applied to bring about a mutually satisfactory solution. If Mr. Wells wants to moderate his anonymous posting service, why not have it immediately remove all header information from the message, and store the result for later verification and posting. Thus, Mr. Wells can still "weed-out" the annoying childish-insult messages that someone like BIFF might post anonymously while protecting the privacy of those who have legitimate needs. On the other hand, I feel Mr. Detweiler has gone a little overboard in his attack in what seems to be an attempt to protect the masses from their own stupidity. The simple facts of the matter are, any time you use an anonymous remailer without encryption you run the risk of having your email intercepted. One thing people need to learn is that the world is a risky place and any action you take can have negative consequences. I certainly wouldn't send threats to president@whitehouse.gov expecting Hal's or Julf's remailers to protect me. Even using encryption, an anonymous remailer operator as well as many other people can do traffic analysis. Unix keeps tons of logs which are quite easy to parse. (I recently got finished writing syslog accounting software which tracks all the path of all messages sent and received on a system bills them based on bandwidth.) There are several things you can do such as remailer chaining, using private machines (off the network), etc but none guarantee absolute privacy. If you are concerned about protecting the masses, write up your own "Remailer Safety FAQ" detailing the benefits and dangers. -Ray p.s. is there a proposal out there to increase the security of moderated newsgroups? I was thinking that it might be a good idea to incorporate digital signatures into the moderation protocol such that newsreaders could filter out messages which didn't have a proper moderator's signature. -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries --