ANON: Chaining to Penet remailer
Well, after a fair amount of experimentation I have learned who the mysterious an10757@anon.penet.fi is. It's me. Or, more specifically, it is my remailer operating at hal@alumni.caltech.edu. If you send mail from this remailer to anon.penet.fi for posting or remailing it is identified as comin from an10757, the same address used in the post by "Nowhere, Man". This address is different from the address I get if I just send to ping@anon.penet.fi from that account. I think the reason is that the mail sent from the remailer is identified as comin from "nobody" instead of "hal" in the From: field. This causes Julf's remailing software to assign a different anonymous ID. I don't see any problems with this (not right away, anyway) and in fact it seems to me to be a desirable feature. I think we should document this for people who want to use the Penet remailer for posting, in a more untraceable way. Send mail to either: hal@alumni.caltech.edu (posts as an10757@anon.penet.fi) hfinney@shell.portal.com (posts as an19579@anon.penet.fi) Have as the first lines of your message: :: Request-Remailing-To: anon@anon.penet.fi X-Anon-To: news.admin.policy Follow this with a blank line, then your message. Put whatever newsgroups you like (separated by commas) after X-Anon-To. This method of posting does not allow you to receive replies. I have set "nicknames" for these two accounts as "Untraceable account" which will appear in the "From" line on the postings. Hopefully that will offer a clue that the normal reply mechanism doesn't work. Maybe the nickname should say so more explicitly? I believe this approach would work with most of the other Cypherpunks remailers. The one thing for remailer operators to watch out for is what is put in the From: line when the remailer sends it. You want it to be different from your regular account name or else your anonymous ID will be used for all messages through that remailer. Naturally, this is vulnerable to abuse. If "Nowhere" or someone else continues to post obscenities and flames then Julf may have to block off all of our cypherpunks remailers, which would be unfortunate. Until there are more remailers I think anonymous posters need to continue to exercise some self- restraint. Hal
From: Hal <74076.1041@CompuServe.COM> This method of posting does not allow you to receive replies. I have set "nicknames" for these two accounts as "Untraceable account" which will appear in the "From" line on the postings. Hopefully that will offer a clue that the normal reply mechanism doesn't work. Maybe the nickname should say so more explicitly?
You'd better make it quite clear that replies will not work. The consequences of misunderstanding here is that somebody's missive to an apparent penet user ends up in your remailer machine's postmaster's mailbox. This is not good; it's an unexpected breach of privacy, and it will tick off the sysadmin if it continues to happen. It's happened at least once -- I did it. Fortunately, my message to "NOWHERE, MAN" was about netiquette, not 'shrooms. Nothing to cause your postmaster's jaw to drop, but it could have been. The security provided by this technique could be provided without the IMHO serious disadvantage of having no return address. Eric's hybrid approach, where a pseudonym server hands mail to an remailer chain, is secure (barring sophisticated traffic analysis) if you trust the last remailer in the chain. Julf, have you thought about whether you want to do something like this?
Hal
Eli ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu
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Hal