Today I posted the attached message to various newsgroups. I still plan to continue mail service, and my work on the alt.whistleblowers project. Julf ----------- The anonymous posting service at anon.penet.fi has been closed down. Postings to netnews and mail to arbitrary addresses has been blocked. Mail to anonymous users will still be supported, so anon.penet.fi can be used as an anonymous P.O.Box service. Due to the lawsuit-intensive climate in the US, many anonymous services have been short-lived. By setting up anon.penet.fi in Finland, I hoped to create a more stable service. Anon.penet.fi managed to stay in operation for almost five months. The service was protected from most of the usual problems that had forced other services to shut down. But there are always going to be ways to stop something as controversial as an anon service. In this case, a very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality managed to contact exactly the right people to create a situation where it is politically impossible for me to continue running the service. But of course this political situation is mainly caused by the abuse of the network that a very small minority of anon users engaged in. This small group of immature and thoughtless individuals (mainly users from US universities) caused much aggravation and negative feelings towards the service. This is especially unfortunate considering these people really are a minuscule minority of anon users. The latest statistics from the service show 18203 registered users, 3500 messages per day on the average, and postings to 576 newsgroups. Of these users, I have received complaints involving postings from 57 anonymous users, and, of these, been forced to block only 8 users who continued their abuse despite a warning from me. In retrospect I realize that I have been guilty to keeping a far too low profile on the network, prefering to deal with the abuse cases privately instead of making strong public statements. Unfortunately I realized this only a couple of days before being forced to shut down the service, but the results of a single posting to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d gave very positive results. I take full blaim for my failure to realize the psychological effects of a strongly stated, publicly visible display of policy with regards to the abuse cases. For this I have to apologize to the whole net community. On the other hand I am deeply concerned by the fact that the strongest opposition to the service didn't come from users but from network administrators. I don't think sysadmins have a god-given mandate to dictate what's good for the users and what's not. A lot of users have contacted me to thank me for the service, describing situations where anonymity has been crucial, but I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams. At the same time quite a few network administrators have made comments like "I can't imagine any valid use for anonymity on the net" and "The only use for anonymity is to harrass and terrorize the net". Nevertheless, I really want to apologize both to all the users on the network who have suffered from the abusive misuse of the server, and to all the users who have come to rely on the service. Again, I take full responsibility for what has happened. Julf