It still seems to me that the spoofing issue has been oversimplified: [...] "Spoofing and deception are not the same."
What's overly simple about this?
Then Boxx gets dinged for using spoofs,
I don't think anyone cared that "S. Boxx" posted pseudonymously. [ Example of someone impersonating William Gibson ] [ Example of someone impersonation *you* ]
tell me you wouldn't feel furious. Someone has used anonymity to misrepresent you. In essence, to lie about you in an ingenious way made possible by a combo of human nature and the structure of the NET.
Anonymity has nothing to do with this. Nor does pseudonymity. This is a simple case of exploiting technical loopholes the size of Neptune. Unfortunately, many people give more credence than they should to the From: line, perhaps not realizing that present protocols were never designed for security. An easy way of making reality conform to expectations is to spread the use of digital signatures. Your examples of "harmful spoofing" are problems, but they are old problems having nothing to do with the use of nyms. You can't, for example, post to alt.cyberpunk as an47351@anon.penet.fi (William Gibson) and expect to fool anybody. Yes, forgery is obnoxious. But this putative offense of "pseudospoofing", of having multiple names, is very from forgery. Eli ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu