Greg Broiles wrote:

...

Very long term, when message costs are borne by the sender, this problem goes away. (Others remain, such as death threats, extortion, markets for murder, etc., but they're in a different category.)

If you mean digital postage when you say "message costs", I don't see how charging Detweiler $.25 or so to send his messages is going to stop him; it might put a dent in the sheer volume, but probably not in the variety of inappropriate groups he chooses to annoy. If message costs are high enough to deter Detweiler, they're going to be high enough to deter legitimate and useful posts, too.

OK, this issue just keeps coming up again and again! I fully concede, and have never maintained otherwise, that charging 25 cents or a dollar or whatever for digital postage will stop Detweiler or anyone else for posting an "inappropriate" message to an individual, a list, a newsgroup, or even many newsgroups. What I maintain is that, absent such digital postage, flooding of many newsgroups is just too damned cheap. Remailers are even't needed, as the "Jesus is Coming" posts so clearly show. This is the "Usenet in its current form is broken" point. But we can't change the whole world overnight. What we _can_ do is experiment with things like digital postage. I maintain that this is a useful step, not a total solution. And keep in mind that the issue of us not liking what Detweiler has to say, or the readers of sci.health.diabetes not liking a "Welcome to BlackNet" posting in their newsgroup is NOT SOLVABLE by us. Pleenty of posts I don't like, and plenty of posts of mine are doubtless disliked by others. What's an "annoying" post and what's a "legitimate and useful" post is in the eye of the beholder. What Detweiler writes is up to him and to the newsgroups that choose to accept what he writes (no moderation) and to the pricing structure that results in the subsidization of these postings. Where *we* get involved is in the practical issue of minimizing short term damage to our remailers (to the owners, too). I hope I'm making myself clear: - we can't hope to filter annoying posts from legitimate and useful posts - there is probably no conceivable standard for this - government censorship is not a solution Cypherpunks will support - ideally, recipients will decide what they wish to receive, or at least will not have to pay for mail they don't want. (This is the situation with the Post Office today---imagine if you had to pay the Federal Express charges on packages sent to you unsolicited, and the sender had to pay nothing at all to send them....that's roughly the system we have today with Usenet. It mostly works because others (universities, corporations, grants, cross-subsidies) are footing the bill. But ask anyone who has to pay 25 cents per mail message what he thinks of getting mailbombed.) - digital postage will *not* fix the problems of abusive and inappropriate message (see points above)--nothing will, save for censorship or screening at some point - but digital postage may reduce some types of flooding - and it gets us started in a real and easy-to-understand application of untraceable digital cash I call these some good reasons to explore this further. And such a system is likelier to be the basis for a "next generation Usenet" than idle speculations about new features. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power:2**859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.