[mark@coombs.anu.edu.au writes:]

Maybe it's not in the spirit of this mailing group but what of the question of purposeful abuse of the anon mailers/newsposters? Say for instance some person posts either a sh*tload of garbage to every known group, flooding the USENET or a more personal attack whereby they send out anonymously information that was so fundamentally personal to someone they could possibly react very badly....

I see two answers: one is public censure, which has appeared to work to a large extent in at least one newsgroup whose users make habitual use of an anonymous remailer (alt.sex.bondage) . Another is broadcatch, a favorite topic of mine, which is concerned with the filtering of information. (Note: where "broadcast" is a one-source-to-many subscriber system, "broadcatch" scans many sources for information relevant to one subscriber. The end result is less quantity and higher quality.) With broadcatch, you could turn off threads of conversation you were not interested in, block out flamers, and IGNORE ANONYMOUS EMAIL in general. Of course, pseudonyms may come to be trusted and thus not filtered out, though they, too, are cryptographically anonymous. (Another common mechanism of broadcatch filters is to allow through articles with mentions of the subscriber's name.) Also, in the long run, when networks are made up of smarter, cooperating machines, neighboring machines to a flamer that is generating mass ammounts of email will begin to choose not to listen as often at that address. In sum, I think that it is someone's right to say anything they want, as long as I don't have to listen. Fen ~~~ ~~~ Fen Labalme General Magic We Are Everywhere 40 Carl Street #4 2465 Latham Street ------------------- San Francisco CA 94117 Mountain View CA 94040 The US Constitution 415/731-1174 (home) 415/966-6273 (my desk) may not be perfect, <fen@netcom.com> 415/965-9424 (fax) but it's better than <fen@well.sf.ca.us> <fen@genmagic.com> what we've got now.