[This document was Exonized at The Exon-Hyde Center for Thought Cleansing.] On Wed, 6 Dec 1995, Bill Humphries wrote:
Fine for the tiny subset of Net users who understand crypto enough to use it on a daily basis. I'm not one of people either. This crypto isn't user friendly stuff. Before you propose such as solution, better make sure people can use this stuff.
You're right here, definately. While I'm not volunteering, I think something could be written, such as an encrypted UUCP transfer system, and a better premail. PGP is reasonably user friendly, if you have any kind of memory at all. It isn't, of course, user friendly if you have to save your message to a file, shell, encrypt it, exit the shell, load it back in, and send it. I think that there is the major problem with PGP. I *know* that kind of thing is a problem with chaining anon mailers, unless you have installed an application such as Premail. I think that we'll eventually see applications such as Eudora pop up with PGP support, directly or indirectly.
Anyone wish to comment on the prospect of a double blind server, set outside U.S. borders, that can act as an interface to the rest of the world, perhaps encrypting or stego'ing the data transfered between it and the user? Basically, an anonymous remailer that acts as a cross between an NNTP, POP3, and SMTP servers.
How are you going to pitch this technology to all the people with AOL and Microsoft Network accounts who barely understand the net? These are the people who need exposure to all the uncensored expression they can get.
I was thinking more along the lines of an offline message packet that the server creates, encrypts, chains through anon mailers with an response block, and sends to you. You get it, run it through a filter, run your offline reader, such as Yarn, write your replies, run another program to get an encrypted, reply-blocked, ready to send packet, and drop it right into the SMTP port. I don't know if the AOL and MSN software would even allow this without difficulty, as I haven't seen it. I just used it as an example, though. I'm sure there are much better ideas out there.
Instead of figuring out how to build a new treehouse that excludes Exon and Hyde, how about fighting the damned bill in the courts?
Here's a chain of events: 1) Congress gets their wish, and it all passes. 2) President signs into law. 3) ISPs: a) Shutdown, which isn't really likely, b) Severely restrict service, or c) Tell the government where to shove it (and watch themselves promptly prosecuted). After one or two ISPs are busted, the rest will "fall in line." 4) Someone gets caught writing "<EXON>" in E-MAIL or on USENET, or committing some other form of thought-crime, and is prosecuted. 5) While this person is fighting his or her impending exonization and cleansing of dirty thoughts, the rest of us have our free speech severely restricted. Would I be wrong in saying that it would take a long time, and a lot of money to fight this up to the Supreme Court? Then we risk the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Congress, however unlikely that may seem. The S.C. could just as easily tell us to "exon off" to keep the world safe for mentally impaired children that, while smart enough to operate a computer and go looking for pornography, are damaged by it and/or the word "exon."