REMAIL: Positive Reputations Now!

[Hal <74076.1041@CompuServe.COM>]

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There's been a lot of talk on news.admin.policy about ways of handling
abusive or illegal anonymous posts.  One proposal is to restrict posts
from certain people, but this will fail if multiple remailers allowing
chaining become available.

I had an idea for another way of filtering anonymous posts which might
be achievable with current news software.  It would require some work by
the remailer operators, though.

We have talked here about positive reputations as a filtering method.
A positive reputation would basically be a recommendation by some respected
person that a particular poster is worth listening to.  If posts could be
marked with such recommendations, people could set up their news software
to filter out non-recommended anonymous posts.  This would be a way of
distinguishing between those who want to post anonymously just for privacy,
and those who want to harrass or abuse others.

Current news software doesn't provide for such reputations.  But there
were suggestions being made at one time for a standard way of marking
anonymous posts.  One idea was to give them a unique identifier in the
"Distribution" field of "anon".  I gather that this would require a little
modification of major news distribution sites to honor this distribution
but from what I understand the changes needed are not major.

My idea is to implement positive reputations at the source which is in the
best position to provide them: the remailer operator.  Applying the
distribution idea, posts which were from people on a "good guys list"
would be posted from the remailer with a specific distribution that
identifies them as such.  Anonymous posts from people not on the list
would get a different identification.

In order to verify that posts were really from who they claimed, they would
have to be PGP (or RIPEM or PEM) signed.  The list would actually be a list
of keys rather than a list of user ID's.

People would get on the list by asking the remailer operator, perhaps by
pointing to some of their posts which were responsible.  People would
be removed from the list at the remailer operator's discretion, presumably
when they posted objectionable messages.

The advantage of this system is that it introduces, in a limited way, the
idea of positive reputations.  It fits into the current killfile system
so that people easily offended can avoid seeing most offensive anonymous
posts.  It encourages the use of encryption software on the part of people
who want to post anonymously and get a good reputation.  And the only
difficult software requirements are in the remailing/posting software;
everybody else just runs the current SW.

Now, since I don't run a remailing/posting service, I am in the rather
embarrassing position of offering a "solution" which requires somebody
else to do the work.  I would be very willing to help with the software
requirements for recognizing incoming PGP signed messages and looking
up keys in a database.

The actual maintenance of the good posters list would take some time and
energy on the part of the operator.  But perhaps this would not be that
much more than the other activities involved.  And it would have the
advantage that it would point out a new direction for the net, towards
a system where privacy and responsibility can coexist.

Hal Finney
74076.1041@compuserve.com

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