From: kovar@nda.com (David Kovar)
There is a lot of effort being put into creating tools to mask identities. I'm curious why people don't go a different route - creating a false electronic identity? If you have control over your own system, it is easy enough to create an account. Lacking that, there are a lot of companies out there offering low cost accounts on Unix systems with full Internet access. Why not get an account in a different name rather than using anonymous remailers?
If you use five different identities, why waste your money paying for five accounts, especially if some of them are used only infrequently? Why have a full UNIX account (like my account on PANIX, say) for an identity that won't need to do anything but send out a couple of email messages now and then? What if you create and kill off personas relatively frequently? Having everything centralized seems like the most logical way to go--don't forget, separate accounts would mean setting up separate .profile files, copying code from one place to another all the time, keeping duplicate copies of things, etc., etc. The exception would be when you have identities or "lives" that are truly separate, with little overlap, but even then I'd prefer having full access to all my files and robots in one place all the time. If I had an Internet connection on my own box at home, sure, it might be more convenient to segregate things in separate accounts, but most people don't have that luxury yet. --Dave.