I have recently encountered a situation (ongoing in the newsgroup alt.zines) in which some person has been sending a woman harassment mail and threats, etc in an anonymous manner. She has tried to put his name on her kill list, but he uses a different ID each message. I assume that he is telneting to the mail port, so analysis of the message headers will show what system the message is from. I will be happy as soon as she can kill all his messages and ignore him. But during conversation with her, I mentioned that it was a good thing he wasn't useing a cypherpunk remailer, else we would never be able to identify the source. She responded with the comment that she could just kill all messages incoming from the remailers and be done with it if that were the case, which gets me thinking... The remailers are perfect for those who would harrass and abuse others. Freedom of speech with 0 responsibility, etc. They are also good for many other things, and the amount of junk mail going through them must be FAR less than the usefull traffic, however we all have seen or heard about what a few obnoxious people can do. The problem I forsee is that junk mailers and porno-grams like the ones I've been dealing with this week will start using our remailers as their method of choice, and once word gets around of that, many, many people could put all the remailers in thier kill lists, thinking "Why would anybody need to send ME anonymous mail?", and the effectiveness of the remailers would be drasticly reduced. Then again, maybe it won't be a problem. I'm realy not sure, but it's worth a little thought. Happy Hunting, -Chris Odhner
We just discussed a related issue on another list I subscribe to. I feel that we want accountability along with anonymity in many circumstances. You can deny service to 'bad apples' with out compromising the identities of anyone who uses your service. Not even the identiy of the 'bad apple' need ever be know to you. Chaum discusses how this can be achieved cryptographicaly. Is anyone working on an implementation? j' -- O I am Jay Prime Positive jpp@markv.com 1250 bit key fingerprint = B8 95 E0 AF 9A A2 CD A5 89 C9 F0 FE B4 3A 2C 3F 524 bit key fingerprint = 8A 7C B9 F2 D5 46 4D ED 66 23 F1 71 DE FF 51 48 Public keys by `finger jpp @hermix.markv.com' or pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu Your feedback is welcome, directly or via symbol JPP on hex@sea.east.sun.com
participants (2)
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cdodhner@indirect.com
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jpp@markv.com