-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I'd like to expend some "reputation capital" here and ask people for a favor. I am worried about Larry Detweiler's obvious mental anguish. We tend to forget that we are dealing with real people on the net, flesh and blood human beings. Larry is obviously going through genuine difficulties here. As a member of our virtual community, I ask that we show him some compassion and consideration. Larry believes that people have been communicating with him in private mail under multiple identities in order to confuse and mislead him. Specifically, he has suggested that Jamie Dinkelacker is a pseudonym employed by Tim May. I gather that he has received email from both names. He also suggests that others have employed these practices. Since I do not live in the Bay area, I have never met Jamie Dinkelacker, although I had the opportunity to meet Tim once when he visited southern California. So I am not in a position personally to assure Larry that Jamie is a real person separate from Tim. But I know many list members are in northern California and I assume several of you have met both Jamie and Tim. I ask those of you who can vouch for Jamie's separate identity to send me private email saying so, which I will forward to Larry. If enough people can do this, perhaps a PGP-style "web of trust" can be established which will reduce Larry's concerns about this particular case at least. (I have considered the possibility that Jamie actually is a pseudonym employed by Tim. This is certainly not inherently impossible, given the structure of the net. As I told Larry, I myself have occasionally posted under apparently-legitimate pseudonyms in other times and places, although never on this list. I certainly don't attach the moral significance to the practice that Larry does. Nevertheless, in this particular case, the situation is so obviously causing mental suffering that I assume that if Larry's charges were true that Tim would have confessed in order to spare Larry this pain.) I know that it's easy to just write people off on the net, the various marginal or fanatical personalities whom one runs into now and then. That is why I am asking this as a personal favor. If you have read and appreciated my essays on digital cash, or on the various legal issues involving crypto exports; if you have used the remailer code I worked on, or PGP for that matter on which I spent hundreds of hours of personal time, then I ask that you help me out with this request. Do it as a favor to me regardless of your feelings for Larry, and I will just hope that my efforts will bring him some peace of mind. Thank you. Hal Finney hfinney@shell.portal.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLMr+6KgTA69YIUw3AQHCawQApGA27Q+lmrzsN9qpG3Af9DfJLfdHTlWG Ic6FQKNqjfliLHR/z/iVSDTGKIiRRuZm4ZBqARQAvp4jaOBymcWcd5y1/jCPDQto PZjlq6ksvvdpgsQsV2DiwAlRxS9wdo7E+gvmDWJ8tXBApRloATWv4ZQ9AFUwF1Nx jp56uZsaTxs= =91Uh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----