marc, if article cancellation is made cryptographically secure, there is the possibility that articles can be made uncancellable. of course, if there is some wild card that allows the backbone cabal to cancel articles remotely and after the fact, then i suspect usenet will remain vulnerable to forged cancellation messages. but maybe not. i see your point about backbone admins refusing to traffic in certain kinds of messages, but as a veteran of usenet from before it was even called usenet, i assure you that other admins would quickly fill in the gaps in connectivity. this has happened many times. i don't agree, btw, that we can rely on the backbone admins to be very strong supporters of speech, nor should we. as for "the guy with the disk" wanting macpgp to go away, that's not what happened here. everyone i've talked to that has a direct role in the decision agrees that there is a valid research and education function served by distributing macpgp. ah well, sometimes the dragon wins. and regarding the network providers decision to pull penet's plug, i believe this decision was based principally on the opinion of ... how did julf put it? ... oh yes, "a very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality" (i doubt that i would regard him as a strong supporter of free speech, btw). i suspect that when we get to the bottom of this, we'll discover that many people's interests were being represented without their knowledge, assent, or agreement. regarding your comments about net abuse and megabytes of trash, i agree that we need to brainstorm and find ways to address these problems. i am optimistic that technical solutions hold a lot of promise; it's just a matter of discovering them. let's put our shoulder to the wheel! peter