Speaking of "pseudonymity"... At 12:53 PM -0400 9/27/05, Somebody wrote:

Argh! Not this again!

Yes, again, and I'll keep repeating it until you get it. :-).

No, "anonymity" is "don't know who sent it".

For some definitions of "who". To paraphrase a famous sink-washing president, it depends on "who" you mean by "who". :-)

Examples are anonymizing remailers which give all incoming users the same outgoing name, or the Anonymous Coward comments in /. (Disregard for now details such as the /. admins being able to link an AC comment to an IP address.)

Fine. Ignore the output thereof as noise, it's probably safe to do so. Though concordance programs are your friends. Behavior is biometric, after all. The words you use give you away, and can be filtered accordingly. Ask someone named Detweiller about that. Or, for that matter, Kaczynski. Or your trading patterns in market. Just like your "fist", in telegraphy.

"Perfect pseudonymity" is "can't tie it to meatspace".

See "who", above. Since we haven't quite gotten AI down just yet, that's good enough for me, though I expect, like Genghis, and not True Names, we'll figure out that "intelligence" is an emergent property of *active* physical manifestation, and not a giant pile of data.

Different communications from the same sender can be tied to each other. Examples include most of the free email services, and digitally signing a message sent through an anonymizer.

Yup. That's what I mean by reputation, if I take your meaning right. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'