I find myself largely in agreement with Nick Szabo's assertions that too many people spread too much information about themselves over the Net. But I wonder about whether or not we will be doing anyone a service by making encryption and 'Nyms widespread in newsgroups. It's too long a topic to tackle all at once, so let me throw out a few opening thoughts. Case 1) technical postings of a research/white (in the sense of whitenet/ blacknet) nature. Here anonymity would be a hindrance. I post in large part to help my name be known in certain academic circles. In this case I would tend to wonder at people who posted anonymously and would (as was mentioned in this list) tend to discount their information. In research circles, name value means a lot. Case 2) technical postings of a black nature. Here anonymity is a big help, as you may have some question about the legality of what you are doing. But the question I have is: why post at all? What gain is there from publicizing this kind of information? Perhaps the gain is some assurance of safety from retaliation from parties who might feel themselves wronged by what you posted. In this case, anonymity wins. Case 3) non-technical postings (social, talk). Again I wonder what is the value of anonymity in this case. To have a social conversation is to build a community of like-minded people and to contact people whom you want to relate to in some way. Anonymity defeats this social building and relation process. A counter-response to this might be to say that we want to put privacy in, not anonymity. But again, I wonder about this. If I want my message to be read only by a certain list of people, why am I posting to a newsgroup instead of to a mailing list? There's no point in privatizing the substrate, since anyone can get a client that will decrypt at the far end. In sum, I guess I'm somewhat baffled at why one would want to use anonymity and/or privacy enhancement technology on one's news postings. --Alan Wexelblat, Reality Hacker, Author, and Cyberspace Bard Media Lab - Advanced Human Interface Group wex@media.mit.edu Voice: 617-258-9168, Pager: 617-945-1842 PUBLIC KEY available by request "To pleasure!" "To passion!" "To paradise!" "To pain!" "Tonight!"