Announce: "secret-admirers" mail list(usenet)

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 04:00:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>      --
> At 11:24 AM 12/16/2000 -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
>  > Only by running your own mail or news server can you prevent the ISP
>  > from monitoring your email or news reading.
> 
> My newsreader, like most people's newsreaders, automatically downloads 
> those newsgroups I am interested in full, in the background.   Therefore 
> there is no way anyone can no which particular message of 
> "alt.anonymous.messages" I have read.

Interesting.  I didn't know that newsreaders did that.  None of my
newsreaders do, but then I use rn or trn and not the newsreaders built into
browsers, which I assume is what you mean by "most people's".

Yes, if you always download all of a.a.m then there's no way to do
traffic analysis unless your opponent can control your news feed and
selectively delete or modify messages in the newspool, and that's a lot
more work than looking at the download logs.


> Alt.anonymous.messages is completely effective. 

Not completely- it wouldn't work for people with newsreaders like trn which
don't always grab everything from the subscribed newsfroups.
Simple to fix, but something to be aware of.

-- 
  Eric Murray           Consulting Security Architect         SecureDesign LLC
  http://www.securedesignllc.com                            PGP keyid:E03F65E5