Rich Graves writes:
On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Alan Bostick wrote:
Somebody, too clever for their own good by half, has come up with a novel way of using Usenet and anonymous remailers to perpetrate mailbombs. The M.O. is to post a message to the naked-lady newsgroups saying "get pics in your mailbox! send this message to this address!), giving the email address of a cypherpunk-style anonymous remailer and including a pgp-encrypted message block.
Yuck.
Unless someone comes forward to say that they were the target of this attack, I'd guess that the target is the remailer network itself.
The target, Homer Wilson Smith, is one of the people embroiled in the Scientology wars. I don't want to get into the recent history of repression and abuse by Scientology agents & sympathizers, but my guess is that this is an attempt to harass someone that Scientology doesn't like. They (Scientology) have shown a remarkable ability to grasp both the technical details and social implications of the Internet and use them to harass ex "church" members and people who say things that they don't like. The "church" undoubtably hates remailers because so many of their critics post anonymously through them. But as they discovered with Usenet news, the same technology can be used to harass those critics. I think we'll see more ingenous attacks like this, using CP-tech in perverted ways to harass people. Annoying for sure, but helpful in a way- they'll help debug the technology. Like cipherpunks hacking Netscape, in the end it just makes it stronger. -- Eric Murray ericm@lne.com ericm@motorcycle.com http://www.lne.com/ericm PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03 92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF