[Please don't copy Eugene Volokh <VOLOKH@law.ucla.edu> on your follow-ups; I copied him on my original because I had quoted him.] At 10:04 PM 11/6/95, s1113645@tesla.cc.uottawa.ca wrote:

Judging by the amount of posting you do here, I was surprised that I only got 36 listings on your new address (1/3 of which quoted you but not directly written by you). Either you post more to alt, soc and talk (which they don't have) or you use a third address (the second thing I tried was tcmay@netcom.com, even less, though the archive's pretty recent, so that's expected).

I do little posting these days on Usenet. There is almost no sense of "community" there, in the sense of persistent, memorable posters, and in the sense of even _slightly_ having similar goals and aspirations. A vast number of the posts on any topic come from people who just rolled off the turnip truck and who have no interest in learning.

I figured I'd send this to you as a private note, but then I figured this thing really is scary and has a lot to do with anonymity. Watch out folks. Litte Brother is saving everything you've ever said on usenet. Your old posts just won't go away.

I've assumed this for many years. One used to be able to buy "Usenet on CD-ROM"...before the volume got to be too high. I've always assumed that archives would be increasingly available, eventually covering the entire history of Usenet, going back to the early 80s, and with tools for tracking the changes in login names over time (so that, for example, Perry's 1984 postings could be easily retrieved). Dossier services are coming, of course. If not legal to operate in the U.S., trivial to locate offshore. ("Employers, we will provide a scan of prospective employers. We can let you know if potential employees have ever posted to alt.drugs, alt.homosexual, alt.deviancy, or alt.cypherpunks. Avoid needless risks.")

(Not that someone who is so open in his views and true name as yourself would mind, Tim, but I'm certainly happy for my sake, that alt isn't archived yet. It's bad enough they have rec.)

Huh? What makes you think "alt" is not archived? Just because DejaNews doesn't index it doesn't mean it is isn't archived in various places. Paul Robichaux pointed me to another searcher, http://www.excite.com/, which _does_ index the alt groups. I'm sure more are coming, reaching further and further back in time. (At the rate the Net has been expanding, by the time they can archive-and-index the last year of Usenet, they can get the entire history for not much more. I'll bet this happens by the end of 1997.)

Ps. I will of course run searches on every other address that the who command on majordomo@toad.com supplies me with, so watch what you say ladies, gents and otherwise. ;-> Get those 'nyms ready.

I offered the "Blacknet Dossier Service" a couple of years ago to the Extropians list subscribers. Nick Szabo helped me out by claiming to the list that he had purchased his dossier contents, and was "shocked" by what he found. A number of the Extropian list subscribers were quite perturbed before I told them it was a joke. Then I pointed out to them that there is absolutely nothing which stops such things. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."