I will feed alt.anonymous.messages to ANYONE who asks. I will accept a feed of that one group from any news server which is used by a remailer. -Lance At 1:13 PM 11/2/95, Futplex wrote:

Name Withheld by Request writes: [re: problems with the Usenet newsgroup model of pseud/anonymous message pools]

...

Denial of service attacks could be made somewhat less feasible by making the pool accessible as a mailing list and via http.

Mailing lists of course suffer the problem of strictly limited participation. The web approach might work better, in some future with better privacy- protecting infrastructure in place. Specifically, if HTTP transactions with a popular web server were routinely encrypted, then all reasonably long visits to that site would act as cover traffic for a message pool on that server. As a bonus, you could have a spiffy form on the web page that searches the pool for you.

In any event, the server could log your exploration. This returns us to the issue of strongly anonymous web proxies. (And we could imagine countermeasures, like daemons that search for randomly selected pseudonym tags to muddy the waters. As Tim might say, lots of issues.)

Also, the mention of "as a mailing list _and_ via http" is significant. Making the pool available in multiple forms seems to be an unconditional benefit.

-Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>

---------------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell loki@obscura.com PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available! http://obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche ----------------------------------------------------------