-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- There's been a lot of talk on news.admin.policy about ways of handling abusive or illegal anonymous posts. One proposal is to restrict posts from certain people, but this will fail if multiple remailers allowing chaining become available. I had an idea for another way of filtering anonymous posts which might be achievable with current news software. It would require some work by the remailer operators, though. We have talked here about positive reputations as a filtering method. A positive reputation would basically be a recommendation by some respected person that a particular poster is worth listening to. If posts could be marked with such recommendations, people could set up their news software to filter out non-recommended anonymous posts. This would be a way of distinguishing between those who want to post anonymously just for privacy, and those who want to harrass or abuse others. Current news software doesn't provide for such reputations. But there were suggestions being made at one time for a standard way of marking anonymous posts. One idea was to give them a unique identifier in the "Distribution" field of "anon". I gather that this would require a little modification of major news distribution sites to honor this distribution but from what I understand the changes needed are not major. My idea is to implement positive reputations at the source which is in the best position to provide them: the remailer operator. Applying the distribution idea, posts which were from people on a "good guys list" would be posted from the remailer with a specific distribution that identifies them as such. Anonymous posts from people not on the list would get a different identification. In order to verify that posts were really from who they claimed, they would have to be PGP (or RIPEM or PEM) signed. The list would actually be a list of keys rather than a list of user ID's. People would get on the list by asking the remailer operator, perhaps by pointing to some of their posts which were responsible. People would be removed from the list at the remailer operator's discretion, presumably when they posted objectionable messages. The advantage of this system is that it introduces, in a limited way, the idea of positive reputations. It fits into the current killfile system so that people easily offended can avoid seeing most offensive anonymous posts. It encourages the use of encryption software on the part of people who want to post anonymously and get a good reputation. And the only difficult software requirements are in the remailing/posting software; everybody else just runs the current SW. Now, since I don't run a remailing/posting service, I am in the rather embarrassing position of offering a "solution" which requires somebody else to do the work. I would be very willing to help with the software requirements for recognizing incoming PGP signed messages and looking up keys in a database. The actual maintenance of the good posters list would take some time and energy on the part of the operator. But perhaps this would not be that much more than the other activities involved. And it would have the advantage that it would point out a new direction for the net, towards a system where privacy and responsibility can coexist. Hal Finney 74076.1041@compuserve.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.2 iQCVAgUBK8uFMqgTA69YIUw3AQFqswQAhx/GN/qg4Jx6Ggqh8Rmt6Lta1iN82dOQ gAAkEwcgJsMuvEjtcgRFkHxxW6uCF/8m2kLU3HUA8lnT94BR5TJc/0K5xH05gKhH NvU+74sCxIV68ef+0pz1X9TzC1E7tUxAhJKPQ80li1QFsBw5yATzuh1UHeDIk/5O 7yyVS8AGQFc= =RyI6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----