Re: Remailer Operator Liability?
Now that the CDA decision has been made, I was wondering how this would affect the liability status of the various remailer operators? In the past several remailers have opted to discontinue service due to legal/political pressure. Will this CDA decision help to decrease remailer operator liability?
Unlikely. The use of anonymous remailers was given as a reason for why it was impossible to effectively determine if indecent material was being distributed to a minor who was using a nym. I think pressure on anonymous remailers is going to increase as various groups complain that the paw innocent widdle kiddies are "vulnerable to corruption"(or some bullshit like that) because their age can be hidden. Read the decision. The CDA _may_ be declared constitutional if there was an effective and reliable way of preventing minors from accessing "indecent" material - which anonymous remailers make harder to do. On another front, anonymous remailers were brought up in the latest hearing of the Church of Scientology's court case against Dennis Erlich. Judge Whyte expressed concern that trade secret status could be destroyed simply by posting information through an anonymous remailer. Of course, the Church dearly wants those concerns to be considered valid in law. I expect Whyte to set a precedent concerning anonymous remailers sometime soon, and it is unlikely to be a good one. Zed(hendersn@zeta.org.au) "Don't hate the media, become the media" - Jello Biafra PGP key on request
Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 15-Jun-96 Re: Remailer Operator Liabi.. by Zed@zeta.org.au
distributed to a minor who was using a nym. I think pressure on anonymous remailers is going to increase as various groups complain that the paw innocent widdle kiddies are "vulnerable to corruption"(or some bullshit like that) because their age can be hidden. Read the decision. The CDA _may_ be
This is true. Yesterday evening I interviewed the director of enforcement for a TLA here in DC. He expressed his concern about anonymous remailers and anonymity online. (More on this later.) The word here in DC is "accountability." -Declan
Hej! I've finally got the time to read "Cyphernomicon", and in chapter 5 (Cryptology) and 17 (The Future) I found this, which I think looks interesting, since I'm interested in computational topology. 5.5.9. Miscellaneous Abstract Ideas [...stuff deleted...] - links to knot theory 17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled. ("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics (work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect there are some links between knot theory and crypto.) Has any work been done along those lines? I did some searches with AltaVista, but I only found Cyphernomicon... /Krister
Krister Walfridsson writes:
17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled. ("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics (work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect there are some links between knot theory and crypto.)
Has any work been done along those lines?
I did some searches with AltaVista, but I only found Cyphernomicon...
I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get, since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully solved, and after that things got boring... Perry
On Sat, 15 Jun 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get, since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully solved, and after that things got boring...
Well... I think the theory has become much more interesting after the classification, because we know that our problem _can_ be solved, and our only problem is to do it faster and to get a better understanding for the subject (there are lots of conjectures which seems simple, but whose state is unknown.) I agree that it doesn't look good (since most of our invariants are NP-hard) but the vassiliev invariants might be used to approximate the other invariants... (I do not know what has been done in such approximation theory the last couple of years.) /Krister
participants (4)
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Declan B. McCullagh -
hendersn＠zeta.org.au -
Krister Walfridsson -
Perry E. Metzger