For those interested, there has been an active debate on the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.policy about whether anonymous posting should be allowed on technical newsgroups. Johan Helsingius's anonymous server at anon.penet.fi is being widely attacked for allowing this function. Several questionable messages have been posted to various groups using this server and some of these are being used as examples of why anonymous posting should not be allowed. There have been about 50 messages on the topic, with probably 40+ being generally opposed to anonymous posting on the non-"personal" groups, and only a few being in favor. I don't really know how much influence that newsgroup has on the Usenet anarchy but there certainly does seem to be a lot of opposition to anonymity. Since it is an important part of our Cypherpunk ideals I think we need to give some thought to how to "sell" the idea of anonymous mail and postings to the net community. Hal Finney 74076.1041@compuserve.com
More important than anonymity in a public forum such as Usenet is pseudonymity. A strictly anonymous posting might well be ignored, and in cases should be. An alternate identity, however, can be more easily believed if it has said useful things in the past. After all, most of the people I know on the net are as good as pseudonyms to me. I've never met them, have never even had voice contact, and am unlikely to ever. This is the case for everyone. We rely on the human net of familiarity to assure us that these are real people. But a pseudonym on the net looks to us like "someone else's friend." We can't verify everyone personally, but we assume that someone has. Therefore pseudonyms will always be possible on the net. Indeed, they are already mostly with us. Eric
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Eric Hughes -
Hal