Hal Finney (I think) writes,
the net is inherently an anonymous environment. ...The sooner people realize that there is no line that divides the clean from the unclean, the sooner anonymity will be widely accepted on the net.
But there _is_ a line, and people will likely want to draw it. It's true that currently there aren't any security guarantees to prevent a person from pretending to be someone else, but there will be. PEM certificates will distinguish between real people and personas. A public-key-authenticated "real person newsgroup" can be implemented. This raises the possibility that most newsgroups will transition to real-person-only status. This will cramp the style of those of us who wish to participate in the net using a persona. I think a major task ahead of us is to provide an alternative to "real people = good, personas = bad", and to put forward alternatives to "real person newsgroups" which are tolerable to most and more palatable to us. So what's the distinction we might wish to put forward instead of "real person"? "Paying customer", perhaps, or "respected reputation"? Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe it's time to set up some reputation based newsgroups, with a means of keeping track of who has been posting good stuff, and of filtering for credibility. -- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)