Re: You Aren't [I'm Not]

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@Athena.MIT.EDU>]

   From: Peter Honeyman <honey@citi.umich.edu>
   Date: Thu, 4 Mar 93 09:49:10 EST

       Date: Thu, 4 Mar 93 08:54:56 -0500
       From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@Athena.MIT.EDU>

       And "holding somone responsible for their actions" doesn't necessarilly
       mean throwing someone in jail, or sueing them for lots of money --- it
       can be as simple as their knowing that what they say can be traced back
       to them, and their own personal credibility is on the line.  

   ted, do you think today's nets offer this assurance?  i certainly do not.

Not completely, no.  But to a certain extent, yes.  It is generally much
more difficult to get a new account on a (same or differemt) computer
system, then it is to get a new pseudonym assigned to you by a remailer,
or to generate a new public/private key pair.  So if you drag your email
identity through the mud, you are damaging yourself.  If today's nets
did not have this characteristic, why are people building remailers in
the first place?!?  The answer, of course, is that they do have this
effect. 

And, of course, if someone is truely abusive --- or perhaps isn't being
intentially malicious, but by accident started a mail loop of some kind,
perhaps involving a buggy vacation program --- you can always send mail
to the postmaster of his/her site.

There are definitely controls on undesireable behavior (whether
intentional or non-intentional) which get lost when you move to a
remailer based system.

							- Ted