At 9:21 PM 01/16/95, Homer Wilson Smith wrote: [snip]
Does any single recipient have the right to demand that they be blocked from all anon messages. I would say yes.
How about demanding blocking anon messages only from some senders? That is harder to implement. If you block the sender, you block ALL his postings, not just to that party. So you would need to block specific From: and To: combinations. This would not work with chaining at all, even if we did share blocking information. So that is out.
Does a list owner have the right to demand blocking to his list, with or without a vote of the list readers? I would say yes.
What about a newsgroup? I would say it takes a vote. Are anon voites allowed? Touchy question that was important at one time on alt.r.scientology.
I agree with all of that. Somewhat conditionally with what you say about newsgroups, because while it sounds nice, it would be hard to implement. I'm tempted to say that a newsgroup, by it's nature, doesn't have any mechanism for control/government, once created. And as such, doesn't have any way to "decide" not to accept anonymous posts, or posts from a specific user or remailer. So I'm tempted to say "tough luck" to newsgroups that don't like receiving anonymous posts. The alternative is for people interested to create a moderated newsgroup, where of course the moderator could refuse to allow anonymosu posts with or without the remailer operators cooperation.
Anyhow I would guess that the correct action here is to write the offender and let him know a complaint has been registered against him. I would also educate him as to why he was so easily traced and tell him that if he wants to avoid such in the future to start chaining.
Yes, I think that is an excellent course of action.
However if he is a determined abuser not prone to social embarassment, then the sharing of blocking among remailer operators might become a very good idea.
I'm not so sure about that. It might become neccesary, but blocking remailer delivery to a particular address is a _much_ more desirable solution, in my opinion. If a particular person doesn't want to receive anonymous mail, fine. And it might be good to have a mechanism by which he could make those desires known to all remailers, so he doesn't have to do it individually. But if he does want to receive mail from the remailers, I think he's got to receive all mail from the remailers, and not count on the remailer operators to play Identity Detective and try to screen out people he doesn't like. Same with a listserv and the requests of the listserv operator. A newsgroup is, of course, more touchy, because there really _isn't_ a way for "the newsgroup" to decide not to accept anonymous posts. And I'm not really sure there should be. Part of the answer relies on how "independent" your remailer is. If you _were_ to take no action at all to people who complain about "abuse", would you get in trouble? (from school, company, service provider, country). If you would, then you've got to decide if you are willing to take the heat. And your probably not willing to take the heat for Cantor & Siegel to spam the net. So you've got to do what you've got to do. But, personally, if I ran a remailer on a machine that wasn't subject to political pressure (from school, service provider, whatever), I would never make any effort to cooperate with other operators to track down "offenders", and I'd never exclude any newsgroups from delivery. Because I wouldn't want to play censor and decide what "offense" is worth tracking down, and what isn't. And because even having the _capability_ to track down people is really dangerous, when you get pressure to track down someone you _don't_ want to track down. Much better to say "Can't be done, don't have logs, can't figure out who it was," then to have to admit "well, I've tracked down 5 people in the past month cause someone complained about them." Kind of ruins the point of anon remailers. Best would be to have tracking down be impossible, and it would be close to, if not entirely, impossible if the user took the proper precauations. But even if it's possible, it's probably best not to develop a mechanism to do it.