Anonymous blogging

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 05:40  PM, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>

> But cypherpunks isn't that great a forum for publishing ideas.  Take a
> look at http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/current/maillist.html to
> see the unfiltered list feed.  Sure, no subscriber with half a clue
> actually sees it like this, but that's how it looks to the outside 
> world.
> It's tough to find the nuggets of enlightenment buried amongst the 
> crap.

Reading an unfiltered feed these days is like watching television 
without a mute button, without a channel change button, without a PVR. 
In other words, reading an unfiltered feed is a lot like watching 
television in 1970, when changing the channel meant getting up and 
walking over to turn a crude knob, when junk and spam was unavoidable.

>
> I'd like to start publishing a blog.  But of course given the 
> sensitivity
> of my position and the boldness of my arguments, it's important that
> there be strong anonymity protection.

Blogs without active feedback are just rants. You may find yourself 
ranting to a handful of people you'll never know, never hear from. 
Boring.

And as boring and low-volume as Cypherpunks has become, this is true 
for most lists. So many proliferated lists, blogs, newsgroups, chat 
forums, Yahoo groups....

(You could do the Hettinga thing and post to 7 of your own lists, but 
this is considered tacky in civilized places.)

Offhand, I can think of several ways to do an anonymous blog...posting 
to alt.anonymous.messages, for starters. Same ability to do stream of 
conscious writing. Sure, the "immediacy" of some blogs is missing, but 
posting to Usenet can propagate in tens of minutes, which is comparable 
to most blogs. And adding anonymity through remailers makes an 
anonymous blog no more responsive than posting via a mail-to-Usenet 
gateway.

But the best way would of course be to use a standard Web proxy. Such 
things have been out for several years.

--Tim May