Date: Tue, 15 Feb 94 12:59:55 -0800 From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes) As I recently argued, the problem is not individual disrupters but salience in general. I agree; this is indeed the problem. And when we try to sell the moderation software to individual groups, it should be sold as solving the salience problem --- and that it solves the individual anonymous disrupter as only side effect. The way I'd design this service is that the newsgroup would be moderated, and so postings would be mailed to a central site. The moderation group would have to have internet access, and would connect to the central site using a client program. The client program would display the message to the moderator, and then the moderator would have a chance to give a "thumbs up", "thumbs down", "abstain", or "decide later" vote. The software on the central site would send out the message after the threshold number of moderators had approved the message, or would kill it after the threshold number of moderators had given it the thumbs down. Of course, with something like this you'd want to make sure authentication was done right --- which in this case, probably means using a password-based challenge-response authentication system. Note that this proposed solution does not solve a lot of problems. It does not solve the moderation selection problem. (The moderation group can not be left wide open; otherwise a Detweiler could approve his own postings.) It does not solve the "forge a faked approved: header" attack. Yet for the problems it does solve, it would probably be a good thing. - Ted P.S. Wow, a productive, constructive, relatively flame-free discussion on cypherpunks! I was beginning to think it wasn't really possible. :-)