With respect to recent discussion about anonymous posts/mail, and the wishes of some to avoid passing anonymous traffic .. I guess I've really got to wonder just how difficult people think it is to get onto the net, anyway. I've got my net access becuase I pay UUNET roughly $50/month for it - and I get my own domain name, with as many hosts (and as many users on those hosts) as I care to set up. I set up 'fake' accounts on a regular basis - not becuase I'm trying to trick anyone, per se, but becuase it's the easiest way I know of to tweak the flow & storage of mail on disparate subjects & topics. I can post a message and say "Please E-mail to me, and I'll summarize with a post", and do so easily - I just set up a special account that I'd like replies to go to, and then I post from that account. (Usually, just to be polite, I'll use the same 'real name', but multiple account names - 'gb@goldenbear.com' vs 'greg@goldenbear.com' vs 'gbroiles@goldenbear.com', and so forth.) Then, a few days/weeks later, it's no big deal to concatenate the replies in those different mailboxes into different summary messages for posting. This seems like the sort of thing everyone ought to be able to do - such that you could request (or command) that replies to a message be directed into a particular E-mail folder owned by your account. What all of this brings home to me is how easily I could just create an entirely fictitious 'person', and use it for posting & mailing - it'd be totally anonymous, provide me with easy way to receive replies & carry on conversations .. *and* nobody would even know they were talking to a real person via a fake name. I don't do this because it seems impolite to converse with people under false pretenses; if I wanted or needed to post/mail anonymously, I'd probably use a redirector (if I could find one) because it seems more polite to be clear about my desire for discretion & privacy. Apparently, however, some of the powers that be would rather see folks like me using fake but real-sounding names when we want privacy, instead of being clear about what's going on. I think that's a shame, because it seems like lying. The Internet has already had to deal with the fact that it's not possible to trust a user simply because they're root on their local machine - it may well be that 'root' (as in my case) is just some guy with a '386 who likes to play on the net. There is, I think, still some expectation that user names are what they appear - if you see a post from "cjones@leviathan.com (Chris Jones)" there's some expectation that there really is a human being out there named "Chris Jones", who's probably got a job and a desk and a boss, or at least some form of accountability. It's this slippery notion of 'accountability' that is perhaps at the root of this 'anonymity' problem - the idea that there's gonna be some hell to pay if somebody writes to 'postmaster@leviathan.com', and complains about Chris Jones. The fact is, you can mail to 'postmaster@goldenbear.com' and whine all you like, it's just another alias for the same damn person (me). I think there are going to be more & more people like me in the future - I *am* my boss, the postmaster, and the sysadmin - and if people don't like what I do or say on the net, that's just too damn bad. This illusion of accountability and control can't last much longer .. can it? As I see it, these "net gods" who don't like anonymity have two choices - anonymity they can detect, or anonymity they can't. I'd much prefer to be polite and straightforward about things, and post clearly marked anonymous posts/mail when that's what I want to do - but if that traffic is going to be suppressed, I'll resort to more clandestine anonymous transmissions. The days when it was possible to make any assumptions at all about human to "real name" to net address correspondences and mappings have passed, if they ever existed at all. I think about my E-mail address(es) as ways to direct the flow of mail such that it's convenient for me; I know other people do this too. My E-mail address isn't a license plate, it's a file folder. -- Mail to pgpserv@goldenbear.com, subject="Greg Broiles" for PGP public key. Greg Broiles greg@goldenbear.com Golden Bear Consulting +1 503 465 0325 Box 12005 Eugene OR 97440 BBS: +1 503 687 7764