Re: Anonymity: A Modest Proposal
Eli Brandt <eli@UX3.SP.CS.CMU.EDU> writes:
If you split the message into shadows, you avoid having anyone in this position.
Hal Finney <hfinney@shell.portal.com> responds:
...If the end user is responsible for reassembly, then that is tantamount to voluntarily agreeing to receive anonymous messages, and that is no problem... ...And of course anonymous news postings via shadows would also have the reassembly problem.
It seems that there could at least be a hierarchy of shadowed newsgroups, e.g. alt.freespeech.*, requiring the enduser to use special software to reassemble actual postings. This could even be integrated into the newsreaders, or even at a local newserver level. To post to these groups, something like the current Mixmaster remailer network might be used, with extensions for posting "shadows" to these newsgroups. So posting would require slightly more enduser sophistication,and the ability to encrypt. The client posting software would hit ITAR, but presumably not the client reassembly software (newsreader extensions, etc.), since it doesn't need the ability to encrypt. Then the newsgroup hierarchy itself would become the target of control fervor. Perhaps this could be fought with an emphasis on freedom of speech and creation of newsgroups for "political expression", e.g. alt.freespeech.talk.politics, etc. It's unfortunate, but good soundbites can be as important as good protocols: "Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace: Feds want to eliminate so-called "freespeech newsgroups" on the new information superhighway..." I haven't done my homework on protocols for distributing shadows. Are there problems with this, other than the obvious one of actually doing all the work? Doug Cutrell _____________________________________________________________ Doug Cutrell General Partner doug@cdsnet.net Open Mind =============================================================
On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, Doug Cutrell wrote:
It seems that there could at least be a hierarchy of shadowed newsgroups, e.g. alt.freespeech.*, requiring the enduser to use special software to reassemble actual postings. This could even be integrated into the newsreaders, or even at a local newserver level.
There already is. I think the *.test (or at least alt.test) groups have good propagation. Nobody "reads" anything but their own posts anyway, so the natives wouldn't be bothered. There are some "real" (as opposed to usenet posting tests) *.test newsgroups, so you'd have to be careful about which ones you post to. ire hierarchy for this sort of thing widely propagated. Last year I was a prolific contributor to alt.config. At one point someone on c'punks mentioned problems in getting alt.anonymous and alt.anonymous.messages. I hoped my good reputation in alt.config (at that time, anyway ;) might help my call for a round of re-newgrouping to increase the groups' propagation. But I found that I couldn't convincingly justify their existence against the objections raised by news admins. Let me summarize the arguments I've seen against alt.anonymous.*: 1) It's a hopeless mess for readers, because messages on all imaginable topics will be jumbled together there. Messages there won't fit conveniently into the flow of threads in other newsgroups. So anonymous messages intended for general consumption will be pointless in alt.anonymous.* 2) In light of 1), people won't look there unless they expect a personal message from someone. So most of the traffic there will be irrelevant to nearly everyone on Usenet. 3) If it has sufficiently low bandwidth for news admins to overlook 2), it should be a mailing list. The fundamental conflict, as I see it, is this: For security reasons, we want messages to be distributed to a very wide audience, although those messages are only of interest to a very narrow audience. News admins understandably are generally inclined to accept bandwidth only in proportion to readership. For practical reasons, they don't want to carry messages to people who aren't interested in them. It's not easy to convince the news admins to do it anyway out of altruism. -Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>
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