Remailer Abuse Solutions

[Adam Back]

Peter Hendrickson <ph at netcom.com> writes:
> However, if you restrict postings to an approved group of people, perhaps
> everybody on the mailing list, you can eliminate spam.  How, then, do we
> allow anonymous postings to come through?  Individual people on the list
> can receive the proposed post and forward it to the list if it is
> appropriate.  They could even charge a fee for doing it.  That's easy to
> do if there is a "paying" remailer which will handle the money for them.

Not necessarily a good idea.  The post may be a hot potatoe, and the
forwarder may find themselves in legal trouble.  (Say RC4 & RC2 source
code, NSA handbook, the results of the Mykotronic's dumpster diving
spree, etc).  Exercising `editorial control' has landed some ISPs in
trouble, to the extent that some are specifically avoiding it for that
legal reason alone.  Being _paid_ for forwarding the message may make
that even worse.

Often the posts which would get the anonymous poster (or the true name
forwarder) into the most troublle, are the ones which are most
interesting, and also very on topic.

Howabout someone liberates skipjack and forwards it to you via
remailers with $50 for your trouble.  Do you bite?  I thought not, NSA
interviews, ITAR violation, etc.

If the spam/off topic posts gets to you badly, perhaps you should
subscribe to a filtered list.  Newsreaders with ratings of posts and
reputation handling of posters would probably help a lot also.
Reputations alone doesn't work that well, many posters in my view are
not consistent, they post good stuff usually, but now and then get
drawn into rambling off topic, or noisy discussions, etc.

Ecash for email works better to stop spam sent directly to email
addresses where you don't cash the money as a curtesy, and your
software junks if it doesn't have valid ecash.  Email spam itself is
getting mildly annoying lately, I get a couple a day average at the
moment.

Adam
--
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