Anonymizer employees need killing

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 1:01 AM -0600 3/28/04, bgt wrote:
>you state openly in your policy that you're not to be
>trusted!

Think about it for a second.

Anonymizer is set up to prevent *businesses*, stalkers, and
small-time crooks like spammers, from seeing your behavior on the net
and annoying you there.

What's he going to do when uncle Fed shows up with guns? Have a
shootout or something?

:-)



The point to cypherpunks as always been this, folks: Do not rely on
*people*, especially people and *laws*, to protect your anonymity
from, if you will, national technical means -- guys with guns and
rubber hoses.

That's what remailers are for, speaking of Lance, the guy who wrote
Mixmaster. *Use* them. Build them. Make 'em better.

And, if you're upset that you can't *surf* anonymously, sure as hell
don't blame Lance. Blame the state of *markets* for such
onion-routing services as Zero Knowledge's Freedom, or, even, the
lack of interest in the open source community to build an equivalent.
Meaning *buy* stuff when it comes on the market, and *use* someone's
code when it shows up on sourceforge, or wherever, report bugs, and
help *out*, instead of pissing and moaning that a single-hop
anonymity service doesn't provide perfect anonymity against national
technical means.

More important, if you, personally, can do something about it, write
code. If not, *hire* someone to write code. And, if you can't do
*that*, then quit whining at the people who are actually *doing*
something, anything, however small it is, in the right direction.
Like Lance. Especially Lance.

Certainly, if something you do pisses off the Uncle Fed, he's got the
muscle to kick your ass. Live with it. Work around it. Use what's
there to keep from getting your ass kicked. Progress is about doing
something that hasn't been done before so that you have the *freedom*
to do what you want.

For example, Julf provided a single-stop remailer with penet. Some
"church" subpoenaed him out of business. Fine. Do something else.
Just don't sit there and whine about it. These days, there are *more*
and better remailers out there (thanks to people like Lance) than a
single hop one in Finland. Could it be better? Sure. So make it
better instead of whining about it.



And, finally, one last thing. After 5 or 6 years of it from Tim, who
started this list, and the original physical meetings, it's no secret
I've gotten really tired of the "need killing" chest-puffing
bullshit. Tim was bad enough, but, at least -- and in ever-decreasing
usefulness -- he had something substantive to say.

Self-reference is a bitch, :-), but people who say other people "need
killing" need killing themselves, and, frankly, deserve everything
they get for saying so in otherwise civil discourse. Unpopular
opinion is one thing, but bad manners is a mortal offense in my
opinion. :-).



So, try to act like adults, people. Not like a bunch of 12 year old
boys who just found a loaded BAR in the garage.



Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'