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

[Bill Stewart]

At 04:00 PM 12/16/00 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>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.

Agent or Free Agent can be set to do this, and it may make sense
for newsgroups where articles are short, but I certainly
wouldn't run in that mode for a newsgroup that had
large postings that I didn't want all of.
The binary program newsgroups are a good example of this -
article bodies are often 64 times as large as the headers,
if they stick to 64KB, or much larger if they don't,
unlike text oriented groups where they may be 4 times as large,
so downloading the entire contents on modems is really slow.

>Alt.anonymous.messages is completely effective.  It does not provide mere 
>obscurity, but rather supplies true security.  To determine who I am 
>communicating with, and what I was saying, the adversary would need to 
>compromise my firewalled computer.

The adversary might have a good idea who's actively downloading the group
from a number of major isps.  That doesn't mean they'll know who's
reading it from random-isp.ru or direct off the spool at random.edu.au, 
but if they really care, they can get a good idea how many people
are reading the group, even if they don't know which articles you read.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639